I hear a lot of black people complaining about industries dominated by "old boys"; complaining about white people in the business not having the foggiest idea about afrocentric advertising; complaining about past opportunity denied and complaining about lack of training and lack of intent to train.
I also hear a lot of white people agreeing with their black colleagues but at the same time throwing their hands in the air and lamenting, "What can we do? We've got our hands full running businesses - it's a tough world out there..."
I'm hearing a lot of rhetoric, a lot of invective and not a heck of a lot of sense.
It is time those who are apathetic to black advancement, those who see everything as simple political correctness and those, on the other side, who are yelling everything from "unfair" to "up the revolution", should take a long hard look at the facts. And the facts have nothing to do with black and white.
Quite simply, the media and marketing industries need to get a lot more excited about black advancement, not only from the point of view of righting the wrongs of the past, levelling playing fields and getting government business by looking as black as possible. Or, for that matter, out of sympathy or guilt. They need to get excited about black advancement out of a sense of survival. And a sense of plain old-fashioned business.
Right now, these industries are in crisis, whether they want to admit it or not. Talk to anyone in the media and they'll tell you that when it comes to media buying, there are people at the top who know what it is all about but once you start looking lower down in the ranks, there aren't many media buyers who have the foggiest idea of what is happening in this country.
But, on the other side of the coin, talk to ad agency people about the media. They'll tell you that advertising sales directors and managers know what selling advertising is all about but go down the ranks and you'll hear complaints about sales people not having the foggiest idea what selling advertising is all about.
Agency people will also tell you that, on the editorial side of the media, quality is rare and compromise commonplace. Instead of building bastions, editors in South Africa are only just managing to patch up the cracks.
And on the marketing side, just talk to any advertising agency about brand managers and you'd better prepare yourself for an hour's diatribe on everything from futility to incompetence. Don't even ask about product managers.
No sector of either the media or marketing industry is blameless when it comes to second-rate performance down the ranks. And it is getting worse.
That is why the need for black advancement in South Africa has nothing whatsoever to do with political correctness. It is simply because there is no other sort of advancement available.
What whites could have been advanced have advanced all the way to Australia, Canada and the UK.
South Africa has to use what resources it has and those resources just happen to be black. And what I can't understand is the reluctance these industries have to tap these resources and also the reluctance young blacks seem to have in terms of getting involved in these industries.
And they do. Talk to any youngster in the townships and he'll tell you that the advertising industry has only one purpose and that is to provide young white guys with a sure-fire easy access to Porches.
And it is unforgivable, if not downright criminal, to suggest that black people don't have a feel for advertising or other media disciplines.
Because they do. Not only that, but they have enormous aspirations, enormous wills to succeed and the pool of potential talent out there is both wide and deep. Someone just needs to take time off from self-interest and perhaps a bit of self-pity and to start looking beneath the surface.
It is time that these industries that are so crucial to the economy put rhetoric and recrimination aside and get on with what's important. Surely it makes sense for anyone who has a passion for these industries to make use of all 47 million South Africans and not to keep trying to do it with just a few thousand. That is really what it is all about.
Right now, South Africa's media still has an excellent reputation in global terms. So does our advertising industry and so do our marketers. But this enormous momentum is running out of fuel and starting to run on the smell of an oil rag.
Now, the really scary thing about all this is that I wrote this column exactly 10 years ago and it is still as relevant and pertinent now as it was then. Very little has changed.
