Seeing Campaign Fails, Ad Pros Launch a Multicultural Agency to Help Brands Do Better

Pop’N Creative founders aim to better serve creative projects

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Coming from the entertainment marketing industry, Jessica Lane and Lori Hall, the co-founders of Atlanta-based agency Pop’N Creative, have seen some pretty tone-deaf brand campaign pitches.

In the last decade, the two have worked in-house at Turner, overseeing marketing campaigns for TNT and TBS. Before teaming up for their own agency, they led campaigns for TV One, a cable network that primarily targets Black audiences.

Working for brands, the two recalled insensitive agency pitches that have ranged from key art for a talk show hosted by a Mexican American personality with mariachi bands, sombreros and garden hedges—all reinforcing stereotypical depictions of Mexican Americans—and key art for a candy brand centered on nooses, disregarding the history of nooses and Black people in America.

“Sometimes we forget how many horror stories we’ve seen with pitches for multicultural audiences that just go so left,” Lane said.

Hall

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