15529: One School @ One Year = One Photo Op.

 

Adweek reported One School—hatched in partnership with Spotify and The One Club—celebrated its inaugural year by training 84 Black creatives and recording an 80% hiring rate for graduates. Considering that One School is a free 16-week portfolio school, the results seem extraordinary.

 

Then again, recruiting entry-level minorities is a slam dunk routinely executed by even the most mediocre players. Why can’t The One Club leverage its privileged influence to ignite an employment spike for mid- and senior-level Blacks?

 

And how do the figures from One School compare with the success rates of MAIP, High School for IAM, BrandLab or other education-based heat shields? The retention numbers will mark the true measure of progressive victory.

 

Check back in one year…

15523: The Economics Of Exclusivity.

 

Current Affairs published a perspective by Bertrand Cooper that expressed the following:

 

A closer look at the economics of Black pop culture reveals that most Black creators (outside music) come from middle-to-upper middle class backgrounds, while the Black poor are written about but rarely get the chance to speak for themselves.

 

The notion could arguably be applied to Blacks in Adland too, although there is probably no data to prove it. In short, this may indicate the pointlessness of recruiting exclusively from underserved communities in the hopes of improving diversity in the field.

13257: Twin Cities Troubled.

A MultiCultClassics visitor pointed to a StarTribune article reporting on the dearth of diversity in the Twin Cities advertising community. To help solve the problem, White advertising agencies are turning to—ta da!—The BrandLab. Why do White advertising agencies presume minority candidates do not exist—and such candidates must be bred in specialized training programs? It feels like faux philanthropy that’s actually philistinism.

Twin Cities ad industry struggling to increase diversity in ranks

The BrandLab is trying to pick up the pace by doubling percentage of minorities by 2017.

By Nicole Norfleet

After three months of unanswered and rejected job applications, Travon Sellers decided to remove his headshot from his résumé.

Sellers, who is black, thought his five internships, college degree, years of experience as a freelance designer and support from industry contacts would be enough to earn him an entry-level job at a Twin Cities advertising agency. To that point, though, the 24-year-old south Minneapolis native had been shut down.

People of color make up little more than 6 percent of Twin Cities advertising industry employees, less than the racial diversity of the general population and lower than the nearly 23 percent of the broader national workforce in advertising, public relations and related services who are nonwhite, according to a study published last year by advocacy group the BrandLab.

By 2017, the BrandLab wants to double the percentage of minorities in the local industry and is expanding its services to achieve that goal.

“Whether we like it or not, advertising is so ubiquitous it influences how people feel about themselves, how they see themselves,” said Mike Lescarbeau, CEO of ad house Carmichael Lynch and a BrandLab board member. “So if the people making that work all come from the same background likely that work is going to be narrow in its depiction of human beings and roles people can play and all that.”

Despite outreach efforts to attract minorities to the field such as Sellers, who went through two BrandLab internships, many industry insiders admit frustration that marketing offices still remain mostly white even during a time when clients are clamoring for more minority representation on their creative teams and in their ads.

“In the advertising arena, you can still count with your fingers the number of people in a given agency that are people of color,” said Lorenz Esguerra, the managing director of business development at Minneapolis ad agency Colle+McVoy.

Twin Cities firms need to increase their racial diversity to stay competitive against other agencies in markets on the coasts or in larger cities that naturally attract diverse talent, he said.

“Gone are the days where you basically target women and you bring a team of men; that doesn’t work anymore,” said Esguerra, who is Filipino. “Or you pitch a Hispanic audience, and you don’t have somebody that actually represents that market. It just isn’t authentic.”

Nowadays, some advertising clients ask for bios of the agency’s account team complete with photos to see how diverse the group coming up with their marketing ideas is — a practice that was unheard of five years ago, said Erinn Farrell, general manager of advertising firm Space150.

“The more backgrounds you bring into that and the more points of view you bring into that, you strengthen the idea by challenging it,” Farrell said. “It’s not one note. Suddenly it becomes layered. Those layered ideas are good for business.”

Two years ago, Space150, which doesn’t track its diversity numbers, removed its education and age requirements to try to get more diverse candidates. This spring the firm launched its internship program on Snapchat so potential interns could use its geofilter feature at campuses and expanded its usual targeting to include historically black schools like Howard University and Spelman College.

Barriers still present

While many marketing professionals acknowledge the diversity problem, they give varying reasons for the dearth of ethnic minorities in local advertising operations.

Dorion Taylor has grown used to being one of the only black people in the room. The unwanted title has followed him since he was a teenager when his parents sent him to a mostly white high school in the Milwaukee suburbs to his current position as director of new business at Carmichael Lynch, where people of color make up more than 10 percent of the agency.

While Taylor made the decision early on that he wanted to be in a creative field, he said many young people, especially those of color, aren’t aware that advertising is a viable career option.

“They still don’t know what they can do … I think it’s just getting that pool bigger,” he said.

To Elliott Payne, the lead strategist for Space150, much of the problem has to do with how people are hired, which he said can be inherently biased. Oftentimes, advertising job openings are spread by word-of-mouth and are filled quickly.

Payne, who is black, was told of an available job at Space150 after he met the then vice president of strategy in his graduate school class. Not everyone can be so lucky, he said.

“The natural forces at play in this industry is to hire who you know and if the people who work in the industry don’t have a diverse personal network, the network of the industry is not going to be diverse,” Payne said.

After he was inspired by black social justice movements that erupted in the wake of police shootings, Payne decided to build his own network of people of color within the local marketing world. Starting last fall, Payne, who also volunteers for the BrandLab, organizes monthly social meetups for the group to help people better network.

A marketing office can’t begin to address the diversity problem until it builds an inclusive work environment, said Carmichael Lynch’s Lescarbeau. Even when a person of color gets a foot in the door, he or she won’t stay if he or she feels marginalized within the office, he said. Inclusion extends beyond race and also includes gender, sexual orientation, age and other differences.

“I think agencies traditionally have been tough places to break into and it takes quite a bit of time for people to feel a part of things,” he said.

Offering solutions

The BrandLab has been trying to guide students of various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds into marketing careers since 2007, when the late John Olson, who was head of the Olson ad agency, founded the group. Christine Fruechte, BrandLab board chair and chief executive of Colle+McVoy, became involved soon after the organization was established.

“This is not a new issue,” Fruechte said. “It has been an issue that has been around as long as I’ve been in the industry, but it’s one that leaders have to take responsibility for and set the tone from the top down.”

At Colle+McVoy, which is currently helping to pilot new BrandLab workshops, about 12 percent of the staff are people of color.

The BrandLab offers several programs including a classroom initiative in which staff meet with high school students in their schools and teach a marketing curriculum. This past school year was a record of about 720 students being served in 14 metro schools.

Another large part of the BrandLab is its summer paid internships at marketing offices across the Twin Cities. Numerous agencies as well as companies with in-house marketing offices partner to host interns or donate to the organization including 3M and Best Buy. The BrandLab also provides around $30,000 in college scholarships each year.

Sellers, who went through the classroom program, a scholarship and internships through the BrandLab, said when he first went on tours of agencies he determined “I need to do this!”

“I didn’t have any models of people who did a 9 to 5 everyday,” he said.

As the BrandLab looks to the future, it plans to expand its offerings to make sure young people thrive as they enter the industry, said Ellen Walthour, BrandLab executive director.

The BrandLab is piloting “Fearless” workshops that it hopes will help companies’ staffs deepen their comfort in talking about race and biases. BrandLab is launching a mentorship program where marketing professionals team up with BrandLab alumni. The organization is also creating a mobile app alumni network so that graduates can stay in touch with one another. In addition, the BrandLab will start to offer skills-based training for alumni such as how to build a portfolio to help them be more competitive as they apply for jobs and internships, Walthour said.

“Full success is … meeting kids in high school, exposing them to a career they never heard of, building a pathway, breaking down barriers and making sure they land,” Walthour said.

Next steps

Besides taking part in BrandLab activities, Walthour gave several other ways companies can diversify their workplaces. For one, agencies should publicly post all their job openings to allow for a larger and more diverse pool of applicants, she said. They should also make sure all of their internships are paid so that it’s not only people who can afford to be unpaid who are applying for internships. Agencies should also collect and release their demographic data to keep better track of how well they are doing, she said. The BrandLab will conduct another survey in the fall of marketing companies’ diversity rates.

Despite the challenges, BrandLab supporters and industry insiders say they are confident that numbers will improve.

Mandana Mellano, chief media officer at ad firm Fallon, who is Iranian American, said she encouraged other people to not give up on finding their way in the industry.

“I think it’s so important for people to know that there are options and sticking with your plan. … If everybody comes in and gives up, where do we go?” she said.

Late last month, Sellers finally was given the break he needed when he landed a job as the marketing information manager at the National Sports Center in Blaine, Minn.

“I have no doubt that I will be a creative force in this industry. … I know I’m going to kill it. I’m going to climb the ladder.”

13240: White Supremacy In Adland.

Advertising Age published a perspective titled, “Five Ways Agencies Can Dismantle Systems Keeping Diversity Out”—and the author declared White supremacy is a root cause of the global dilemma. Actually, White supremacy is not as big a problem as White complacency in our industry. That’s why the “Five Ways” don’t present a true solution. Why would Madison Avenue’s ruling majority consider taking five action steps when they haven’t even bothered to take a single step toward progress? Hell, the typical advertising agency leader makes the average Grand Wizard look like a Boy Scout.

Five Ways Agencies Can Dismantle Systems Keeping Diversity Out

Ad Agencies Would Be Remiss If They Did Not Address the Uncomfortable Topic of White Supremacy in the Industry

By Bethany Iverson

I’m grateful to those taking up the charge to build an industry reflective of the world we live in, though we would be remiss to talk about the progress we’re working toward without addressing the most pressing and uncomfortable issue keeping diversity out of agencies. I’m talking about white supremacy—a core component of inequality most ad agency folks are reluctant to acknowledge.

Wait! Don’t stop reading, I know it seems dramatic to see the words “white supremacy” and “ad agency” in the same sentence, but hear me out. My hope in writing about such a charged topic is not to shame our industry, but rather to start a conversation about the root problem preventing us from being inclusive. Once we move past the initial shock, it becomes clear that white supremacy is nearly invisible in our everyday lives—all the more reason to call it out.

White supremacy is an ugly term with an uglier past, conjuring images of Nazis and the KKK, undoubtedly two of the reasons it’s uncomfortable talking about it. It’s a shameful part of our history we’d rather bury because acknowledging it means we’re complicit and that’s all it takes to shut most of us down. That said, it’s critically important to acknowledge a much wider definition of white supremacy apart from the overtly racist symbols of Civil Rights-era America and hate groups. It’s our misguided aversion to the subject of white supremacy that keeps wide-reaching, sustainable diversity beyond our grasp.

To further complicate things, the phrase “white privilege” is sometimes confused with “white supremacy.” While we’ve begun to open up about privilege in recent years, our role in the system of white supremacy has gone largely unaddressed. Put simply, white privilege represents all the perks we have as white people. White supremacy is why white privilege exists; it’s the system our industry was built on because it’s the system our country was built on. Evidence of white supremacy can be found in imbalanced political power and representation, incarceration rates and sentencing disparities, wage gaps and skewed unemployment rates, discriminatory housing practices, and inequitable access to education. Acknowledging white privilege without addressing white supremacy is like treating a symptom while ignoring the disease.

Our industry was born to push against complacency and yet when it comes to issues of race we find ourselves quietly burrowing into it. We navigate our way through oftentimes cloudy conversations about diversity without understanding that it is we who continue to hold it back. But we can do something about it.

Here are five immediate actions we must take to meaningfully address the structural inequities in our industry. I offer these in addition to best practices such as recruiting from historically black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions; tapping professional organizations dedicated to advancing young people of color; continually investing in employees of color via mentorship; and unconscious bias training for managers:

1. Remove four-year college degree requirements, create an apprenticeship program for new talent (or partner with an organization like BrandLab), and recruit from places like community and technical colleges.

2. Create culturally competent agency leaders. There are organizations in every major market dedicated to helping people learn about racial equity (shout out to Interaction Institute for Social Change and the YWCA).

3. Get other white people thinking critically about race by facilitating discussions with co-workers in a judgment-free zone where they don’t have to be afraid of saying the wrong thing.

4. Make it easy for agency employees to develop a deeper understanding of race and racism by organizing a listserv, blog or book club dedicated to articles, podcasts and books by people of color.

5. Don’t monopolize the conversation. You should be listening more than talking in conversations with people of color who are working to address our industry’s structural inequities.

It’s time to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Our privilege will always prevent us from perfectly navigating discussions about race and inequity. We’ll make inaccurate statements and ask awkward questions in front of friends and colleagues of color. I’ve personally fumbled my way through countless conversations about race, I’ve inadvertently offended people I respect, and I’ve resigned myself to continue trying. What matters is that we don’t let shame or pride get in the way of progress. And that we don’t try to fool ourselves into thinking we’re making measurable strides toward an inclusive future unless we’re also willing to talk about the ways the industry we built is set up at the expense of diversity.

Bethany Iverson is director of strategy at Space150, a full-service digital ad agency.

12143: Valley Of Digital Death.

USA TODAY reported on the dearth of digital diversity—that is, the abysmal lack of minorities in technology companies. Sadly, the excuses from the tech industry mirror the bullshit routinely shat out by the ever-exclusive advertising industry. Here are a few of the technological turds:

There’s a severe shortage of qualified Blacks and Latinos in the pool of job applicants. Of course, there’s no recognition that the pool is exclusionary—and little effort is being made to wade outside of the limited pool. There are plenty of available and qualified candidates. You just have to look beyond the routine and stop relying on cronyism, nepotism, racism and other assorted isms.

Blacks and Latinos need more educational opportunities. This leads to the belief that there must be greater connections with inner-city residents and historically Black colleges and universities. Look for tax-exempted internships, scholarships and outreach programs to explode in the years ahead.

Tech companies don’t want to sacrifice quality by hiring Black and Latinos. This is simply arrogance and ignorance at work.

If Silicon Valley continues to follow the lead of Madison Avenue, expect to see more Chief Diversity Officers, Diversity Development Advisory Committees, BrandLab knock-offs, ADCOLOR® donations, examples of delegating diversity and tech executives saying, “We’ve got a long way to go and we’ve got to do better—we’re fucked up!” But don’t expect to see any progress.

Tech jobs: Minorities have degrees, but don’t get hired

By Elizabeth Weise and Jessica Guynn, USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO – Top universities turn out black and Hispanic computer science and computer engineering graduates at twice the rate that leading technology companies hire them, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

Technology companies blame the pool of job applicants for the severe shortage of blacks and Hispanics in Silicon Valley.

But these findings show that claim “does not hold water,” said Darrick Hamilton, professor of economics and urban policy at The New School in New York.

“What do dominant groups say? ‘We tried, we searched but there was nobody qualified.’ If you look at the empirical evidence, that is just not the case,” he said.

As technology becomes a major engine of economic growth in the U.S. economy, tech companies are under growing pressure to diversify their workforces, which are predominantly white, Asian and male. Leaving African-Americans and Hispanics out of that growth increases the divide between haves and have-nots. And the technology industry risks losing touch with the diverse nation — and world — that forms its customer base.

On average, just 2% of technology workers at seven Silicon Valley companies that have released staffing numbers are black. Three percent are Hispanic.

But last year, 4.5% of all new recipients of bachelor’s degrees in computer science or computer engineering from prestigious research universities were African-American and 6.5% were Hispanic, according to data from the Computing Research Association.

The USA TODAY analysis was based on the association’s annual Taulbee Survey, which includes 179 U.S. and Canadian universities that offer Ph.D.s in computer science and computer engineering.

“They’re reporting 2% and 3% and we’re looking at graduation numbers (for African-Americans and Hispanics) that are maybe twice that,” said Stuart Zweben, professor of computer science and engineering at The Ohio State University in Columbus.

“Why are they not getting more of a share of at least the doctoral-granting institutions?” said Zweben, who co-authored the 2013 Taulbee Survey report.

An even larger gulf emerges between Silicon Valley and graduates of all U.S. colleges and universities. A survey by the National Center for Education Statistics showed that blacks and Hispanics each made up about 9% of all 2012 computer science graduates.

Nationally, blacks make up 12% of the U.S. workforce, and Hispanics 16%.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple and Yahoo declined to comment on the disparity between graduation rates and their hiring rates.

LinkedIn issued a statement that it was working with organizations to “address the need for greater diversity to help LinkedIn and the tech industry as a whole.”

Google said on its diversity blog in May that it has “been working with historically black colleges and universities to elevate coursework and attendance in computer science.”

In his blog post on diversity, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook cited improving education as “one of the best ways in which Apple can have a meaningful impact on society. We recently pledged $100 million to President Obama’s ConnectED initiative to bring cutting-edge technologies to economically disadvantaged schools.”

All of the companies have insisted they are hiring all of the qualified black and Hispanic tech workers they can find.

In an interview earlier this year, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the key to getting more women and minorities into the technology field had to start with improvements to education.

“We are not going to fix the numbers for under-representation in technology or any industry until we fix our education system,” she said.

Others say tech giants simply don’t see the programmers right in front of them.

Janice Cuny directs the Computer Education program at the National Science Foundation. She says black and Hispanic computer science graduates are invisible to these companies.

“People used to say that there were no women in major orchestras because women didn’t like classical music. Then in the 1970s they changed the way people auditioned so it was blind, the listeners couldn’t see the players auditioning. Now the numbers are much more representative,” she said.

The same thing happens in the tech world, said Cuny. “There are these subtle biases that make you think that some person is not what you’re looking for, even when they are.”

One of the key problems: There are elite computer science departments that graduate larger numbers of African-American and Hispanic students, but they are not the ones where leading companies recruit employees. Stanford, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, UCLA and MIT are among the most popular for recruiting by tech companies, according to research by Wired magazine.

“That is the major disconnect,” said Juan Gilbert, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

“The premise that if you want diversity, you have to sacrifice quality, is false,” he said. His department currently has 25 African-American Ph.D. candidates. Rice University in Houston has a large number of Hispanic students.

“These are very strong programs, top ranked places that have excellent reputations,” he said. “Intel has been hiring from my lab and they say our students hit it out of the ballpark.”

Justin Edmund says he was fortunate to attend Carnegie Mellon. Today he’s the seventh employee at Pinterest and one of the top designers at the San Francisco startup valued at $5 billion.

He’s also one of the few African Americans in his company.

“There’s a lot of things that can be done to fix the problem but a lot of them are things that Silicon Valley and technology companies don’t do,” Edmund said. “If you go to the same prestigious universities every single time and every single year to recruit people … then you are going to get the same people over and over again.”

Contributing: Paul Overberg

10592: The Problem With First World Problems.

At Business Insider, Jim Edwards questioned the racial stereotypes in the Facebook “Chairs” commercial from Wieden + Kennedy, yet gushed over the First World Problems commercial from DDB. The exploitation of impoverished people from foreign lands is a popular cliché for advertising agencies. MultiCultClassics presents another spin on it all.

10572: Dearth Of Diploma Earners?

Advertising Age published a perspective from Deutsch CEO-North America Linda Sawyer titled, “Want to Reach More Students? Teach the Teachers.” Sawyer opined luring more top college students to the industry requires connecting with professors, and the Deutsch CEO ultimately wound up promoting the Advertising Educational Foundation’s Visiting Professors Program. According to Sawyer, “The VPP is a highly competitive, two-week fellowship for professors of advertising, marketing, communications and liberal arts. A professor can be placed with an ad agency, marketing or communications company or other media company depending upon his area of interest.” Problem is, too few agencies are participating in the program. But why should they? Wouldn’t it be more effective to make kids aware of the field at an earlier age? Why not send students to Sweden or build an advertising-focused high school to groom future candidates? Someone ought to launch “Where Are All The College Students?” to heighten awareness. Damn, Madison Avenue is in trouble when it can’t even persuade White kids to pursue careers in the business.

Want to Reach More Students? Teach the Teachers

We Must Connect Directly With Professors to Improve Their Perception of Advertising

By Linda Sawyer

For years now, we all have acknowledged the need to change the way we pique interest among, and acquire fresh talent from, top college students.

I would like to offer another solution: Influence the influencers by educating the educators. We need to directly connect with the professors, provide them with exposure to our business and improve their perceptions of advertising.

I recognize that part of the problem is that the challenge is far too large for any one agency to tackle on its own. A pooling of resources and a unified front will be required to really make change happen. Fortunately, there is already an organization with the requisite infrastructure in place to make it all possible. That organization is the Advertising Educational Foundation.

The AEF is a nonprofit foundation whose mission is to work toward enriching the understanding of advertising as an essential component of our economic and social system.

This is necessary because many students only hear about advertising in the context of reinforcing stereotypes such as conspicuous consumption, creating false demand for goods and negative gender portrayal. In fact, many of the professors from the top liberal arts universities view advertising as a “trade” and a profession appropriate for a certain type of person who appreciates glitz over substance.

We need to dispel the antiquated notions about our industry by firsthand experience.

The AEF has one such arrangement—the Visiting Professor Program. The VPP is a highly competitive, two-week fellowship for professors of advertising, marketing, communications and liberal arts. A professor can be placed with an ad agency, marketing or communications company or other media company depending upon his area of interest.

The VPP gives professors a greater understanding of the industry. They go back to campus able to give students a more accurate, and often more positive, image of the business. Meanwhile, host companies have an opportunity to develop closer ties to academia—and offer instructors real-world insight into our fast-changing industry.

This past summer, Deutsch hosted Natalie Tindall, who teaches PR at Georgia State University. She described her experience as “a fantastic opportunity to build a rapport with industry leaders.” She was able to “understand what they want in new hires” and “catch up at a time when strategic communication is merging and changing at such a fast rate in the real world.”

But there is one problem. Last year, 75 professors from top schools submitted applications to the AEF. Only 18 agencies participated. That’s 57 missed opportunities.

We need the industry to step up, engage, and commit to hosting professors.

And we need to leverage the AEF’s Visiting Professor Program by significantly ramping up participation.

We all know the power of word of mouth. The professors’ influence on the student body makes a difference.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Linda Sawyer is CEO-North America at Deutsch

9464: Seeking Advertising Talent In China.

Advertising Age reported on the apparent dearth of qualified advertising talent in China. WPP is responding with the launch of a 3-year college program designed to create a fresh crop of skilled Chinese adpeople. Gee, what an original idea. Perhaps students will be inspired to write a thesis on the classic Calgon commercial. BTW, is WPP also scouring the low-income sections of Shanghai for prospective employees? The holding company should integrate a student exchange program with Howard University. Maybe The One Club will stage a “Where Are All The Chinese People?” event. Or TORCH could introduce TORCHINA—Together Our Resources Can Help In Nations Abroad. Expect the 4As to jump on the bandwagon with a new MAIP—Mandarin Advertising Intern Program. Meanwhile, look for Tiffany R. Warren to hand an ADCOLOR® Award to Jackie Chan. And somebody better bring in a Chinese interpreter to translate when Dan Wieden declares, “Now that’s fucked up!”

8332: Brilliant Concept, Questionable Execution.

Advertising Age supplemented its fluff piece on BrandLab with a fluff podcast episode via Ad Age Outlook. Bob Knorpp and reporter E.J. Schultz discussed the minority youth outreach program, noting a few more details behind the effort. For example, Schultz said BrandLab selects low-income high schools where at least 40 percent of the students are minorities, and 40 percent are participating with government-sponsored free lunch programs.

OK, MultiCultClassics continues to struggle with examining programs like BrandLab. On the one hand, the folks involved probably have the best of intentions. Yet the execution here seems a bit screwy. Try not to take offense to the following paragraphs.

First, why target low-income minorities? It feels a tad insulting, as if the presumption is that all minorities are poor. MultiCultClassics also wonders if it involves politics—that is, the program must meet certain guidelines to qualify for aid and tax benefits. Even Knorpp referred to BrandLab as a philanthropic endeavor (versus a professional recruitment tool).

The MultiCultClassics staff has been in the ad game for a while, and has literally and personally connected with many minorities in the field. Can’t think of a single minority advertising executive who was raised in a low-income setting—especially when considering the generations after Baby Boomers. Granted, MultiCultClassics doesn’t have research data to support the matter. But it appears that most minority advertising executives have economic backgrounds similar to their White peers. And please note the qualifier is economic, not social, cultural, geographic, etc.

Madison Avenue isn’t scouring poor White neighborhoods in search of the next Alex Bogusky. So why only visit underserved communities for future minority adpeople?

Hey, since Ted Williams is suddenly landing commercial gigs, shall we now direct our minority recruitment attention on homeless shelters?

BrandLab and minority youth outreach program advocates might argue that it’s imperative to make young minorities realize there are opportunities in our industry. Agreed. But everyone seems oblivious (or perhaps culturally clueless) to an easier solution: hire more minorities today, not decades down the road. When minority kids start to see advertising executives in their communities—when Mr. Brimm next door is a creative director and Ms. Miller across the street is a research director and Mr. Steffens down the block is an account director—then they will clearly recognize and believe there is a place for them in our ranks.

8312: Supplement BrandLab With WhiteLab.

Advertising Age presented a fluff piece on BrandLab, another minority youth outreach program. As always, it’s hard to rip these efforts. At the same time, why are they always targeting low-income schools? The story closes in stereotypical fashion:

Ad executives say they want to hire more minorities, they just can’t find them. “There are not that many candidates with diverse backgrounds getting into advertising,” said Christine Fruechte, president and CEO of Colle & McVoy and a BrandLab board member. “And how do you change that? You reach them at a younger age.”

Um, you could also try ending the exclusivity present in too many advertising agencies. And how do you change that? You reach Madison Avenue executives at an older age and enroll them into diversity training programs. After all, most White adpeople are far more clueless about non-White cultures than poor kids are about the alleged opportunities in our industry. You can’t recruit and retain minority talent with minority-unfriendly workplaces. Cultural enlightenment must happen in the high-income ad firms before heading to the low-income schools.

Minneapolis’ BrandLab Aims to Diversify Ad World’s Future

Local Industry Group Hits Up High Schools to Pique Youth Interest in Marketing

By E.J. Schultz

MINNEAPOLIS -- Jamir Hopson always thought he wanted to be a cop. “I like to work with people,” said Mr. Hopson, a high-school sophomore from Minneapolis. “I wanted to stay connected” with people in the neighborhood.

But that all changed recently when he enrolled in a diversity program called BrandLab that connects Minneapolis marketers and agencies with low-income high schools. Students take advertising classes and apply for internships at some of the city’s hottest shops.

After a few classes, Mr. Hopson was hooked, and he realized advertising was a better fit for his personality. “The BrandLab actually made me want to change my occupation,” said the affable Mr. Hopson. “Working at an ad agency would be a lot more fun for me because I like to design and network.”

Although his neighborhood might get one less cop, the ad industry will gain what it sorely needs—an African-American job candidate who will help bring more racial and socioeconomic balance to the overwhelmingly white field. And that’s what BrandLab is all about: introducing minority and low-income students to a career that many don’t know much, if anything, about, in hopes of influencing them to make it a career.

“These kids don’t know about this field, that you can actually get paid to do what we do,” said John Olson, founder and chairman of Olson, a local indie agency he says has donated roughly $1 million in time and money to the effort. “And simply introducing them to the concept of getting paid to be in marketing, in this glamorous world, is a very simple concept.”

Mr. Olson came up with the idea a few years ago, and in the 2007-08 school year dispatched agency employees to Minneapolis’s South High School, where they taught marketing to a group of Native American students. He slowly got other executives involved, and BrandLab is now growing like a hot start-up. The program—which has a budget of $300,000 -- expects to reach nearly 300 students this year at 10 Twin Cities schools, with plans to reach even more students next year.

Corporate funders include area stalwarts Target, General Mills, 3M, Best Buy, Land O’ Lakes, Schwan Food Co., Imation and Medtronic, while agencies such as Olson, Fallon, Carmichael Lynch, Larsen and Colle & McVoy provide guest lecturers and host field trips. Some shops host interns. And work is under way to take the program national, with the goal of reaching 50 cities in five years. Interest is coming from New York, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles.

In Minneapolis, BrandLab targets schools with at least 40% of students on government-sponsored free and reduced lunch programs that also have a minority population of at least 40%. Four part-time administrators oversee three part-time instructors who teach classes on branding, campaign strategy and print, radio and TV production, which are open to all students at the school. Volunteers from agencies routinely visit classrooms to conduct seminars.

On a recent day at the FAIR school—a K-12 fine arts magnet school—two Olson creatives guided students through a mock scenario of a granola brand that wants to shift strategy and appeal to younger consumers.

“Get into their mind-set,” Tom Lord, an associate creative director, told the class. “That’s what makes great ads.”

Minutes later, students used an Olson worksheet to scribble out personality profiles for their target customer base—young consumers who are ready to try something a little healthier. Mr. Hopson, who was sitting in the back row, caught on quickly, throwing out the hypothetical “Amanda Appleton,” a journalist and part-time yoga instructor who hates smoking and watches “Glee.”

Next up was Lou Florez, an Olson creative director, who told the students that if they are competing with Doritos “you gotta make granola cool.”

“What if Kanye West was pushing granola?” he asked.

“I’d eat it,” blurted Mr. Hopson.

The class erupted in laughter.

By the end of the semester, the class will have created a full-fledged campaign for the brand. It’s too early to gauge the success rate of the program because the alumni are still in college, officials say. But BrandLab plans to watch its former students closely, recently setting up a database to track how many end up in advertising or marketing.

For Minneapolis marketers and agencies, the program is more than a feel-good effort—they hope to fill a business need by creating a local pool of diverse talent.

Nationally, the industry is woefully short of minority-hiring benchmarks. African-Americans, 13% of the population nationally, should make up at least 9.6% of advertising managers and professionals, but composed just 5.3% in 2008, meaning 7,200 African-Americans were “missing” from agency ranks, according to a study last year by the Madison Avenue Project, a partnership of the NAACP and civil-rights law firm Mehri & Skalet. The study found that 16% of large ad firms employed no African-American managers or professionals, a rate that’s 60% higher than the general labor market. Cyrus Mehri, a partner at the firm, has suggested the industry has engaged in “purposeful discrimination.”

Ad executives say they want to hire more minorities, they just can’t find them. “There are not that many candidates with diverse backgrounds getting into advertising,” said Christine Fruechte, president and CEO of Colle & McVoy and a BrandLab board member. “And how do you change that? You reach them at a younger age.”