Some of My Best Friends Are Black (36 page)

“It’s all about street cred,” Vann Graves says. “There’s enough talented people out there to sell soap or shoes. It’s how you package that. It’s letting your client know that, good or bad, you’ve got their back. ‘You need me to make you look good.’ It’s how you approach the game, and a lot of it is a game. Some agencies spend more on producing the entries to awards shows than it cost to create the work that they’re submitting. There are people who hire their own PR firms just to keep their names out front. You get opportunity based on reputation, but no one is giving you the opportunity to work on the big campaigns that give you that reputation if you don’t already have it. So either you’ve got street cred, a little nepotism helping you out, or both.”

When he started at BBDO, Vann had neither.

Vann showed up at the tail end of the Mad Men era. Three-martini lunches. People smoking in their offices. Having come in through a minority internship program, he was probably the only guy in the building who wasn’t there because of a school or family connection. He got along well enough, but he didn’t really fit in, and he wasn’t getting ahead.

Growing up in Richmond, Vann’s parents had moved across town to get him across the color line. There were barely enough black people at his high school to have a black cafeteria table, and Vann had made white friends with no problems. His parents raised him to sit anywhere in the cafeteria he wanted. “Almost to the day he died,” Vann says, “my father would say, ‘You have to run faster, work harder, and aim higher just to be considered average. You can’t make everything about race, even if it is.’” But then Vann went to Howard, which made him doubly conscious of his race. That would be both a blessing and a burden.

“I was empowered by going to an HBCU,” he says. “The benefit of going somewhere like Howard was understanding the history of race and discrimination. They equipped me for that. I became a much more aware individual. But coming out of that environment and going into corporate America, there was also a level of defensiveness on my part. I had my back up, always thinking that racism was what kept me from succeeding, the reason people weren’t giving me opportunities. The hardest thing as a minority is to step back and say, ‘Are they being racist, or is this the process?’”

Advertising is a shitty business for black people. It’s also just a shitty, frustrating business. The rock stars get to handle all the cool projects, and until you’re one of them you might spend five years in a cubicle thinking up new ways to peddle sugared cereal to fat kids and hating yourself for it. When your big break finally comes, you show your boss thirty great ideas and maybe one makes it to the final presentation. Then, the night before the big meeting, your one idea gets scrapped and left behind. Then you start all over again. Black people aren’t the only ones who quit.

In a department of two hundred and fifty white guys—and we are talking mostly guys—there was no shortage of slights and affronts for Vann to be offended by. Never any overt hostility directed at him, he says, but more of a deep-seated lack of awareness and cultural understanding. And given the era, with white agencies fumbling awkwardly to cash in on this new hip-hop thing, he found himself designated “the black guy.” He was thrust into the middle of a lot of meetings where MC Hammer–grade train wrecks were waiting to happen, a lot of black men dancing
for chicken and soda and four-door sedans. Vann didn’t know how to pick his battles, when to speak up and when to let something go. He picked a couple of the wrong battles early on. He might have flamed out completely if it hadn’t been for one person who cared enough to reach out and help. “The creative manager, June Baloutine, a great friend and mentor. She pulled me into her office one day and said, ‘I’m not going to let you ruin this for yourself. Once you’ve established yourself and earned some authority,
then
you can challenge the way things are done around here, but not before.’

“Then she told me to open my eyes and said, ‘Look around. They’re hard on everybody.’ And it was true. There was a white guy right next to me, she pointed out, an incredibly talented illustrator and artist; he’d been there longer than I had but hadn’t gotten as far as I had. Was there some racist stuff going on? Sure. Did my color hurt? Sometimes. Did it help? Sometimes. But I realized that they messed with everyone. Everybody had to be pledged, and there were white guys who got pledged just like me. The way agencies worked back then, if you were there you probably knew someone, because you weren’t just rolling up into BBDO. So while I came in as a MAIP intern, I also just came in with all the other guys. As far as my department knew, I wasn’t the black intern. I was just another pair of hands like all the rest of them. I was given the same chances to screw up that everyone else got.”

Vann also came to realize something else. As offensive as the lack of cultural awareness in the office was, part of that deficit was his own. They didn’t understand him, but he didn’t understand them, either. “I used to walk into the office dressed to the nines,” he says, “top to bottom, because that’s what Howard taught me. ‘This is what you do. This is professional.’ Then I realized, Huh, everyone here, including the senior management, is in casual clothes. I was making myself separate from them. I wasn’t a part of the culture.

“So I said to myself, ‘I need to step up and learn what these people do. I need to understand not how
I
think they should play the game, but how the game is played.’ I toned down my clothes and my attitude, and I did more listening than talking. I learned it’s not a hard adjustment to make
if you’re willing to make it. And that doesn’t mean you’re giving up your blackness. It doesn’t mean giving up anything. It’s not assimilating, it’s learning. It’s creating opportunities for yourself.”

According to the NAACP’s employment figures, the average black employee washes out of advertising in less than seven years. Vann stayed at BBDO for fifteen, building a portfolio of award-winning work on accounts like Gillette, AT&T, Motorola, Snickers, and Visa. He was promoted to vice president and creative director in 2004.

Across town at Chiat/Day, Geoff Edwards was learning to play the same game as Vann. “It’s impossible for you not to feel race in advertising in America,” Geoff says. “You name the meeting, I’m the only guy who looks like me at every meeting of the last nineteen years of my career. I struggled with it a bit. There were a few occasions where I was asked not to be in a client meeting, or a pitch; that’s where, for me, it was a little bit of an eye-opener.”

The difference between Vann and Geoff, regardless of their respective talents, was that Geoff walked in the door with the tool kit to work around the problems he encountered. “Maybe it’s just the way I grew up,” he says, “but my experience has always been a healthy one in terms of my parents raising me to not see color as much as possible. My dad went to Indiana University in the 1950s; it’s pretty easy to find him in the yearbook. He experienced a great deal of racism. But he also came from a country where there were all sorts of people—black, Indian, Asian—who all considered themselves Guyanese. He didn’t raise us to think that we were any less or any different than anyone else. I had a mom who told me I could be anything I wanted. When I first went to school, it was just never an issue. I had friends who were white and I had friends who were black. So once I was in advertising I was always able to network at a very high level with people who weren’t black.”

Consistently able to network one level up from himself, Geoff got his ideas in front of the people who mattered. His talents were quickly recognized. He jumped around to a few different agencies, landing at DDB in 1994. Soon, he was networking at the highest levels imaginable, on both sides of the color line. Looking for a director to helm a television spot for Budweiser, Edwards cold-called one of his idols, filmmaker Spike Lee.
Lee signed on to do the piece, and they worked on it together. “We went to dinner one night,” Geoff says, “and he told me, ‘I’m gonna let you in on a secret. I’ve always kind of wanted to be in advertising. Remember the work I did as Mars Blackmon with Nike? Ever since then, I’ve wanted to be in this business. I love it. I think more of us should be in it.’

“So I said, ‘Why don’t I talk to some higher-ups at DDB and try and make this happen?’ At the time, neither of us really knew what that meant. But I got Spike on a conference call, and before you know it, we’re crafting a deal to launch an agency together.”

In December of 1996, Spike/DDB launched as a joint partnership, with Lee taking a 51 percent controlling interest. Edwards and his writing partner went with Lee to head up his newly minted creative division. Only five years in the business, not even thirty years old, and Edwards was already founding an agency with the most famous black filmmaker in America while the Mad Men wrote checks to cover the overhead. After DDB, Geoff leapfrogged to Foote, Cone & Belding in Chicago, then back to Chiat/Day in Los Angeles, and finally to T.A.G. in San Francisco. In 2006, he was named Top Art Director in the Country by
Boards
magazine and a Creative All-Star by
AdWeek
, and his client Adidas was named Advertiser of the Year at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. “What’s amazing about this business,” Geoff says, “is that it’s a business of ideas, and ideas have no color. Once you’re in, it really is about the work. It really is about talent.”

In the past decade, the Congressional Black Caucus, the New York City Commission on Human Rights, and now the NAACP have made a lot of noise about tearing down the walls of the old boys’ network, but none of them has made a whole lot of progress. In part, perhaps, because they seem to have fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. Madison Avenue doesn’t have an old boys’ network. It has two of them.

“A few months ago, I went and signed up for LinkedIn,” Vann Graves says. With over one hundred million members, LinkedIn has become the primary online networking site for business professionals; in an industry that’s all about street cred, most people at least keep a presence on it to help get their names out there. “I was looking for folks to work for me
and work with me. So I signed up, joined LinkedIn Plus and the whole package, and I started looking through my business connections, and then through my connections’ connections, and I was like ‘Wow. This is weird. There are no black folks on LinkedIn.’

“But I kept adding people and then I started getting through to those fifth and sixth degrees of separation, and I was like, ‘Oh, wait. There’s a
lot
of black people on LinkedIn.’ It was just that their professional networks were all several degrees away from mine.”

Vann Graves and Geoff Edwards work in advertising. Most black people don’t work in advertising. They work in black advertising. Or “multicultural marketing,” as it’s now often called, lumped in with Hispanic advertising and Asian advertising. Advertising and multicultural marketing are not the same thing. They’re two separate industries built on separate business networks—and separate social networks, because in a relationship business there’s no difference between the two. Nowhere is this more apparent than on LinkedIn and on Facebook. LinkedIn is strictly for business, and Facebook is allegedly social, but to look at them side by side proves what everyone knows to be true. Your friends are often your business contacts, and your best business contacts generally become friends, because you like doing business together. That was true in 1955 when Roy Eaton and Charlie Feldman bonded over being ethnic outsiders in a world of WASPs. It was true in 1971, when Byron Lewis and his friend Al Bell collaborated on the hit marketing campaign for
Shaft
. And it’s true for Vann Graves and Geoff Edwards today.

“My AT&T client?” Geoff says. “We’ll close a deal over Facebook. It’s basically a business tool in that way. I just joined LinkedIn recently, and I actually think that Facebook is a better business tool
because
it’s social. People see you. They see what you’re up to. They see your status updates. They comment on them. What’s interesting about Facebook and LinkedIn is that, given the two, people want to see who you are. If there’s a choice of looking at someone’s résumé and seeing how they interact and how they live and what they’re about? You’d be surprised how much that factors in.”

Advertising is making friends. Not contacts, friends. Which, for the most part, means making white friends. Vann has 395 LinkedIn connections
and 587 Facebook friends. Having just joined LinkedIn, Geoff’s only up to 162 connections there, but his business partner calls him “the Mayor of Facebook”; with 783 friends, he’s on it all the time. Roughly speaking, Vann’s Facebook network is about 30 percent black, 60 percent white, and 10 percent other. Geoff’s network is closer to 20 percent black, 65 percent white, and 15 percent other. (And I say “roughly speaking” because not everyone’s ethnicity is readily apparent from his or her profile photo, and also because I’m using a pretty broad definition of “white.” Is the Turkish guy white? How about the half-Brazilian/half-Moroccan girl who totally looks Jewish? The boundary between “white” and “other” is pretty hard to nail down. For that matter, the boundary between “black” and “other” is getting pretty hazy, too.)