Racism as a Marketing Strategy: At What Cost? & What Can We Do?
A two-part call to action for creatives, agencies, trade media, the industry associations that set our standards, & humanity as a whole.
A spotlight shaped like a star. A white skirt caught in its beam, casting a pointed, hooded shadow. A pair of black sneakers held up high, dangling like feet.
That is the Converse ad that ran on Instagram this month featuring K-pop star Karina. Social media saw what a room full of decision-makers apparently didn't: a Klansman's hood and the feet of a lynching victim. Converse, owned by Nike, pulled it and apologized: "This should not have happened and we will do better."
U.S. Congressman Troy Carter said it plainly: "Black pain is not a marketing prop. Lynching is not a creative concept."
Sit with one word in that apology: happened. Ads don't happen. They are briefed, cast, lit, shot, retouched, reviewed, approved, and scheduled. Every step has a person attached to it. Usually several.
This piece is for those people. It's for my fellow creatives, the agencies we work in, the trade outlets that cover our work, and the associations that set our standards. It comes in two parts. Part 1 asks what racist marketing is costing us, and who is paying. Part 2 asks: so, what can we do about it? I'll warn you now: Part 1 is uncomfortable. Stay with me. Part 2 is where we get to work.
Part 1: At What Cost?
Black pain is the bait
The Converse ad dropped the same month 60 members of the U.S. Congress demanded a federal investigation into the hanging deaths of Black people. At least 10 have been reported in 2026. That is the number we know of.
Spend five minutes on Black Twitter and you'll see tallies of 70 and higher. I can't verify those numbers, and that is exactly the problem. Many of these deaths never make the news. When they do, police and medical examiners are quick to call them suicides. Not murders. Never lynchings. To'Nea Nicole Miller in Florida. Kyle Bassinga in Georgia. Trey Reed at Delta State University in Mississippi. All ruled suicides, and several families dispute those rulings. BLM Georgia's independent tracking counts 22 suspicious hanging deaths of Black people between March 2025 and August 2026.
None of this is new. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented more than 4,400 racial terror lynchings between Reconstruction and the Second World War. JULIAN's A Crimson Record counts more than 70 suspected modern-day lynchings across seven Deep South states since 2000. The United States didn't make lynching a federal hate crime until 2022 – just four years ago. Sit with that fact.
In Woke Works, I traced “stay woke” to Lead Belly’s 1938 warning to Black people travelling through the South: stay alert, or you might not make it home. That warning is 88 years old, and it’s still as urgent as ever in 2026. Black families are once again burying loved ones found hanging and being told not to ask questions. Staying woke was never a political slogan. It was, and still is about survival for Black peoples.
This is not only an American story in June, Canadian Parliament recognized the noose as a hate symbol in Bill C-9, but years after nooses also kept turning up on Toronto construction sites. The Converse ad ran in social media feeds across North America and the world.
So when a lynching shows up in a sneaker ad, it isn't edgy. It's terror, repackaged as content.
More than 4,400 lynchings. Not a creative concept.
Dog whistles, bullhorns, and a pattern we can't ignore
At the IABC World Conference in June, I talked about dog whistles and bullhorns. Dog whistles are coded signals that certain audiences hear loud and clear. Bullhorns need no decoding at all. Line up the last 14 months and you can hear both.
In July 2025, American Eagle told us Sydney Sweeney has “great jeans.” Critics heard the genes/jeans eugenics echo. About a week later, Dunkin’ had actor Gavin Casalegno poolside, saying of his tan: “This tan? Genetics.” In December, Pantone named Cloud Dancer, an off-white, its 2026 Colour of the Year in an environment where white supremacy is on the rise. This past Spring saw Dolce & Gabbana having all white models on the runway during Milan Fashion Week. Swatch’s slanted eyes controversy, #EmmysSoWhite, and more. On August 24, Target’s “Circus Clown” Halloween costume for kids arrived with a face covering that read instantly as blackface, a year and a half after Target rolled back its diversity commitments. And now, Converse.
In Woke Works, I wrote that nobody sets out to make a blackface costume. I still believe most individual creatives don’t. But I want to name something plainly: when the same “mistake” keeps getting made by different brands, agencies, and approval chains, it isn’t a mistake anymore. It’s a strategy. Sometimes someone makes a choice.
Sometimes the system chooses by removing everyone who would have said no – even when someone is in the room, they may not have the power, influence, or privilege to call it out. Dr. Ibram X. Kendi teaches us to judge policies by their outcomes, not their intentions. The outcome is the same either way: the brand’s name in every headline and Black pain doing the heavy lifting.
And it isn't only anti-Black racism. The same playbook has targeted women, from Good Good Golf's Callaway ad to Razer's "yapping" headset spot, and erased 2SLGBTQIA+ communities as brands muted Pride.
Why it keeps getting approved: racism engages
Oxford University Press named rage bait its 2025 Word of the Year: content "deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage... typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement." The research explains why. A 2021 study in PNAS of about 2.7 million social media posts found that each word referring to a political "out-group" raised the odds of a post being shared by about 67 per cent. Algorithms don't know love from hate. They know engagement.
Look at what happened to American Eagle. It didn't apologize for "great jeans." The Sweeney jeans sold out within a week. In April 2026, the brand brought her back for a new campaign, with its chief marketing officer saying, "There is no one who has resonated more with our customer base." That's not a brand recovering from a mistake. That's a brand doubling down on a strategy.
Racism doesn't always sell. Target's comparable sales fell 3.8 per cent after its rollback and the boycott that followed. When Starbucks settled a Florida lawsuit over its diversity programs this month, there was no sales bump to point to. But in an industry that measures success in reach and earned media, racism reliably engages. That's why it keeps getting approved. And the apology is the cheapest line item in the media plan: pull the post, issue a statement, keep the impressions.
Then we hand out trophies. Strategy's Marketing Awards, the Institute of Canadian Agencies' Effie Awards Canada, the CMA Awards, Cannes Lions, and The One Show all celebrate impressions and "cultural conversation." I've yet to see an entry form that asks who was harmed to get those numbers. In Ad Standards Canada's latest complaints report, offensive content was the largest category, at 25 per cent of complaints. By the time a complaint is reviewed, the impressions are banked.
The bill comes due for Black workers
While brands cash in on Black pain, Black people are not only paying for it with our lives but also with our livelihoods and with our mental, physical, and emotional health.
In the U.S., Black unemployment hit 6.0 per cent in August, compared with 3.7 per cent for white workers. Black women's unemployment hit 7.3 per cent last December, and their labour force participation has dropped from 60.7 to 58.4 per cent since January as government jobs, long a path to the middle class for Black women, disappear. In Canada, Toronto Metropolitan University's State of Black Economics Report 2026 puts Black unemployment at 11.1 per cent, double the 5.5 per cent rate for non-racialized Canadians.
Our industry is part of that story. PoCAM's Visible & Vocal 5 study found that 80 per cent of BIPoC professionals in Canadian advertising and marketing experienced a micro-aggression from a colleague, 58 per cent experienced discrimination, and 88 per cent stay on guard at work, an all-time high. One respondent said it best: "BIPoC photos are used in marketing, but the decision-makers who hold all the power remain 100% white."
Read that again. The people most likely to catch a hooded shadow in a lighting test are the ones being pushed out of the room.
Part 2: What Can We Do?
With a tip of the hat to John Oliver, let's get to work.
Start with the context. In 2026, the world is retreating inward. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer finds that seven in 10 people worldwide have an "insular trust mindset." They are hesitant or unwilling to trust someone who lives by different values, believes different facts, wants to solve society's problems differently, or comes from a different culture or background. That insularity is exactly what rage bait feeds on. It isn't just a signal of fear and fragmentation. It's a call for courageous leadership and creative connection.
We are at a pivotal moment. When trust collapses, connection collapses. When connection collapses, progress stalls. And when progress stalls, purpose loses power.
But here is the truth: purpose-driven brands don't shrink from difference. They harness it. They don't build echo chambers. They build bridges. Edelman calls this trust brokering: building trust across difference, not by trying to change people, but by surfacing what they have in common. That is a job description for our industry. And the people who build those bridges are us: the creatives, strategists, marketers, and communicators in the room when the work gets approved.
Our marketing manifesto
We will not market at the insular.
We will market with the inclusive.
We will stand for trust over tribalism.
We will promote dialogue over dogma.
We will elevate empathy over ego.
We reject the myth that alignment means agreement.
We choose alignment in human dignity.
A purpose-driven brand pledge
We listen first. Not to echo our audience back to themselves, but to understand their truths, even when they differ.
We amplify voices across difference. Not just voices that look like ours, but voices that expand our worldview.
We create spaces for honest dialogue. Not curated comfort, but courageous curiosity.
We act with integrity, not optics. Not performative purpose, but relational trust in action.
What this looks like on Monday morning
A manifesto means nothing if it doesn't change what gets approved. Here is how each commitment shows up in the work, and why it matters.
Run the Baldwin Test before anything ships. James Baldwin wrote, "I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do." Before approval, ask whether your audience would believe the brand, or only see what it does. So what? The Converse ad passed every checkpoint between brief and post. One honest question at any of them would have stopped it.
Give veto power at the approval gate. Put Black, Indigenous, racialized, 2SLGBT+, and women colleagues in the approval chain with the authority to stop work, not just comment on it. So what? Representation without authority is decoration. The PoCAM data shows the people who could catch the harm are the ones being pushed out.
Run the Pyramid of Hate check in creative review. The Anti-Defamation League's Pyramid of Hate shows how "harmless" stereotypes and "edgy" tropes sit at the base of something much uglier. Catch them before they scale. So what? By the time Ad Standards reviews a complaint, the impressions are banked and the harm is done.
Measure harm alongside reach. Report sentiment among Black, 2SLGBT+, and women audiences next to impressions. So what? If a campaign needs outrage to hit its numbers, the brief is the problem, and your clients deserve to know that before the backlash does.
Stop rewarding rage bait. ICA, CMA, IABC, CPRS, award juries, and trade editors: add equity questions to entry forms and coverage. Ask who was in the room and who was harmed. So what? The industry makes what it celebrates. Change the scorecard and you change the work.
What this looks like in action
Campaigns that honour complexity, not caricature. Content that invites curiosity, not reinforces bias. Communities that thrive on authentic engagement, not algorithmic comfort zones.
Three things I want you to do
If you lead or work at an agency or creative shop, bring From Tokenism to Transformation to your team as a keynote, workshop, or half-day training. We bring the frameworks, the case studies, the data, and the space to sit in productive discomfort. Email LetsBreakSomeEggs@BreakfastCulture.ca to learn more.
If you lead a brand, find out who actually holds power in your approval chain before the next campaign ships. Our Workplace Culture Assessment Software and Purpose-Driven Marketing Workshop are built for exactly this. Book a 30-minute discovery call.
If you lead an industry association or cover our industry, let's talk about equity standards for awards, codes, and coverage. I'm available to comment on racist and bigoted marketing and what the industry can do about it.
Our rallying cry
Purpose-driven marketing isn't about being liked. It's about being trusted. And trust isn't built on sameness. It's built on safety, empathy, and shared humanity.
So here is what we commit to. We will be the brand that says "we belong together" louder than any voice that says "stay apart." We will be the bridge when others build walls. We will choose people over polarization, and humanity over fear.
Lead Belly told Black people to stay woke because their lives depended on it. They still do. And every creative executive who approves an ad now carries a piece of that responsibility. Walk. Your. Talk.
Thank you for reading until the end. Let's break some eggs!
Jefferson Darrell, Founder & CEO, Breakfast Culture Inc.™
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