‘All-white’ advert slammed
AN OUTsurance advertisement, to celebrate Father’s Day, backfired badly yesterday with the company having to pull the advert from its social media sites after it caused a furore for being “anti-Black”.
The video advert, which was shared yesterday on Twitter by the insurance company, with the caption Happy #FathersDay to all amazing dads out there” was lambasted by Twitter users for showing mostly white fathers enjoying activities with their children.
OUTsurance’s head of marketing Peter Cronje yesterday said the video had been made by a junior employee and admitted it was “demographically inappropriate” but that was due to an “unintentional oversight”.
Twitter users were scathing in their criticism of the insurance company for the advert, arguing the campaign was not representative of the country’s demographics and showed that only white men made good fathers.
South African celebrities weighed in on the matter, including actress Rami Chuene who tweeted pictures of Black fathers with their children and a picture of herself with her father with the caption: “Hey look! That’s me and my father! I think we make a cool advert, what do you think @ OUTsurance?”
Actor Hlomla Dandala tweeted at Outsurance: “Delete this ad. Or adjust it to make it more representative. All you’re doing is pissing us off.”
One user, Pholoho Selebano, took the issue further and wrote: “@OUTsurance first you raised R250 000 for Knysna fires, but have never donated to shack fire victims. Now an anti-Black fathers day ad (sic).”
Cronje said: “This advert was created by one of our junior ladies in the social media department and I believe she made an innocent mistake when she created and posted this video.
“This is the first time we have had trouble with one of our ads because we make sure that they are representative of the country’s demographics,” Cronje said, shortly after removing the campaign from the company’s social media sites.
He emphasised that the money collected for Knysna went to black neighbourhoods of the town, which was recently affected by run-away veld fires.
Asked whether he had seen and approved the advert before its publishing, Cronje said he hadn’t, before adding: “We give our social media employees some leeway to run campaigns in order to empower our young staff.
“I will have a word with the young lady to make her more aware of how our campaigns should reflect South Africa’s demographics.”
However, social activist Yusuf Abramjee said there was a similar Mother’s Day advert by OUTsurance, where all the women and children in it are white.
Abramjee said he was “very disappointed” in OUTsurance – a company he worked with during his time as the head of activist group LeadSA – for not “reforming” in line with South Africa’s quest for non-racialism.
“South Africa has been a democracy for 23 years now and for a company like OUTsurance to have an ad which is 99% white – I think there is one person of colour in that whole advert, I think it is a disgrace,” he asserted.
“If I was an OUTsurance client, I would seriously reconsider my business with them as a person of colour.”
Cronje said he still had to discuss with his fellow executives on whether they will take down the Mother’s Day advert, adding that the company’s social media adverts do not undergo the same “stringent demographic” filtering as TV adverts do.
“OUTsurance is a responsible corporate citizen and people should not think we are racist,” he said, alluding to various initiatives that he said the company does to uplift black people, including the “only black” points men and women the company employs to assist with traffic congestion in Gauteng metros.