Essay 4574

Came across the USA TODAY article below. It’s over a year old, but still worth re-reading…

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N.Y. ad agencies vow to address lack of diversity

By Theresa Howard, USA TODAY

NEW YORK — Jimmy Smith is at the top of his game.

His work as executive creative director at ad agency BBDO includes the launch ad for Motorola’s Rokr phone and iTunes player that shows musicians including Madonna and Bootsy Collins cramming into a phone booth. Among his ads earlier at Wieden & Kennedy was the iconic Nike Freestyle ad in which NBA players bounce a basketball to a hip-hop beat.

But after more than 20 years in the business, Smith, 44, remains one of a handful of African-Americans in top advertising jobs.

Complaints about this lack of senior minorities led New York City’s Commission on Human Rights to begin a probe of the industry 18 months ago. The city is seen as the capital of advertising, with more than 46,000 employed in the industry.

The commission found that of 8,000 workers at the 16 agencies targeted, 22% make more than $100,000 a year — but only 2.5% of those high-earners are black.

The commission this summer subpoenaed the agencies to explain at hearings that were set for Monday, the start of the Advertising Week annual industry gathering here.

The potentially embarrassing hearings were called off only after the agencies signed agreements in recent weeks to boost minority hiring over three years. One company, Omnicom, also committed $2.5 million over five years to a plan of its own that includes an ad curriculum at a New York City college.

Trade group to back efforts

The agreements are “a decision the agencies made, and it’s the right way to go,” says Wally Snyder, CEO of the American Advertising Federation (AAF) trade group. “We’re about to turn our attention to helping agencies with retention and mentoring. … I think we can really accomplish something.”

The face-off, however, remains part of the backdrop for the AAF’s annual diversity awards today at Ad Week. BBDO, owned by Omnicom, will be named Agency Corporate Leader in Diversity Achievement.

Smith says he supports the commission’s move to force faster results: “Absolutely, you’ve got to have somebody step in.”

At the offices here of BBDO, Smith recalls his first job hunt in 1984. The Muskegon, Mich., native got a phone call from Warren, Mich., agency Campbell-Ewald. He says the agency “loved” his portfolio and wanted him to interview the next day for a creative position.

He got up at 4 a.m. to drive across the state to meet his would-be boss. He never got past the human resources office — he believes because they weren’t expecting him to be black. “That’s when I realized this was going to be a little more difficult than I thought.”

“We were dismayed to hear Mr. Smith’s story,” says Mark Benner, a spokesman for Campbell-Ewald, now owned by the giant Interpublic Group (IPG). “It does not represent who we are as a company.”

Diversity “is a significant priority for Campbell-Ewald,” he says.

In 1985, Smith landed a job at Burrell, a top agency specializing in marketing to blacks.

Looking for his break

It was more difficult again in the 1990s. Smith was working at multicultural ad specialist Muse Cordero & Chen in Los Angeles (now Muse Communications). Nike was concerned about its image among African-Americans as basketball shoes became more important.

Smith, who has a passion for basketball, had high hopes that good work for Nike at Muse would get him noticed by Nike’s much larger general market agency, Portland, Ore.-based Wieden & Kennedy. But he says that in 1994, principal Dan Wieden pulled back on hiring him. Smith wrote Wieden a five-page letter questioning whether the reason was that he’d have been the agency’s first black copy writer.

“I hesitated about hiring him, but not because he was black,” Wieden says. “I wasn’t convinced that his (portfolio) was up to snuff. I was trying to be nice, and we had a bunch of conversations. But he took me to task with a letter that was so well-written. We hired him on the basis of an angry letter rather than on the basis of his book.”

More progress needed

Since then, however, Wieden says the agency has boosted minority hiring, but not enough. “I will not stand here and try to make excuses for the number of African-Americans we’ve hired. It’s pathetic. There’s a lot more we can do.”

Other ad agencies trying improve minority hiring and promotions include IPG. Three years ago, it named Heide Gardner as diversity director to lead minority recruiting and retention for its agencies, including giants McCann-Erickson and DraftFCB.

Now, the seven-page agreements signed by agencies in New York should boost such efforts. They include annual progress reports to the city and fines of up to $250,000 for failing to meet goals.

Such incentives were not in place when Doug Alligood, an advertising major in college, was doing various jobs at a Detroit radio station. Then the Pepsi bottler pressured the station to have more blacks selling ads full-time. “It was 1962, in Detroit, and there was no black salesperson.”

Still, “I didn’t want to be a good black ad man. I wanted to be a good ad man,” Alligood says.

Today, Alligood, 72, is BBDO’s senior vice president of special markets. He researches media consumption in the African-American, Hispanic, Asian and senior markets.

Like Smith, he welcomes the commission’s actions. “Sometimes, you have to jumble things up to see how wrong you’ve been.”

But he says good consumer marketing transcends differences.

“Advertising has nothing to do with race, culture or ethnicity,” says Alligood. “You just have to give consumers enough information to get them to buy your product.”