7541: Steed To Run Madison Avenue Initiative.

From Target Market News…

Munson Steed, ‘Rolling Out’ publisher, named director of Madison Avenue Initiative

Rev. Al Sharpton, president and founder of the National Action Network, has appointed Munson Steed as Director of the Madison Avenue Initiative (MAI), a program under NAN that addresses fairness in advertising. The formal announcement will be made at NAN’s upcoming national convention in April.

Since its inception, the MAI has addressed the needs of minority-owned companies that do not receive their fair share of corporate and governmental advertising expenditures and the Initiative has already helped redirect millions of dollars to Black and Latino media. MAI has successfully pushed for corporations to make advertising purchases that approach the level of minority consumer patronage of their products in specific markets.

“Munson Steed is the right person to accelerate this vision in 2010,” said Rev. Sharpton, “and his background and business acumen within the media and advertising industry exemplifies a vision of equal access and inclusion for minority-owned media outlets.”

Steed is the CEO of Steed Media Group, Inc., a multimedia company that includes newspapers, magazines, television programming, internet properties, custom publications, signature events and more. Over the course of more than ten years, Steed has moved the company’s flagship publication, Rolling Out, into national prominence as the largest chain of African American-owned weekly papers in the nation.

A graduate of Morehouse College, Steed holds a bachelor’s degree in political science.

MAI’s philosophy has been to encourage corporations to step up their efforts to build working relationships with businesses of color. “If we’re talking to a company that does 40% of its sales with blacks and Latinos, we expect a lot more from them than a company that might do marginal sales,” said Rev. Sharpton.