Marketing faux pas are a PR disaster for brands. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of poorly executed TV commercials and ad campaigns that get called out for whitewashing, greenwashing, or cultural insensitivity every year. These missteps not only alienate consumer groups but also tarnish a brand’s reputation, eroding trust and loyalty.
But why is it such a common occurrence? The reality is that all too often, the right people aren’t in the room speaking up and making decisions, says entrepreneur Lori Hall.
Despite women driving pop culture in 2023 (thanks to Barbie, Taylor Swift, and Beyonce) and Black culture being the cornerstone of American arts and entertainment, Black women are rarely the ones driving marketing decisions for big brands.
The lack of diversity in the marketing agency world was a problem that Hall and her business partner Jessica Lane kept running into as they built their careers. The two met while working at Turner and later at the broadcast media and Black entertainment company TV One. Both graduates of Northwestern University and veterans of the entertainment space saw a lack of agencies that really understood how to create content for a multicultural audience.
Recognizing the clear gap, Hall and Lane launched Pop’N Creative, an Atlanta-based marketing agency, in February of 2020. Despite COVID shuttering several of their in-person marketing efforts, the agency quickly found opportunities to grow.
INNOVATING IN THE MARKETING SPACE
While both Hall and Lane built their careers as general marketers, they both believe leaning into their identity as a black-owned, female-owned agency has helped them win new business.
“We are so passionate about being Black women ourselves and we feel that the multicultural marketing is underserved,” Hall told Hypepotamus. “Some people would say [we] might pigeonhole ourselves by targeting multicultural marketing specifically. But we have not found that to be the case. We’ve got products of all kinds, all target audiences, all ethnicities, all races, all cultures. Just marketing ourselves as multicultural shows how we are ahead of the game in driving the future because the world is multicultural.”
For the Pop’N Creative team, it is important to create marketing experiences that reflect what the audience really wants to see.
The goal is to “reignite the business landscape, especially the advertising landscape, to make sure they prioritize and re-center diverse voices in the creative process. We had already been here. And so when they came looking, we were ready. We already do this. It’s our expertise. It’s our passion,” added Lane.
Over the last four years, the team secured big named clients like Freeform, Sony Pictures, Discovery, and Hulu. In 2023, the team branched out and took on more clients in the beauty space. Now, the agency has grown from a 2-person startup to a 12-person agency, and closed out last year with 200% year-to-year revenue growth.
“We’ve been lucky in saying that the things that we’ve been passionate about…the culture is swinging in that direction,” the co-founders added.
