‘There’s always money for avocados, but none for Black History Month:’ Confessions of a Black ad tech senior marketer

By Seb Joseph

There’s an ad tech company out there where the avocado budget is sacred. There’s always money for avocados at this company — even when there’s none to celebrate Black History Month. As odd as it seems, the company’s senior marketer had to try and make sense of the stance. She did. Then she resigned. In the latest edition of our Confessions series, in which we trade anonymity for candor, the marketer explained why she had reached a breaking point.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What does being a Black woman in advertising now mean in terms of the experience and has much changed since the rise of the #Metoo movement in 2017/18?

Being a black woman in advertising is tough. You never feel like you belong. You hear colleagues make sweeping statements cloaked in unconscious bias and sometimes conscious. And you struggle to know how to navigate and address these challenges. If you get upset or show a visceral reaction to aggressive or upsetting behavior —people try to demonizse you or start to imply that your mental health or well being need to be investigated.

Then there’s the drive to make things better for younger people coming into the industry to protect them from the racist, sexist system that dismantles their enthusiasm and leaves them angry and jaded. In general women are overlooked in advertising and often need to wade through treacle to get to the top. But being a black woman — you are doing the same journey in the dark with 50k weight on your back.

People who have the privilege of being white or male, will read that statement and try and trivialise it and state that it’s an overreaction and that in itself demonstrated their inability to not be at the center. MeToo and BLM are only spoken about in our industry when there is a commercial benefit or they can be exploited or commoditized for commercial gain. It’s a legal legitimized corporate form of slavery.

Avocados?

Before I joined the company they had never done anything to celebrate Black History Month. They did, however, celebrate Oktoberfest. HR told me that there wasn’t any money to do anything so I asked my boss if I can take £500 from the marketing budget. I used the money to put on a series of events that went down really well internally. It was just hard to believe that this global company, which has an actual budget for avocados and spends money on German flags for a beer festival, didn’t have any money for Black History Month. It put me in a bad situation because I then had to ask people, many of whom are friends in the industry, to come and talk at my internal event for free. It felt like I exploited my friends at times, even though they would say that’s nonsense. They should be getting paid to speak at these events because we pay other people to do so.