No one has noticed yet, but IP is decorating itself with strange plums for its corporate identity.

You sit comfortably in the padded chair with a bucket of popcorn on your knees. You wonder, like a small child, about the man who kicks a screaming plastic bottle into the trash can with a kick. You are ready to escape from everyday life for 2 hours. And then he appears in front of you. The stoic head, the hopeful gaze directed into the distance. Anyone who grows up in Luxembourg associates a warm and nostalgic feeling with this logo. It is not about the anthropomorphic desert plant, the embodiment of our consumerism, but about a… moment.

Suddenly, it jumps into your eyes like a kitten in the Zone Verte. While this logo is mixed with a variety of other badly aged things in innocent childhood memories, the weary look back has overlooked for years that an advertising agency seems to be decorating itself with foreign plums. Beneath the logo, which is racist and out of date, proudly displays: IP. IP is the largest „advertising agency“ in the country. It is the company that not only runs advertisements in cinemas, but also on the RTL website, on RTL Radio, on RTL TV, and even on trams and in many other places. IP belongs to CLT-UFA, the group behind RTL Luxembourg.

However, the Native American motif at IP is not a relic from a time before Woke Culture, but its corporate identity. In 2017, there was even a campaign in which an „Indian“ walks through the country and brings gifts to embarrassed advertising partners, encouraging them to dance with him and smoke a peace pipe.

It feels a bit redundant to specify that the „actor“ was of course a white man with face paint, a naked torso and extra jewelry. When in 2018(!), after 20 years, the head of IP retired, the company announced this on its Facebook page. The chief was photographed wearing feather jewelry and face paint: „As a chief, Lou always looked after his tribe well – rarely did he have to unpack the peace pipe ;-) (…)“

However, this fun does not remain the privilege of the chief alone. In a cinema commercial the entire IP team dressed up as natives, including drum music in the background. Elsewhere, an actor in full costume was sent through the city to wish New Year’s greetings. People were filmed watching him from behind. At the end of the video, he fails to make a fire and has to use a lighter, and then ends by wishing Kirchberg a happy new year with a smoke bomb. IP also shows „Indians“ in its advertisements for its own services. And this with all the racist stereotypes, including elaborate language of „primitives“. To show how big the reach of the services offered is, an actor dressed as an „Indian“ crawls through a visual representation of the RTL.lu platform and admires all the different advertising spaces in awe. But hey, that was a different time, the time before Corona - maybe you would still try to lie to yourself, before clicking on „IP Digital“ on the IP website today.

Has anyone noticed this yet? Has anyone found this problematic? Have years of anti-racist education been passed over in Luxembourg? The fact that discriminatory stereotypes are reproduced in advertising agencies is one thing, but the fact that cinemas, bus stops and operators of all sorts of other supports have participated is even more shocking. RTL Luxembourg has a government contract and receives millions of euros every year. They are obliged to give no place to racism directly through several conventions, codes and texts. And yet IP and its logo are omnipresent at RTL.