ADVERTISING/MARKETING: Irish International and QMP D'Arcy have been asked to present creative work for the National Anti-Racism Awareness Campaign. The Government-funded campaign was to begin at the start of this month with an allocation of €500,000 (£393,700), but the lengthy tendering process involved 15 agencies.
It will now begin in early February. Edelman, the agency that introduced the campaign last year, won the competitive tender to run the PR side. While the contracts are for one year, it is thought the advertising and PR agencies will be kept on for a second year to expand on the campaigns.
At present, few Irish-made adverts reflect the increased ethnic diversity in Irish society. Even those campaigns that try to sell to every adult living here, such as telecoms, lottery or public health campaigns, tend to support the fiction that Ireland is a homogeneously white State.
Mr Ian Ombima believes this is changing. He came here last year from Nairobi, where he worked as a casting director and, having done some low-key research among advertising production companies, found there was a niche for an agency specialising in ethnic minorities.
His Global Faces agency has 100 people on its books who live here but come from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Before this, production firms seeking actors from such ethnic backgrounds routinely went to London for casting sessions.
Already, Mr Ombima has supplied extras and actors for adverts for RTÉ and Hibernian Insurance, and for television programmes and soaps. His most interesting brief to date was to supply Puerto Rican extras for a television advertisement for an Italian bank shot in Dublin before Christmas. He found them by trawling Dublin and asking likely looking people if they were interested.
"Finding people hasn't been too much of a problem," said Mr Ombima. "I approach people in the street and I advertise in Metro Éireann." He finds that while people can initially be a bit suspicious, they are not particularly fazed by being asked by a black man if they want a sideline career in front of the camera. So he has assembled a photographic portfolio of people to show to clients.
As well as his experience of working in the advertising and film industry in Africa, he feels at home working with an ethnic mix. "When people think of Africa, they think of a bunch of black people speaking the same language," he said. "But when I was working in Kenya, I was casting people from 43 tribes and the same number of languages, not to mention the white, Asian and Arab communities there."
