In Procter & Gamble’s brand campaign “The Look,” an African-American man deals with the continual, micro-aggressive glimpses of society as he navigates his everyday life. Saturday Morning and P&G offered sobering insights into the creation of the spot at the “Let’s talk about bias” panel at Advertising Week New York 2019.
“When we wrote the script, we didn’t think it would be relevant,” said Keith Cartwright, executive creative director at 72andSunny and co-founder of Saturday Morning. “It’s something people of color deal with every day.”
In each scene, the man experiences subtle discrimination in particular locations, selected specifically for the story. “It was important to establish the historical context,” said Kwame Taylor-Hayford, co-founder of Saturday Morning and founder of Kin. Scenes at a lunch counter and a swimming pool mirror are familiar from racist clashes during the Civil Rights Movement.