Black & Abroad co-founders Kent Johnson and Eric Martin join FCB/SIX Chief Creative Officer Ian Mackenzie and Creative Strategist Simran Kaur to talk about their groundbreaking collaboration.

Go Back to Africa harnessed data and the zeitgeist to create a campaign for Black & Abroad which would not only represent a forward facing message but increase brand visibility by 315%. “Go back to Africa is a travel campaign that takes a racial slur and reframes it as a relentlessly optimistic and uplifting call to action for travel to the African continent,” explains Mackenzie.

The campaign takes tweets using the common racist insult ‘Go back to Africa’, then erases the hateful context and replaces it with uplifting travel imagery targeted directly to a Black millennial audience. It also seeks to address the dominant visual of African vacations tending to feature white people. “If you hear an idea like this three or four times a year then you are having a good year. Part of our responsibility to ourselves and to the world is to not let them go by if we can,” says Mackenzie.

The campaign landed as racial tensions in the United States ran high, and though the work was timely, they could not have predicted the way things would develop. Shortly after launching, President Trump recommended that certain female senators of colour go back to where they came from. “I must say we couldn’t have done it at a better time because maybe a month or two after the campaign launch date the political climate was just so insane,” says Martin. “There was so much that reinforced the actual reasoning for us launching the campaign in the first place.”