Detroit Tycoon Sorry For Mostly White Depiction Of Mostly Black City

DETROIT, MI — Marketing missteps can quickly alter a company’s fortunes, and no one knows that better than Detroit business tycoon Dan Gilbert. After a brutal lashing on social media over the weekend, Gilbert apologized for a huge “See Detroit Like We Do” campaign that featured the Bedrock Development insignia on a window-filling photo of mostly white people. Gilbert said the was was “tone deaf” and “dumb,” while critics called it a slap to 82 percent-black Detroit that stung all the more as the city revisits five days of racial and civil unrest that ignited 50 years ago this week.

“We screwed up badly,” Gilbert wrote Sunday on Facebook after taking a weekend-long lashing on Facebook. Though the image was only one panel in a larger package that would have more closely mirrored the city’s racial diversity, Gilbert said he had killed the campaign and the partial installment had been removed.

“Although not intended to create the kind of feelings it did, the slogan/statement we used on the graphics was tone deaf, in poor taste and does not reflect a single value of philosophy that we stand for at Bedrock Development and our entire family of companies,” Gilbert wrote. (For more local news, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Detroit Patch, and click here to find your local Michigan Patch. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

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Viewed in isolation, bad timing made the partial installment particularly damning.

“On the 50th anniversary of the rebellion, your PR and marketing team decided it was a great idea to unveil an all-white ‘vision’ of Detroit,” Halima Cassells wrote in a post to Bedrock. “At worst it is an implicit incitement to foment racial tension in the city at a time where people are bearing open wounds to communally heal.”

Gilbert, 55, is Michigan’s richest individual billionaire with a net worth of $5.9 billion, according to a recent Forbes ranking of the richest people in every state. The self-made billionaire owns the home mortgage company Quicken Loans, the Cleveland Cavaliers NBA team, multiple casinos and about 100 business and real estate enterprises under his Rock Ventures umbrella. The city’s largest employer, he’s also one of Detroit’s greatest cheerleaders.

This is how the completed image would have looked:

“We’ll be better at this next time.”

You can read the full apology below.

Photo: Dan Gilbert, chairman and founder of Rock Ventures and Quicken Loans, Inc., attends the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, July 7, 2016 in Sun Valley, Idaho. Every July, some of the world's most wealthy and powerful businesspeople from the media, finance, technology and political spheres converge at the Sun Valley Resort for the exclusive weeklong conference. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images News/Getty Images)