Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 9, 1990 TAG: 9003092446
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RANDALL ROTHENBERG THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
"I don't want it to happen that advertisers who have been reluctant so far to spend on the black community will start saying we - black consumers - don't want to be targeted, so they won't spend the money," she said.
Creating advertising for minorities has always been a precarious proposition, but those who do it say it has grown more perilous since R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. caused an uproar by announcing plans to test-market a new cigarette, called Uptown, aimed at blacks.
Denounced by, among others, Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan, who is black, Reynolds abandoned its efforts.
Black ad executives such as Jones, founder of a $14 million ad agency that bears her name, worry that marketers will now abandon them.
Many fear marketers and the government may try to restrict the target marketing of products other than cigarettes.
"It's a dangerous time," Jones said.
Dangerous and divisive.
In the wake of the Uptown debacle, some members of Congress have stepped up their efforts to ban or restrict tobacco advertising, especially advertising aimed at minorities.
Benjamin L. Hooks, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, called these efforts "an insidious form of paternalism."
But other black officials, such as Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., have applauded them.
Jones showed a bit of the same ambivalence when asked whether she would accept a tobacco company as a client.
"I don't want to say no," she said. "I've done cigarettes before. But my Dad is dying of emphysema. Yet I'd rather worry about kids not getting educated.
"That's bigger to me than whether people should smoke. Until someone bites the bullet and says there shouldn't be cigarette advertising or promotion, I don't like the hypocrisy of the position that the government can tax cigarettes and liquor, but then might say you can't advertise it. I really resent it."
The current climate worries Jones.
She calls client allocations for black-oriented advertising "either/or budgets," easily eliminated in times of financial or political pressure.
Now, she fears, the whole concept of target marketing is being discredited.
"Targeting has become a euphemism for `black,' and that's negative," she said. "But marketing is targeting. Everybody should target."
Jones, 48, has a long involvement in minority advertising.
After graduating from the University of Michigan, she joined J. Walter Thompson in 1963 as a secretary and was soon accepted into its copy-writing program.
In 1968, she began a decade of zigzagging between mainstream and black agencies, helping to start Zebra, a pioneering black advertising agency, and later joining Kenyon & Eckhardt, then another minority agency and then BBDO.
by CNB