Some of My Best Friends Are Black (39 page)

Advertising is aspirational. It takes what people want to believe about themselves and then sells it back to them in the form of a car or a house or an iPod. At the end of the day, people don’t
really
aspire to whiteness, or to blackness. Back in Kansas City, J. C. Nichols wasn’t selling segregated housing. He was selling status. The Brother in the Blue Dashiki wasn’t really selling black pride, either. He was selling a salve for wounded male egos. The veneer of an ad may be racial, but the sell is always personal. If you’re a person who understands people, you can sell anybody anything.

Ethnic marketing will always have its niche; it’s critical when there’s a genuine cultural or linguistic barrier to overcome. But it’s a small niche. The gold standard for any brand is to achieve a global status that transcends those barriers, that needs no translation. Nike. Apple. BMW. They’re not black. They’re not white. They’re just cool. That’s the brand that makes money. And the only way to be that brand is by connecting with each individual personally while still having a message that resonates universally. Which is why good advertising is really hard to do, and why most of it sucks.

When the NAACP announced its Madison Avenue Project in 2009, it did so in a state of mild self-delusion. While insisting that major agencies integrate their staffs from top to bottom, the civil rights group is simultaneously insisting that black advertising agencies be allowed to maintain their politically protected status. “In doing this project,” says the NAACP’s general counsel, “we don’t want to dilute what the African-American advertising firms have created.” But if Madison Avenue were
racially integrated top to bottom, as the NAACP says it should be, the major agencies would be fully capable of giving clients the whole spectrum of ethnic sensibilities, including white people, under one roof and at considerable economies of scale. If that happens, the entire rationale for black agencies evaporates.

The emotional attachment to the black agencies is understandably strong: they’ve played an important role in black America’s cultural history. Like Vann Graves, at one point or another, nearly every black creative in the business has wanted to be the one to bring black agencies into the game, or at the very least save them from obsolescence. Geoff Edwards gave it a try when he joined the Mingo Group in the 1990s. “I just didn’t believe that black advertising had to be bad,” he says. “I fundamentally
did not
believe that you had to dance for chicken, that you had to do the Running Man to sell burgers. Between blacks and Hispanics, you’re talking about buying power of over two trillion dollars. Amazing potential. So I went there to change the world. I failed. I heard some things in my one and a half years there that I’ve completely deleted from my memory bank, because I couldn’t believe those kinds of things were being talked about in the mid-nineties—sitting in meetings where white clients would say, ‘I don’t think it’s black enough.’ It’s
un
believable.”

As nauseating as the ignorant white people were, the thing that ultimately put Edwards off was the attitude of the older black managers above him, the fact that they had acquiesced to their second-tier status in the industry. “That was what hurt the most,” Geoff says. “The system that’s created in a lot of those shops isn’t conducive to doing big ideas, because at the end of the day they’re responsible for coming up with an insight that’s ‘black.’ My partner and I would come up with great ideas. Then we would go to our creative director, and he would say, ‘Okay, this is good, but what’s black about it?’ I actually had someone sit me down and say to me, ‘You understand that if we do work like general-market agencies, then there’s no need for us.’ And that was the last thing I needed to hear before I started to get my résumé on the street.”

Soon after taking the job as chief creative officer at UniWorld, Vann Graves realized he didn’t have the stomach for it, either. And Vann survived a convoy bombing in Iraq. “When I came here,” he says, “Mr. Lewis
felt like, ‘Okay, it’s time I really invest in making my agency not only a good agency but a great agency, to elevate ourselves in the public eye, to show that we can do great creative.’ That’s really what my focus was.” But when the new chief creative took his team and tried to forge that new path, he found himself sitting in a lot of the same meetings that had made Geoff so queasy. “In every pitch,” Vann says, “the first question always seemed to be ‘What’s black about it?’ What do you mean, ‘What’s black about it?’ Every person who’s worked on this is African American. It comes from their personal insight. It’s fully thought out, it’s planned, it’s executed, and just because it isn’t some stereotype, you’re asking me what’s black about it?”

That’s the racial assumption this industry was built on: white people don’t understand black people, so they shouldn’t even try. And whenever they do want to try, they should go to the gatekeepers, and the gatekeepers will tell them how that shit rolls—this is the highly scientific process through which billions of media dollars are allocated in America every year.

Vann Graves and Byron Lewis thought they’d had a meeting of the minds. They didn’t. They had a generation gap. Graves wanted to build a general-market agency that had multicultural assets seamlessly woven in. Lewis, along with the other census watchers, was banking on the general market coming around to the multicultural mind-set, continuing to treat each ethnic segment as unique. But that’s not the way the market is going. As minorities become the majority, minority consumers are more important than ever. Which means the real opportunity for minorities is across the street in assimilating with the majority. The melting pot is running away with it.

The Internet has fundamentally questioned the balkanized, racialized business model of Madison Avenue. Whiteness alone doesn’t cut it anymore, but neither does blackness. It has to be both working together. Advertising simply has to be culturally competent across the board. To get there, integrating the white hierarchy of the big agencies is going to take years. In the meantime, black agencies are still asserting ownership of black consumers, but their seventies-era, race-based business model isn’t any better suited to the new media universe than the white guys’. Which
is precisely where the NAACP’s Madison Avenue Project runs into major problems. Do black people want to be in the game, or do they want to be on the other side of the street? It can’t be both. The reality is that it isn’t really a choice. “The only way that I see black agencies surviving,” Neal Arthur says, “is by legislation.”

That’s exactly where they’re turning. The more marginalized black agencies feel, the more they’re turning back to the same affirmative action playbook. In 2000, President Clinton’s executive order on diversity in government advertising set an ambitious target: that 23 percent of all government media dollars should go to minority-owned businesses. As determined by a congressional audit in 2006, however, minorities were still getting just 4.7 percent. So a group of black agencies formed a new trade association to lobby Congress to fight the “persistent bias” of white companies that had kept Clinton’s order from being followed. Yet the government’s audit found that efforts made by the federal media buyers were “consistent” with the rules outlined in Clinton’s directive. The law was followed. It just didn’t work. Because it never has.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1997 black-owned businesses made up 4 percent of all U.S. firms, yet accounted for only 0.7 percent of employment and 0.4 percent of revenue. Five years later, at the end of the dot-com boom, the number of black-owned businesses had increased to 5.2 percent of all U.S. firms—yet accounted for only 0.7 percent of employment and 0.4 percent of revenue. A quota is a quota. It’s a ceiling, and it’s fixed, no matter how many minorities are clamoring for a piece of it. Today, black agencies and Hispanic agencies are fighting with each other for a share of the diversity supplier business—and the black agencies are losing, because the language factor gives Hispanics the justification to take a bigger slice. The minority agencies are squabbling over loose change, and at the same time demanding that the government ramp up enforcement of the policy that keeps them squabbling over loose change. “At some point that legal credit becomes an issue,” Geoff Edwards says. “It becomes a barrier between doing great work and being able to say, ‘We’re supporting diversity’ or ‘We’re working with black vendors.’ It was a model that was established when I was a baby, and it hasn’t
changed. But if those agencies are going to survive, they
have
to evolve. Otherwise they’ll disappear.”

As of right now, it’s hard to tell how much the black agencies want to evolve, or if they even can, given their history. Earlier this year, KFC ran some horribly misbegotten ad in Australia in which a white guy makes friends with a bunch of dancing Aborigines at a cricket match by giving them a bucket of fried chicken. Black men dancing for chicken. Again. The standard uproar ensued. Jesse Jackson appeared on cue and demanded that KFC spend 10 percent of all its national media dollars targeting blacks through minority-owned advertising agencies, increase its minority-owned franchises to 33 percent, up its managerial-level hiring to 25 percent, and hire a diversity director to carry out all of the above. KFC agreed to all of it, and at the 2010 Rainbow PUSH convention, the company president trotted his ass out to the podium and did the White Man Apology Dance: “At KFC, we are very proud of our diversity track record and the progress we’ve made over the years, but we realize there’s a lot more we can do.”

“It’s regressing back to the 1970s,” Vann Graves says.

Byron Lewis was right. While the Madison Avenue boys were up on the forty-second floor writing margarine commercials to air on
The Brady Bunch
, Lewis saw the teeming, multiethnic throngs on the Lower East Side and knew that they would be a big part of America’s future. Madison Avenue told him to stop wasting his time, but what he and the other black agencies did in proving the value of minority consumers paved the way for Madison Avenue to take Nike and Michael Jordan and go to the moon. Now, the more successful Lewis’s original vision is, the less necessary his own business becomes. “UniWorld is Byron Lewis,” Graves says. “He’s an O.G., and I respect him immensely for what he’s done. He stood on that pedestal and said, ‘I’m going to do this.’ And it worked. And it was needed. But the world has changed.”

The world’s not changing. It’s reverting, going back to its natural state.

In 1890, when the Separate Car Act was put to a vote in Louisiana, before it went on to be sanctioned by the Supreme Court in
Plessy v. Ferguson
, some of the law’s loudest critics were the railroad companies. If
the coach car on the five o’clock train was only half full, and only three colored passengers had bought tickets, why should they haul a separate railcar for a handful of people? With the extra fuel and freight, they’d lose money. It didn’t make sense. Segregation never made sense. Which is why, as far as the market is concerned, separate will never be equal—if I have to install two water fountains where I only need one, I’m not going to spend a whole lot of money on the second.

The black-for-black’s-sake business model never really worked in the ad business, and the constant complaint is that racism is to blame for that. But what if that’s not the only reason? What if the market is just telling us it doesn’t want separate railcars anymore, because it never wanted them in the first place? And what if that’s a good thing? The Internet has given black media a whole new playing field, but it has also obliterated the idea that black-owned businesses can exist inside their own politically supported ecosystem. Wherever our new information economy is taking us, it’s too fluid and too fast moving for a system that says black stuff goes here and white stuff goes there. The Internet doesn’t want to haul separate railcars. In fact, it won’t haul them for very much longer, and you’ve got to make the jump from one to the other if you want to stay on the ride.

In October of 2009, after just eighteen months at UniWorld, Vann left to take a job as group creative director at McCann-Erickson.