Performative Gestures in Multicultural Marketing

At some point, we need to demonstrate that the “Performative Gestures” by many advertisers and their media buying agencies have merit and contribute to the overall growth of advertising and marketing to Multicultural Consumers.

Performative Gestures – More specifically, the popular conception of performative describes utterances or actions that benefit a performer but fail to produce, or even contribute to, meaningful effects. In this usage, performative is a pejoratively inflected adjective that simultaneously critiques the performer and their words and/or actions.

We have HispanicAd do not want to discount any efforts that some well-intentioned executives have set forth to demonstrate their attempt to create a balance in their marketing efforts over the last two-years.

But, we need to address if they were “Performative Gestures” or legitimate efforts to balance their marketing efforts base of the Changing American Demographics.

A couple of facts:

• The pendulum has swung completely from one side of the marketing plan towards another, thus placing more emphasis on certain elements in the Multicultural Bucket vs. others, regardless of the size of their respective populations and importance to the total marketplace.
• We applaud the Black Marketing and Media Industry for their dedication and sell to take advantage of this current thinking.
• We fault the Hispanic Marketing and Media Industry for not aggressively positioning their importance and deliverables to ensure a more balanced approach to the “Performative Gestures” initiatives.
• Current promises and “Performative Gestures” have been hindered by several challenges such as the reduced number of Minority Owned & Operated companies to suffice the requirements, the lack of infrastructure by many of the large media buying companies to analyze, manage, execute and disperse these dollars that require a more local, regional and specialty media buy infrastructure.
• “Performative Gestures” do not contribute to sustainable growth of Multicultural Marketing or in our case Hispanic Marketing.
  We would be remiss if we did not acknowledge that certain sectors and companies received some allocated media dollars (a drop in the bucket).
• We have rudimentary tools to even measure the size, impact and contribution to growth of our industry from “Performative Gestures”, this is unacceptable.
• The Multicultural / Hispanic Consumers continues and will continue to not garner their fair share of the marketing and media allocations when “Performative Gestures” are at the core of client marketing plans.

With all the standard research that exists today in marketing and media, demonstrating the social, economic and political importance of Hispanic Consumers in America our growth in our Industry is in question if we cannot capitalize on the facts.

We need to give credit to Ragan Communications, publishers of PR Daily, for highlighting this term, “Performative Gestures” in an article that advised clients not to do “Performative Gestures” during the upcoming Juneteenth observance. Kudos!

Now we have a new term.

Gene Bryan
CEO
HispanicAd