Every month I receive over two dozen magazines in my mailbox, and Vibe adds to this reading pile. No matter the magazine, no matter the targeted demographic, I enjoy the articles as much as the advertisements. As a carnival showcasing celebrity lifestyles, the latest music and entertainment, and fashion, "Vibe serves as a portal to a growing, young, trend-setting, multicultural audience." And with 67.4% of its audience being black (Vibe media kit page 6 of 14), the advertisements that appear in its pages get targeted to that audience. So what exactly would a multicultural audience think about Nissan’s Black Experience ad in Vibe’s 150th issue opening spreads? (Black Experience capital letters courtesy of Nissan.)
G-unit, Roca Wear, K-Swiss, Jordan XX2, Oral-B, and Infiniti Cars (a Nissan division) also advertised in the March 2007 issue, but Nissan’s double-truck, struck me as peculiar. In the full color ad, the automaker presented five Japanese youth hanging out in a Shimokitazawa, Tokyo barber shop with a subhead stating, "The Black Experience is everywhere. NISSAN, SHIFT_respect". Launched over five years ago, Nissan’s Shift_ campaign set the baseline for the automobile manufacturer to communicate in an open-ended fashion. Shift_ can become anything, and in an interview with FreshAlloy.com, Steven Wilhite, Vice President of Marketing for Nissan North America goes into greater detail about this platform. Much in the same way that a car’s chassis can get equipped with a different body style, Shift_ can have any suffix bridged to the underscore to complete or continue a message. Shift_power, Shift_individuality, and Shift_2.0 (like the engine) represent some of their past approaches. But most recently, Nissan and their minority-focused ad agency True chose to revolve Shift_respect around people and cultural identity without including any Nissan vehicles. Within the opening spreads of Vibe’s 150th issue, I witnessed a joyous moment where some Japanese youth took on the the proud and rebellious cornrow hair style, courtesy of a Japanese hair stylist. "I suppose some Blacks might find this offensive because they see the Japanese characters as acting Black; and they are. I’ve been to Japan, in fact I lived there for several years and I see it as a respect thing. They connect to Black culture because they like it and think it is cool, not because they are trying to make fun of it. All cultures borrow from one another. People borrow things seen as interesting and become connected to the ‘coolness’ of that cultural aesthetic," says Maurice Woods, who wrote Envisioning Blackness in American Graphic Design for his MFA graduate thesis.
Mr. Woods also pointed out that this ad runs during February—which happens to be Black History Month. "I believe this campaign’s intentions were to give homage to the influence African American culture has had on the world." On the surface, this appears both celebratory and honorable, but doesn’t Nissan want to promote its vehicles? To Roymieco Carter, who is Assistant Professor of digital art and design at Wake Forest University, the fact that no Nissan vehicle can be seen "portrays a weakness of the product." Prof. Carter continued, "The car has little to do with the creation of image. The car is secondary. The thing to point out is that there is no good guy, no bad guy in this scenario. It is a simple matter of images and the power they possess within our culture. The realization of this should give all creatives a greater sensitivity and responsibility to the craft. We have to remember there is nothing accidental in this ad or magazine. It is a strategy and a construction built on the intelligence, talent, and money of gifted individuals to attempt to control the behavior and thinking of a group of people. There are no arbitrary decisions at this level of representation." With an understanding and appreciation of black culture (and knowing that February is dedicated to it), the message has a positive denotation, but according to Prof. Carter, a new picture gets revealed on a connotative level, "It [the ad] is not humorous nor offensive, it is trivial and silly. Externally it sets the stage to make cartoons out of two cultures. It is a stereotype of a stereotype."
And that’s what came to mind when I saw the Nissan ad, "Is this offensive?" While Shift_respect centers on the Black Experience, how would the Japanese or other Asians perceive this ad? Asianmediawatch.com criticized a 2004 Nissan Murano ad for its portrait of Asian cuisine: "The troubling commercial portrays Asian American culture as strange and foreign relative to Western culture which is portrayed as the norm." And Angry Asian Man doesn’t feel too cool driving his lowly Nissan Altima. Whether or not Nissan’s are cool, the 2007 Black Experience ad makes the Japanese look like they could care less about their own culture and own coolness because they’re adopting somebody else’s; on the other hand, it makes African American culture look pervasive and the "it" way to style yourself, as Mr. Woods states, "This Nissan ad at least gives homage to the Black experience by saying what we all know is true, Black culture is borrowed by everyone. The only real problem with this is when the origins of a culture or experience get lost or misappropriated." While it’s true that Black culture has influenced music, fashion, and entertainment, it’s vexing how Nissan’s Black Experience ad reduces the culture to a barber shop illustration. So many other things could define the Black Experience, but they were overlooked or maybe overused. Apple’s Think Different campaign by TBWA Chiat/Day (who partially owns True) used a variety of heroes including Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali.
Those people signified the struggle, perseverance, and victories that are part of the Black Experience, but instead Nissan and True chose to create a caricature that focuses on an African American surface quality: fashion. At least Nissan chose to run the print ads in African American media like Vibe magazine, in order to target the market they’re after. But what does this advertisement do for the Nissan brand? And will it increase automobile sales in the African American demographic? Certainly they want to improve the brand’s stick-ability with the consumer, and of course they want to sell cars—the barber shop ad is not the first attempt. In 2003, ClickZ.com reported that Nissan launched their Black Experience campaign because, "According to research by Target Market News, a trade publication focused on the black consumer market, African-American spending on new and used cars from 1996 to 2001 more than doubled, surpassing $43 billion" (Brian Morrissey, 2003). Outdoor and print ads expanded the campaign across the mediascape, and assaulted viewers with a number of "shifters, shakers and groundbreakers in the African-American community that have made significant contributions in the arts, science and business from 1619 to the present." No images could be found, but the campaign sounds an awful lot like what TBWA Chiat/Day did with Apple—except the focus here is African Americans.
I suspect Nissan will continue to push the envelope with its campaigns, and employ Truth to assist with their carpet bombing. Most of all, they should continue giving African American’s credit with Shift_respect, "Black people want to see Black culture protected and treated with respect just as any culture. If you use it, fine, but then put it back were it came from. In this case, give us our props. Nissan, I believe is doing this in this ad." For all the time I spent analyzing the barbershop image created, it all boiled down to the closing statement, the one piece of type buried at the page’s far corner, Shift_respect. Props delivered. Props deserved.
As a final notation, this statement by the Black Anti-Defamation Council of Columbus Ohio was located. It includes a press release by Hazel Trice Edney. Neither Hazel Trice Edney nor members of the Black Anti-Defamation could be reached for comments.
This all smacks of over analysis, it is a simple case of image appropriation. Comments like "it's vexing how Nissan's Black Experience ad reduces the culture to a barber shop illustration" seem to imply that Nissan is trying to represent a whole culture in the ad; in fact they are just trying to look cool.
On Mar.01.2007 at 02:44 PM