Some backstory: my company, based in the US, merged with a UK-based company a few years ago. As such, we inherited client bases from all over the world: Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe. Consequently, our CEO and upper management has stressed “Diversity and Inclusion” to attract more people to our profession.
I work in the design department. My line manager is based in the UK, having moved there from China. During our Teams sessions, he always drives home the “diversity and inclusion” philosophy of our branding. I’m here to tell you, just because we strive to embrace diversity doesn’t mean our business partners are nice people. Some of them are outright slime, but that’s the price of doing business.
I recently got an assignment to design posters for our Eastern European branch. We select images from Getty based on key words. In my initial draft, my line manager thought I had too many images of white people. So, I found a more diverse selection of “heroes” and submitted a 2nd draft to our EE BPs. They wanted all white people. I told my line manager that and he banged his head on the desk in frustration.
I’ve never been to Eastern Europe, so I don’t have the same grasp of what our demographics are like out there. Maybe there’s little to no representation of people of color, or Muslims, which I included in the 2nd draft. I’m just going by our branding guidelines, and the examples set by our upper management. So, I submitted three posters with only one image of non-whites. They want that changed to all whites, which they think are more representative of Eastern Europeans.
I replied that Diversity & Inclusion were important to our corporate values and I was following branding guidelines. I can’t believe I just became “woke.” The last thing I want to do is become known for political activism at the workplace. Arghhhhh…
They said you needed more “white people” (!?), or did they say you should put in more Bosniaks, Thracians, and Slavs? I suppose if you were supposed to put in a Tatar or a Gheg Muslim from Kosovo you should not try to substitute someone from the Sudan who also happens to be Muslim, or a bunch of Americans and/or Chinese instead of actual Eastern Europeans.
To be fair, they did not specifically say “white people,” but rather “people who identify as Eastern European.” The examples they gave were white people.
Getty assigns key words to each image, so the user can input terms into their search engine. We’ll input something like “Eastern European students,” d/l the low-res versions, then incorporate our brand colors into props in the image like clothing, a cup they’re drinking from, etc. into the proofs.
I used “Eastern European students” as search criteria and found an image of students walking down a hallway. The primary figures were a Muslim and a black, which fits our diversity & inclusion model. So, blame Getty.
I do find images of people wearing ceremonial dress and fashions unique to their geographic location–oddly enough, the results I got for “Pakistani male” mostly resembled terrorists–but we’re mostly trying to appeal to a certain status, like students, office workers, professionals etc., so “ethnic natives” don’t always fit that mold.
Maybe I’ll try that someday, but I’m sure it’ll get rejected.
DE&I is big in countries with diverse populations, where the white majority has had all the say for way too long. Fact is that many East European countries just don’t have very diverse populations for fairly obvious reasons - the iron curtain came down just 30 years ago. So showing non-white people probably feels tokenistic, and unrepresentative of their people. It would be the same if you were putting up posters in China.
Now, of course, these countries are not 100% white (I work with a guy here in the UK who is from Lebanon and did a medical degree in Romania, so they certainly have ‘non-white students’). But they are going to be behind the curve on this stuff.
Of course, if you were demonstrating at a local level the global nature of your company, that would be a different matter - I would tell them where to go.
Worth remembering as well that marketing in general feels very old school in some of these countries - full disclosure, I’m a Creative Director of an agency working with global clients. I can’t believe the level of cheese some countries like to put into their photography, when here it’s all about ‘authenticity’ in style and representation.
I had an almighty battle recently with one Polish client who saw nothing wrong with having a scantily clad woman called ‘Olga’ clutching a phone on their ‘customer service’ webpage. This was the Polish website of a $8bn global company making drywall.
Are you allowed to be country-specific? If you could identify people as being in a specific nation by the scenery or alphabet used in wall posters would that be inclusive, or would it start an international incident?
Getty keywords are probably reading your individual words (‘Eastern’! European!). So you’re getting a broad mix. I just tried the same search and thought the images looked more ‘global student’ than anything more specific.
I didn’t want to specify the country in case somebody does a search and finds out that I’m criticizing a client online. I’ve been fired before for that.
We want to cater to a more universal audience, and background language doesn’t figure into that. Getty doesn’t usually stock those types of images anyway.
My ex in-laws live in one of the largest cities in Romania, and they had never seen a black person in person until they came to visit in the US. Based on their reaction, it was almost as if they didn’t think black people were actually real and that they only existed on TV. So I could definitely see an ad campaign with diversity falling flat or seeming unrealistic to them as they can’t picture that occurring in their daily lives.
Students are probably a more diverse group than the population as a whole, due to people going abroad for their education. And also because they’ll skew younger, and folks who are growing up nowadays tend to be more willing to buck old trends. So if students are your target market, then it makes perfect sense to search for stock images of “ student”, and then use those images, including the non-white ones.
Technically, Eastern Russia is full of people with Mongolian-like features and many who are mixed between. I would assume that a few moved into Eastern Europe during the time of the USSR but it’s probably not many.
Also, technically, Eastern Europe used to have many Jewish and Roma people…
To the OP: You could probably mix in some Buryat/Kazakh looking people and they’d not think too much of it.
I haven’t heard anything back from our business partners. They asked for 2 posters and I sent them 3, so my guess is they’re going to let the multicultural one sit in electronic oblivion.
I was hoping that someone with Eastern European ties would offer their perspective, and I learned from it. Thanks everybody.
