The new Heineken draughtkeg robot commercial has been eating at me. Don’t get me wrong…it’s a cool commercial. The song is catchy, the graphics are slick, and the robot is intriguing. Even the webs……

I see, not 6 black runners getting ready to run faster than ever, no I see 6 black men bowing to 1 white guy.

Do you see it now?

This is a very racist ad (unintentionally so, but still).

If you hadn’t put up a post about this, had I seen this ad in a newspaper/magazine, I wouldn’t even have paid so much attention to it.

First, demote the importance of intentions. They don’t matter. Markets and consumers do. They say you have offended them. Period. Either be “brand” enough to stick to your message or “brand” enough to acknowledge their opinion and engage the discussion.

Next, ask if this type of response could have been predicted with some basic business scans, i.e. taking what you “mean to say” and testing it. That’s nowhere near near the pc paranoia referred to in some posts – just simple business thought that takes into account the context in which the ad will be viewed.

So, unless we set out with the original goal of tanking the brand, we don’t all need to jet to sensitivity training just yet. An academic approach to simple Cultural Competency (M. Chichester, E. Wilson) would yield tons of case studies and real reasons why you may not want to drop an image like that in the marketplace if you really want to do business, your racism or humanitarian virtue notwithstanding.

Too often we assign our emotions to political factors (especially race) but if we see them as simple environmental and business realities, then we can build them into our thinking. Mitigating risk by being aware of potentially negative cultural considerations is a BUSINESS skill as defined by managing any component that can directly affect ROI.

I mean, I wish people’s hearts would change and that that would inspire some basic human awareness of “the other.” That’s a higher plane of thought, creativity, and action – one that I strive for. But, in case the hearts of the masses don’t change, I’m all for holistic business thought in the meantime, i.e. thought that doesn’t exclude Cultural Competency.

The difficulty that I think will persist lies in people seeing the utility of cultural solutions in business problems. It may seem too “touchy feely” or pc to actually ask a member of a particular ethnic group, “What does this say to you?” …until you start losing the touch and feel of MONEY behind that misstep.

The anger on the board should be the first cue that we have better odds on solving the business problems than the whole sandbox thing. But I have hope.

You know what I see here? I see a multi-billion dollar corporation that’s too cheap to spend some money on a decent ad campaign. This stock-photo-collage-gone-bad is poorly executed and under-thought at best. Even trying to make racial accusations against it gives it a lot more credit and attention than it deserves.