Some of My Best Friends Are Black (40 page)

When critics of advertising say that the industry is racist, that it does not practice discrimination but that it is discriminatory in its nature, they’re absolutely right. A liquid will always take the shape of the container you pour it in. In much the same way, a relationship business will always take on the qualities of the social environment that surrounds it.

At the diversity events that agencies put on, people always get up and go on about how we need to make this industry “look like America.” But that’s just it. Madison Avenue does look like America. White people with all the best-paying jobs on one side, black people struggling with limited opportunities on the other, and a bunch of lawyers and consultants negotiating the demilitarized zone in between. That’s America, and that’s the problem. In a relationship business in a country that’s majority white,
and where white people have the majority of the money, whites and assimilated minorities will always move much further, much faster than unassimilated minorities. Is that unfair? Yes. Is it illegal? Maybe. Is it prosecutable? Not on any level that means anything.

The NAACP has done and continues to do many important things. Thus far, threatening to sue the advertising industry wouldn’t appear to be one of them. A social network is not an institution to be attacked. It’s a maze to be navigated, a puzzle to be solved, and the black political establishment hasn’t shown much aptitude for solving it. As I write this, lawyers for the Madison Avenue Project have collected what they say are concrete claims of discrimination against all four major holding companies, and they have filed those claims with the EEOC. Now everyone gets to sit and wait while the wheels of justice grind forward. Whatever kind of settlement is in the works, lawyers being lawyers, no one is really saying. But it’s now been three years since the Madison Avenue Project was launched. It’s been seven years since the New York City Commission on Human Rights opened hearings on the industry’s hiring practices, twelve years since President Clinton ordered up more blacks in advertising from the Oval Office, and thirteen years since the Congressional Black Caucus started banging heads with Ogilvy & Mather over those anti-drug commercials that don’t actually get kids off drugs. In that time, the first Internet revolution has come and gone, the second one is already well under way, and another generation of young black people has come of age and not gone into advertising.

While the NAACP has been busy railing on about the old boys’ network, other people have been solving it, rewiring it, putting it to better ends. In 2009, just as Vann Graves was headed back to the major-agency world, Geoff Edwards was walking out. He quit. He was tired of playing the game the way it was being played. His feet felt heavy going to work. “This industry is supposed to be about breaking rules,” Geoff says. “We talk to our clients all the time about taking chances and doing things differently, but we don’t take our own advice.”

Geoff and his creative partner, Mauro Alencar, left their jobs, holed up at a San Francisco coffee shop, mapped out a five-year plan, and in December of 2009 launched DOJO, a boutique agency specializing in what
they call “tradigital,” work that transcends the old media silos of print, TV, and Internet. It’s all seamlessly integrated—like the people who created it.

“On paper,” Edwards says, “technically we’re a minority-owned company, but it’s impossible to say this is a black agency, because the culture is made up of several different cultures. The management team is an African American and a Brazilian. We kind of laugh a bit. If this were a model for all the agencies, the industry would be there already. In our first year we had fifteen employees who represented seven different countries. And it’s not like it was picked that way. It’s just talented people who showed up with great work and fit our culture. We had a common dream, and we had people that we knew who shared that dream and who helped us bring it to life.” One important person they knew was Nizan Guanaes, the head of Grupo ABC, a Brazilian conglomerate and one of the twenty largest media companies in the world. Many years before, Guanaes had hired and mentored Geoff’s partner Mauro. Once plans for DOJO were finalized, they went to Guanaes, made their pitch, and Grupo ABC agreed to bankroll the new shop, writing them a substantial check to get started. “It was definitely through a relationship,” Geoff says. “I don’t really believe in the old boys’ network, so let’s just say it
was
an old boys’ network but not the way it’s typically been done. The old boys’ network is being reinvented.”

Since 2008, the current recession has cost the advertising industry over 200,000 jobs. During that same recession, DOJO has more than doubled in size, growing from fifteen to forty full-time employees. It recently expanded to a second floor in its San Francisco headquarters and opened satellite offices in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, and in New York City—right on Madison Avenue. In August of 2011, the agency was awarded the global launch campaign for GoogleTV.

A year after taking his position at McCann-Erickson, Vann Graves was promoted to oversee the agency’s global account for Coca-Cola. And in September of 2011, he was promoted to executive vice president and executive creative director, making him the highest ranking black creative in the history of the agency. And so the next kid coming up behind him won’t have to backtrack as much as he did, Vann established the
R. Vann Graves Endowed Scholarship for students at Howard University seeking a career in advertising.

“What I have learned,” Vann says, “is that advertising is a blood sport. It’s business savvy, and it’s politics. It hasn’t been easy, by no means. I’ve taken my lumps, and I’m sure I’ll take a lot more. But I’d rather take my lumps because I stayed in the game. I know I cannot walk around my agency saying it’s the white man’s fault I didn’t sell a piece of work, or that I didn’t get an ‘A’ because Tanner got an ‘A.’ It doesn’t work anymore.

“I wish I could say that I was some magically talented guy, but the truth is just that I had a handful of people who
wanted
me to succeed. If people like Phil Dusenberry and June Baloutine hadn’t reached out to me, I wouldn’t be in this industry. I was lucky that people saw me and said, ‘Hey, Vann’s someone who can make us look good beyond his race. But he’s black, so that helps us, too—and he doesn’t scare us.’

“Advertising is still about what goes on in the room, me selling you something. And for me to get inside that room, I have to speak your language. I have to make you feel comfortable with my being black. I have that extra piece of real estate to carry. The minute you’re uncomfortable with my race, my forward motion stops, which kills it for the next black person coming behind me, too. Once you’re not walking around on eggshells,
then
I have a chance. That’s the whole premise of the old boys’ club. ‘This guy’s got my back.’ But I have to work extra hard to show you that I got your back. That’s really what it comes down to. That’s the only way to do it.”

In 1986, Roy Eaton returned to classical concert performance at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. From there he toured Europe, South America, Asia, and Russia, and produced four albums, one an international bestseller. In January of 2010, he was inducted into the American Advertising Federation Hall of Fame. In his acceptance speech, Eaton recounted the time Y&R’s Charlie Feldman flew out to Utah to help him recover from a coma after his wife had died, suggesting that perhaps what the industry really needs is more friends like Charlie Feldman. Eaton then capped off the evening with a performance of Frédéric Chopin’s
Fantaisie-Impromptu
. When he finished, nobody asked him what was black about it.

“Ultimately,” Eaton says, “the solution has to come from the level—the only level—that is of any significance, and that is the consciousness with which we view this world. It goes beyond these surface things of a white agency or a black agency, integrated or not. These things are just flotsam and jetsam, coming from a root-level malaise in the value system of the nation. That is where the change has to occur.”

In the early spring of 1964, on a quiet Sunday morning during Lent, Wallace Belson went to church. Belson, a black man, lived in the town of Grand Coteau, which sits just west of the Atchafalaya Swamp in the heart of Acadiana—southern Louisiana’s Cajun Country. Like many of the quaint farming towns you’ll find tucked away in the wetlands of the Mississippi River Delta, Grand Coteau could have been pulled straight from the sketchbook of a Hollywood set designer: weathered old wooden buildings with high-pitched tin roofs nestled under sagging canopies of live oak. The name Grand Coteau translates from the original French as “big ridge.” The town sits atop what, around here, qualifies as high ground, fifty-six feet above sea level. But in spite of its big name, this town is actually very small. Its population, then as now, hovers just above a thousand full-time residents, most of whom profess the same Roman Catholic faith. In 1964, Grand Coteau wasn’t even big enough to support a single traffic light, yet it was home to two separate and distinct Catholic parishes.