16897: Dreaming Of A White Rice Christmas.

 

Savoring holiday memories brought to you by White advertising agencies and Adland.

16846: Exclusive Vintage Advertising.

 

Adweek and Ad Patina are selling vintage advertisements—including framing services—for prices up to $700…?!

 

A quick view of the website showed no advertisements featuring Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, or Rastus. Didn’t spot any offerings from multicultural advertising agencies either.

 

Find the perfect holiday gift for White advertising agency fans—but don’t expect a Black Friday sale.

16438: An Exclusive Gathering Of Friends And Critters.

 

Green Giant is staging a stunt—Friendsgiving—in partnership with No Kid Hungry. The event includes organizing a gathering of friends, as demonstrated via the images depicted here.

 

Not invited to Green Giant’s patronizing party: Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus. Gee, that’s not very friendly. 

 

16329: Overreaction Of The Week.

Comicbook.com reported Cap’n Crunch underwent a transformation, receiving a four-striped uniform and five fingers. The character’s original three-striped jacket—which was called out many years ago—signified that he held a commander ranking, which is one naval level below a captain. In short, he’s been impersonating an officer forever. Yet he’s clearly avoiding charges by taking advantage of his White privilege. Aunt Jemima and Rastus would never have gotten away with that—and Uncle Ben was quietly stripped of his CEO role.

 

Cap’n Crunch Debuts New Four-Stripe Uniform

 

The iconic cereal character finally has a uniform befitting his captain’s rank.

 

By Nicole Drum

 

For years, fans of Cap’n Crunch have had one persistent complaint about the iconic cereal icon's jacket. The Cap’n’s jacket has for years only featured three stripes, which in naval terms means he’s only a commander — the rank below captain. Now, in celebration of the Cap’n’s 60th birthday this year, he’s getting a whole new look and finally getting the stripes to match his rank. On Thursday, Cap’n Crunch unveiled the Cap’n’s new look with a brand-new jacket featuring four-striped sleeves fit for a captain.

 

The beloved cereal character’s new look will get its big debut outside San Diego Comic-Con where, in a nod to his 60th birthday this year, 60 of his “Crunchmates” will appear dressed as the Cap’n himself complete with the new four-stripe look. You can check it the new look [above].

 

“With the celebration of Cap’n Crunch’s 60th birthday this year, we thought it was only fitting to commemorate his epic 60 years of tasty adventures with a fresh new look,” says Kristin Kroepfl, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Quaker Foods North America at PepsiCo. “What better way to unveil the beloved Cap’n Crunch’s new four-striped look than with his cosplaying Crunchmates around one of the most iconic pop culture events of the year?!”

 

The unveiling of the new look isn’t exactly a surprise. Cap’n Crunch’s official social media channels have been teasing the new look for a few days, hinting at the addition of the fourth strip that makes him “officially” a captain. The new look will roll out on cereal boxes, treat bars and more in stores nationwide.

 

Cap’n Crunch getting a new look is just the latest celebration of the cereal mascot’s 60th birthday this year. Earlier this year, the Cap’n celebrated six decades of breakfast adventure by hosting a birthday bash at Coachella.

16281: Removing Culturally Clueless Characters From Advertising—But Keeping Them In Advertising Agencies.

 

A recent post on UK Mad Women in Adland noted that one of the spotlighted creative executives hatched the culturally clueless advertisement depicted above.

 

Turns out the Mad Woman shouldn’t be too harshly judged for the concept. After all, the advertiser—Robertson’s—had utilized a golliwog as its brand symbol since at least 1910. The origin story claims the company visited the US to set up a plant in Boston, where a family member bought a golliwog doll. The image first appeared on price lists, eventually being adopted as Robertson’s official mark.

 

In short, Robertson’s Golly is the UK equivalent of US characters like Rastus, Uncle Ben, and Aunt Jemima. The critter retired in 2002, with Robertson’s insisting they were not bowing to political correctness; rather, the decision was made for commercial reasons.

 

So, it shows how brands can come to see a need to remove racism from advertising. Which begs the question as to why such clients won’t do likewise by removing the systemic racism presented via partnerships with White advertising agencies.

 

Golly, it sure is baffling.

 

16176: From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Rastus And Brer Rabbit…?

Researching the recent erasures and revisions of racist brand icons such as Aunt Jemima, Mia the Land O’Lakes Maiden, and Uncle Ben led to an interesting discovery. The food company whose portfolio includes Cream of Wheat—represented for generations by Rastus—also manufactures Brer Rabbit^® goodies. Here’s the corporate website hype:

 

:::::

 

For more than 100 years, Brer Rabbit^® has been a trusted household brand used in cherished family recipes. Made of the finest quality unsulfured juice of sun-ripened sugarcane, Brer Rabbit sugarcane molasses contains no preservatives, artificial flavor or artificial color. It’s a key ingredient for baking and cooking.

 

Brer Rabbit Molasses comes in three grades: mild flavor, full flavor and blackstrap. All three grades are unsulfured molasses, making them the finest quality of sugarcane molasses available. Brer Rabbit is also available in two syrup varieties: full and light flavors.

 

The Brer Rabbit name comes from the mischievous Br’er Rabbit from the Uncle Remus folktales passed down by oral tradition in the 1800s and popularized for mainstream audiences in the late 19th century by the published works of Joel Chandler Harris. In these tales, Br’er Rabbit is a trickster who wins by using his wits instead of brawn. Trickery and fun can certainly come in handy in the kitchen as you create winning dishes with Brer Rabbit!

 

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Okey-doke. To further comprehend the cultural complexities, brush up on your Brer Rabbit history.

15742: BHM 2022—Fake Black History Month Ads.

To counter the fake reverence annually displayed by major advertisers during Black History Month—as well as the overall lack of BHM advertising—MultiCultClassics presents fake BHM Ads.

 

15663: Aunt Jemima Is Coming To Town…

 

 

This 2020 Moscow-Pullman Daily News article reported on the dozens of women hired to portray Aunt Jemima at events over the years.

 

Maurice M. Manring—author of “Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima”—stated, “There were a lot of regional Aunt Jemimas. Quaker Oats up into the 1960s hired women to portray her at county fairs and community events, as well as schools, all across the nation.”

 

Gee, such a missed opportunity for cross-promotions featuring actors portraying Uncle Ben and Rastus.

 

‘Aunt Jemima’ visit to Lewiston fit the times

 

Brand will be discontinued after years of outcry, but 1955 trip was widely celebrated

 

By Joel Mills, for the Daily News

 

LEWISTON — The Aunt Jemima brand will soon be gone, nixed by Quaker Oats over its racist origins. But a record of her visit to Lewiston 65 years ago still exists in the archives of the Lewiston Tribune, a testament to a time when such stereotypes were widely accepted, and even celebrated.

 

The occasion was the joint National Armed Forces Day-Campfire Girls parade down Main Street on May 21, 1955, in support of a fund drive for a new Campfire Girls camp on Lake Coeur d’Alene. Police closed the road to traffic from First to 19th streets. National Guard soldiers marched, bands played, floats paraded, politicians preened and paradegoers were treated to a flyover of military aircraft at 11:10 a.m. on the dot.

 

But the best treat of all, at least for the hungry among the masses, was a free all-day breakfast of hotcakes, eggs, sausage and coffee whipped up by none other than Aunt Jemima herself. Or, to be more precise, one of the dozens of women hired to portray her at various events over the years.

 

A caption in a photo in the May 21 edition of the Tribune identified her as “Mrs. Jessie Stokes of Nebraska,” without specifying whether Jessie was her first name or her husband’s. Regardless, there is nobody with the last name Stokes on lists of the many women who were known to portray Aunt Jemima.

 

Author Maurice M. Manring, who wrote the book “Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima,” said he didn’t recognize Stokes’ name. But he wasn’t surprised.

 

“There were a lot of regional Aunt Jemimas,” Manring told the Tribune. “Quaker Oats up into the 1960s hired women to portray her at county fairs and community events, as well as schools, all across the nation. There are really more than I could reasonably attempt to keep track of, over the years.”

 

The R.T. Davis Milling company hired former slave Nancy Greene to play Aunt Jemima in 1893 when it owned the brand. Lillian Richard, Anna Short Harrington, Edith Wilson and Ethel Ernestine Harper were among the more well-known women to play the role. Manring said Quaker Oats greatly expanded that list with its practice of hiring regionally from one end of the country to the other, with dozens of women playing Aunt Jemima during the advertising boom after World War I.

 

“I get asked about specific women from time to time, but I rarely recognize their names,” he said. “There were a lot of them.”

 

Steven Branting was a first grader at Warner Elementary (now McGhee) when Stokes, in full character, made an appearance at an assembly in the school gym.

 

“We didn’t notice how large she was until she met with us and greeted us, and then you realized how large she was,” Branting recalled. “It really left an impression on me to remember her so distinctly. It was the first black person many of us had ever seen.”

As kids in the 1950s, no one realized that a hurtful stereotype was being perpetuated by the character, he said. But Branting believes his exposure to Aunt Jemima didn’t leave any scars.

 

“I don’t really think it was meant to demean,” he said. “It was never portrayed that way, but I understand why people feel that way. But I was raised in a very inclusive family.”

 

Branting was a Lewiston Orchards kid, so he didn’t make it downtown for the parade or to sample the free breakfast the next day. But according to ads and coverage of the Lewiston parade in the newspaper, Stokes and four assistants cooked and served thousands of breakfasts from a chuck wagon at Sam Alexander’s Lewis-Clark Garage at 108 Main St.

 

The smorgasbord wasn’t just dished up on the Saturday of the parade, but all day Sunday in what must have been a grueling marathon of pancake flipping. But the women who played Aunt Jemima only needed a rudimentary knowledge of cooking to do the job, because the main qualification was fitting a racist “mammy” stereotype.

 

“She had to be able to demonstrate how to make pancakes with the ready mix, so it wasn’t too demanding a culinary feat,” Manring said. “The company wanted women who could fit the image of Aunt Jemima both in appearance and demeanor — more often than not an older, cheerful, often larger woman who would speak in a kind of slave dialect and recount memories of her days on the plantation. They didn’t need professional actors, and I would imagine most of them weren’t.”

 

Manring said he didn’t judge the women who took an opportunity to get a paying job, but thinks the whole system smacked of exploitation. Stokes said the parade and celebration were the most wonderful she had ever worked in coverage in the May 22 Tribune.

 

“The people here are very enthusiastic and the weather was wonderful,” she said.

 

St. Joseph, Mo., newspaperman Chris L. Rutt appropriated the original Aunt Jemima image and name in 1889 from racist minstrel and vaudeville shows as a way to market a new pancake mix developed at a flour mill he bought with his friend Charles G. Underwood.

 

The Quaker Oats Company bought Aunt Jemima Mills in 1926 and turned it into one of the longest-running and most recognizable brands in American advertising history. The company attempted to update the brand over the years with more progressive depictions of the character, but it admitted earlier this month that its origins were deeply tied to slavery and racism and finally agreed with decades-old calls to pull the plug. Cornell University Africana Studies professor Riché Richardson wrote about those racist origins for the New York Times in 2015 in a call to retire the brand.

 

“This Aunt Jemima logo was an outgrowth of Old South plantation nostalgia and romance grounded in an idea about the ‘mammy,’ a devoted and submissive servant who eagerly nurtured the children of her white master and mistress while neglecting her own,” Richardson wrote. “Visually, the plantation myth portrayed her as an asexual, plump black woman wearing a headscarf.”

 

The company was ultimately unable to ignore calls to retire the Aunt Jemima name after the country was swept by outrage over the killing of 46-year-old George Floyd by Minneapolis police last month and subsequent protests over the mistreatment of black Americans throughout U.S. history.

15608: Papa’s Got A Brand New Logo.

 

Advertising Age reported Papa John’s updated its logo and restaurant design. Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben were erased—yet John Schnatter lives on…? Does he receive royalties for using his name?

15536: New Ben’s Original Campaign Makes You Want To Cry Uncle.

 

Advertising Age reported on the new Uncle Ben’s Original campaign that cooks up visions of diversity—brought to you by a predominately White advertising agency, presumably based in the UK. The patronizing pap for Ben’s Original is anything but original. The inclusion of Mars Food executives is unappetizing too. It’s all as White as, well, rice.

 

Ben’s Original’s First Campaign Highlights Inclusion—And Its Rice

 

The “Everyone’s Original” campaign for the former Uncle Ben’s is one of the biggest in Mars Food’s history

 

By Jessica Wohl

 

Ben’s Original, the brand created to replace Uncle Ben’s, is out with an inclusive campaign backed by major media spending nearly a year after the name change was announced amid a global racial reckoning.

 

The “Everyone’s Original” campaign features a diverse cast of families and friends cooking at home, each group putting its own spin on using Ben’s Original rice with the tagline “We’re all original recipes.” Commercials feature six groups of real families and friends: a Black nuclear family, a pair of friends, three roommates, a single-parent family, a multi-generational Pakistani family, and a family that uses sign language.

 

“Our priority when selecting the families was to be as inclusive as possible to emphasize our belief that everyone deserves a seat at the table,” says Rafael Narvaez, global chief marketing officer and research and development officer, Mars Food.

 

The campaign was inspired by the new Ben’s Original brand name, “which not only speaks to the heritage and quality of our rice, but also our vision of inclusivity that celebrates individuality,” says Narvaez.

 

Each commercial features unscripted moments of cooking, familiar kitchen chaos, and Ben’s Original rice.

 

Name change

 

Mars Food announced plans to change the name from Uncle Ben’s in September 2020 and updated its packaging in May. The name change was spurred by recognition of racial inequities associated with Uncle Ben’s and other brands that relied on stereotypes such as Black waiters and cooks. The products, mainstays in kitchens for decades, were drawn into the spotlight during the period of racial reckoning and call for justice that followed the killings of Black Americans including George Floyd. Other overhauls included Aunt Jemima dropping its name and likeness to later become Pearl Milling Company.

 

Now, after minimal marketing that promoted the name change, Ben’s Original is out with what Narvaez describes as one of the largest campaigns in Mars Food’s history, without divulging spending plans.

 

Mars, which named its rice Uncle Ben’s in 1946 after a Black farmer, doesn’t mention the prior name in the ads. Unscripted commercials show real-life families and friends. According to Narvaez, everyone who appears in the campaign was aware “and supportive,” he says, “of the name change and our evolved brand purpose.”

 

UK cast, U.S. debut

 

The commercials were shot this summer in London with COVID-19 protocols in place. “We have aspirations to feature families who live in other areas of the world in the near future,” Narvaez says.

 

The first series of ads feature a fully UK-based cast, though he points out that many of the families originally came from other countries. The ads come from WPP-backed The&Partnership. After a U.S. debut, there are plans to expand the campaign to Australia, the UK, Germany, Canada and France in the coming months.

 

In the U.S., commercials are set to appear on TV including on TV One, Food Network and HGTV, print ads set to run in Essence and Taste of Home, online video portals, streaming services, social and search. A portion of U.S. media spending is going toward minority-owned networks including Black Enterprise, Blavity, Her Agenda, Travel Noire, Ebony, TV One and Essence. The company plans to follow a similar model in other markets.

 

The brand previously announced community outreach including its “Seat at the Table” scholarship fund to support Black culinary students, developed with National Urban League and United Negro College Fund. Later this year, Mars plans to begin funding apprenticeships in the U.K. Other efforts include product donations to organizations including Feeding America and CARE.

15535: Saluting Iconic Laborers On Labor Day.

 

Look who’s not working today…

15420: Ben’s Unoriginal Erasure Commences…

 

Advertising Age reported on the latest erasure of culturally clueless critters, as Uncle Ben’s officially transitions to Ben’s Original. Gee, this must be how John Schnatter feels about being stripped of mascot status at Papa John’s. That is, the name remains, but all visual evidence of a human persona is gone. Incidentally, Ben was arguably more human than Schnatter. Ironically, both characters served as company leaders—and ultimately vanished amid charges of racism.

 

Ben’s Original, Previously Uncle Ben’s, Rolls Out First Packaging Under New Name

 

The new packs will begin appearing on shelves this week

 

By Ilyse Liffreing

 

In September, Uncle Ben’s announced it was changing its name to Ben’s Original and dropped the image of a Black man from its packaging in an effort to detach itself from offensive stereotypes amid the ongoing racial-justice reckoning in America.

 

Now, the Mars Food brand is releasing the new packaging, which will begin appearing on store shelves in the U.S. this week and will roll out to other countries gradually.

 

Mars is working with retailers to change out the packaging, but the current rice product will not be removed from store shelves. That means customers will see the new version alongside the old until the previous product sells out.

 

The new packaging keeps the colors of the original intact so consumers can identify the rice with the brand’s familiar orange background and navy blue font. The Ben’s Original brand mark is a derivative of Cooper Black and what the brand calls a “modernized version of the previous brand mark.” Photos of the rice take up the majority of the box or pouch. The rice itself remains unchanged.

 

Originally, Ben’s Original told Ad Age it planned to create “equitable iconography” as part of its rebrand, but says “after careful consideration, including listening to thousands of consumers, associates and customers, we believe the decision to not add new iconography is the best path forward at this stage of our evolution.”

 

The brand plans to include its new packaging in future ad campaigns and current social media and digital posts. Ben’s Originals worked with Energy BBDO, Jones Knowles Ritchie, The&Partnership, MediaCom and Weber Shandwick on the redesign.

 

Before becoming Ben’s Original, the brand, which originated in 1946, had been named after a Black Texan farmer known as Uncle Ben. The man in the image was Frank Brown, a Chicago chef and waiter. Over time, the brand’s images became interpreted as promoting racist stereotypes of Black servants. A Mars Food spokesperson previously told Ad Age that it doesn’t know if a real Ben “ever existed.”

 

Over the past year, several food brands have removed monikers and images with racist associations. PepsiCo’s Aunt Jemima rebranded as Pearl Milling Company and B&G Foods’ Cream of Wheat said it will remove the Black chef from its packaging.

 

“Today is a big moment for Ben’s Original,” said Denis Yarotskiy, regional president at Mars Food North America. “Getting to this point on our brand evolution journey has been the result of our continuing commitment to listen to consumers, as well as the support and dedication of our Mars Food Associates. But it is just another marker on our journey. We recognize we have much more work to do as we bring our new brand purpose to life to offer everyone a seat at the table; we remain committed to delivering this ambition.”

 

When Ben’s Original first announced its packaging overhaul in September, it also said it would invest $2.5 million in Greenville, Mississippi, where the 75-year-old brand has produced its rice for U.S. customers for the past 40 years; along with beginning community outreach programs and introducing “Seat at the Table” $25,000 scholarships in partnership with the National Urban League and United Negro College Fund for students pursuing culinary arts or food science degrees.

 

With the rollout of the new packaging, Ben’s Original announced its investment in Greenville will last for the next five years, with the money going towards students in the area and helping provide access to fresh food.

 

For the scholarships, the brand says the first round of recipients will be announced at the end of the summer, and new rounds are planned for the next four years. Ben’s Original is also opening up the scholarships to Black high school seniors for a variety of post-high school education prospects.

 

“Ben’s Original is not just a name and packaging change—we believe everyone deserves to feel welcome, heard and have access to nutritious food,” said Rafael Narvaez, global chief marketing officer and research and development officer at Mars Food in a statement. “That’s why we’ve committed to taking actions based on insights from thousands of consumers, as well as our own associates, designed to enhance inclusion and equity in service of our new brand purpose to create meals, experiences and opportunities that offer everyone a seat at the table.”