Advertising Age reported Deloitte Digital launched a new offering—Ethos—to help businesses create equity, justice and sustainability heat shields. Leading the charge as Head of Strategy for Ethos is none other than Nathan Young. Hey, if the initiative experiences extraordinary success, Young could land an ADCOLOR® trophy.
Nathan Young, Former 600 & Rising President, Heads A New Brand Purpose Initiative At Deloitte Digital
Ethos builds on the promise—and pitfalls—of his former organization
By I-Hsien Sherwood
Nathan Young, co-founder and former president of advocacy non-profit 600 & Rising, has a new plan to help the world—at Deloitte Digital.
After the murder of George Floyd, 600 & Rising galvanized racial justice sentiment in the advertising industry, but the original initiative collapsed just a few months later, its plans no match for institutional inertia, management missteps and the often daunting logistics of running a non-profit.
“When you’re powered by a team of volunteers, for all your good intentions you are having to balance what you're trying to do in that space with your day job,” Young said. “You just can’t get as far as you want as fast as you want.”
Young has learned from that experience. At Deloitte Digital he is now head of strategy for Ethos, a new offering from the consultancy that will help businesses develop internal and external programs to address equity, justice and sustainability issues. While chief marketing officers want to do the right thing, he said, they don’t know how to.
“They understand how their audiences feel about their brand, but they don’t have a really good understanding of how they feel about social issues,” Young said. “It’s not just about the relationship between the brand and the customer. It’s about the relationship between the brand, the customer and society, culture writ large.”
Ethos soft-launched earlier this year and has been working with more than a dozen Fortune 100 companies. (Deloitte declined to name any of those companies, citing confidentiality agreements.) One undisclosed brand with a predominantly white employee base had surveys lauding its positive work culture and high job satisfaction. But when Ethos specifically asked Black, Indigenous, people of color, disabled and veteran workers about their experiences, they uncovered brewing discontent that had been washed out in the averages. The Ethos team then helped the brand develop new human resources programs to help elevate those underrepresented voices.
The resources afforded by an organization as large as Deloitte “allow us to move beyond manifesto, beyond powerful campaigns and actually make up something that fundamentally changes the way that companies work,” Young said, “more in the service of benefiting the planet, benefiting the people that reside in it and being in balance and harmony with society.”
If Young’s rhetoric seems less combative than last year, it is. A sabbatical after his resignation from Periscope in August 2020 helped him channel the urgency he felt about fixing things. “This is going to sound kind of obvious, but it’s relatively easy to point out what’s wrong,” he said. “It’s a lot harder to find a solution for what you’ve perceived to be wrong out there.”
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