Advertising Age is commemorating Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in rerun style like Black History Month—spotlighting a diverse range of talent via the Honoring Creative Excellence series. The second installment features Digitas North America CCO Atit Shah sharing the micro and macroaggressions that people of color face in Adland. Hey, there’s always a diversity of racist behavior in White advertising agencies.
Atit Shah Of Digitas On ‘The Other Side’ Of Being Asian In Corporate America
The chief creative officer on creating an eye-opening storytelling platform for Ascend Leadership
Ad Age is marking Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month 2023 with our Honoring Creative Excellence package. Today, our guest editor Soyoung Kang turns the spotlight to Atit Shah, chief creative officer North America at Digitas.
Here, Shah writes about the creation of an eye-opening storytelling platform for Ascend Leadership.
There was a particular late night, early in my advertising career, that has stuck with me. Exiled to a lonely lane of cubes, fueled by takeout and soundtracked by Napster, I was industriously working on a deck to hand off to a higher-titled someone who would present said deck … when I met a head-on-collision. A senior exec I had only encountered on elevators asked me, quite politely, if I could unlock the mailroom to send out a package.
I had no response—I just kind of froze. Seen but somehow totally unseen. This is my story from The Other Side.
“The Other Side” was an awareness platform my team and I created for Ascend Leadership, an organization devoted to the Pan-Asian workplace experience. It illuminated the other side of being Asian in corporate America. Not the side you think you know, where the AAPI community abounds in professional careers. Rather, The Other Side, the one where barriers, both real and perceived, keep Asians the least represented ethnic group in top executive roles.
To kick off the campaign, we uncovered the hidden and not-so-hidden biases that confront the Pan-Asian professional climb through a first-of-its-kind “headline hack” on LinkedIn. Working with an AAPI coalition of Fortune 500 executives, we changed their job statuses into declarations of Other Side struggle. Overnight, leaders swapped their high-wattage executive title for realities like “Least likely to be promoted to the C-suite,” “Labeled as the Technical One” and “Reduced to the Model Minority.” Because of these leaders’ significant followings and the algorithmic visibility of this kind of LinkedIn update, we sparked a perfect storm of heartfelt response and confession.
Our leader coalition followed the headline hack with a wave of Other Side stories in the feed, in podcasts and out-of-home in the real world. Anne Chow, former CEO of AT&T Business, recounted life on the front line—and the repeated rejection of being an Asian woman in pursuit of a sales career. Sanyogita Shamsunder, a top executive at Google, talked about the tightrope moment when she shed the need to ask for permission at work. Soyoung Kang, global chief marketing officer of eos Products, shared her conflict with reconciling the sense of duty toward her immigrant parents with her yearning for a creative, out-of-the-box career. And eerily echoing my own story, Eric Toda, global head of social marketing at Meta, recalled being mistaken for DoorDash at a boardroom meeting.
This act of storytelling, with an audience who collectively grew up on a diet of “work hard, keep your head down, keep it to yourself” proverbial wisdom, felt radical. So many leaders came to the table adamant that they had no Other Side story to share, only to find a deep, emotional well of them after a little time together. And their stories led to an outpouring of more stories.
It’s this kind of storytelling that we must champion going forward—the unlock of our next big leap.
The Other Side wasn’t the biggest project of my career. It was a humble, homegrown effort led by a thoughtful, passionate crew. But it was perhaps the most personal, representing the first time I stopped and considered my Asian experience as part of my professional identity.
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