BHEJA BAZAAR: 06/01/2011

Tonight, multicultural awards will be handed out for the first time ever at Marketing Magazine's Annual Marketing Awards. As chair of the inaugural multicultural jury I have been asked to say a few words to the gathering, and I thought I'd share them online.

At Barrett and Welsh we like to say it's not mainstream if it's not multicultural.

The multicultural advertising industry has come a long way since I arrived in this country in 1996 - but it still has a long way to go.

Multicultural advertising is too often dismal - in design, writing and concept.

Agencies and clients make excuses - "the budgets are low".

Or they blame each other - "they don't get us."

An advertising award show is no place for that. There should be room only for excellence, not excuses.

So when Dave Brown of Marketing Magazine invited me to chair the inaugural jury, that was the direction we agreed to take.

It's not good enough to take an American ad, tweak it and release it in the Canadian market.

We don't take a dude in a Stetson with a Texas drawl and replace him with a mullet-headed guy in a plaid shirt who says "how aboot those Canucks, eh?"

Adaptations are not good enough for the mainstream and they're not good enough for multicultural.

In fact, "good enough" isn't.

Multicultural category entries could not win if they were "Insert Visible Minority Here" ads.

They could not win just because they used some dumb joke about curry or dim sum. Or an exotic foreign script.

The winners had to be excellent. Excellent work is always original, always insightful, always well crafted, always based on a genuine idea.

The judging was tough but fair. And this year's winners, I am proud to say will set the bar for the category in the future.

My congratulations to them. They proved that small budgets are not the enemies of big ideas.

And that whether your ads run in Punjabi, Mandarin or Tagalog, they can and should come from a common culture - the culture of the Big Idea.

About the ideawallah

Gavin Barrett is Owner/Founding Partner + Chief Creative Officer, of award-winning Toronto multicultural advertising agency Barrett and Welsh. In pursuit of big ideas he has: nibbled on pigs' ears (not on a live pig at the time); gone elephant-back in the Thai jungle (no elephants were hurt); gambled in a Macau casino (was utterly destroyed). His ads: have run in 35 countries, helped elect prime ministers, attracted the ire of the lawyers for Dolly the clone sheep, drawn an angry crowd in Lagos, have been studied in business texts in Canada and India and received derisive mention in a John Irving novel. His poems: can be found in Penguin’s anthology of 14 contemporary Indian poets, Reasons for Belonging.

He cannot: sing.

Barrett and Welsh

We're not in the ad business. We're in the moving business. We move product. Perceptions. Behaviour. Market share. But most of all, we move people. We are the only mainstream-multicultural agency in Canada, capable of handling mainstream or multicultural advertising needs with equal ease, in global and North American markets. We have provided multicultural advertising services to clients in every category including Bell Canada, Brampton Transit, Burlington Transit, CBC, Centennial College, City of Brampton, Diageo, Niagara Region, Procter & Gamble, Rogers, Shaw Cable, Sobeys, TD Bank, Unilever, VivaNext, Walmart and York Region Transit.

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