Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  Being at Howard during the Cosby renaissance, Vann enjoyed his shared experience in the culture. He joined his classmates in reviving the spirit of the sixties, occupying the campus administration building to protest the appointment of Republican Lee Atwater to Howard’s board. A fellow classmate, Sean “Puffy/Puff Daddy/P. Diddy” Combs, was lighting up the campus with epic dance parties, landmark events in the emerging hip-hop scene that would soon come to dominate the country’s cultural landscape. An exciting time, all in all, even if he had to work three part-time jobs and take a few semesters off to save enough to pay his way through. Graduating in the Class of ’93 with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, Vann took his diploma to look for work on lily-white Madison Avenue, and there he quickly realized the one thing his historically black college had not given him.

  “It’s all who you know,” he says, “and I didn’t know anyone.”

  Given the way black high schools in the South were shattered under court-ordered integration, black America’s attachment to its own colleges is tenacious. Still today over 20 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to blacks are earned at HBCUs. According to the United Negro College Fund, black colleges produce 70 percent of all black dentists, 50 percent of black attorneys, 50 percent of black engineers, and, consistently, more than half of all black PhDs in the last twenty years. If you look closely, however, you’ll see that those are all credentialed professions. It’s no coincidence that Cliff and Clair Huxtable found success as a doctor and a lawyer, respectively. Pass your medical boards or the bar exam, and you get called up to the show. Unfortunately, like advertising, a sizable chunk of the American economy doesn’t offer professional credentialing of any kind. Qualifications are softer, more vague, and more susceptible to racial bias. I’ve yet to come across the figures boasting of black colleges’ success in social and cultural industries like media and publishing; I suspect those figures don’t exist.

  Another fact often touted by HBCUs is that they produce half of all black students who go on to earn a graduate degree. An impressive stat, until you flip it over. Oftentimes, when you come out of an HBCU, you have to go to grad school because you’ve put yourself in the wrong pipeline. After Howard, already swimming in student loans, Vann Graves moved to New York and enrolled in the master’s program at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. Pratt is an art and design school with a strong feeder program for the advertising industry; Vann had to backtrack his way into the business. From Pratt, he landed a summer internship at BBDO through the 4A’s Minority Advertising Intern Program. Vann got the chance to do some work on the Pepsi account. He thought that would be the thing to get him noticed, but his big break wound up being something entirely unexpected. “Phil Dusenberry was one of the original Mad Men,” Vann says. “He ran all of BBDO. He called me to his office one day, and he said, ‘I need you to help work on a special project, a Christmas card.’

  “A Christmas card? Then he clarified. It wasn’t his Christmas card. It was his dog’s Christmas card—a senior art director was working on his. But I said, ‘You know what? I’m gonna bust my ass on this.’ Fa la la la la, bow wow, meow, and the rest is history. I had to go back to finish my degree, but Phil called me twice and said, ‘When you’re done with school, I want you back at the agency.’” In 1993, Vann joined BBDO as a permanent, part-time assistant art director. He was one of three black creatives in the entire agency, out of about two hundred fifty.

  Two years before Vann arrived at Pratt to start his master’s, Geoff Edwards had already left with his bachelor’s, headed to take a job at Chiat/Day/Mojo. Geoff had come to New York for college by way of Detroit. Where Vann had been inspired by the Cosby kids, Geoff was a Cosby kid. He’d gone to one of the best private high schools in the country, University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy. His father, a doctor, had emigrated from Guyana in South America to go to medical school. His mother, Motown born and raised, was a chemistry teacher in the city school system.

  “Advertising is one of those callings that you don’t choose,” Edwards says. “It chooses you. Your unique perspective and creativity come from things you see and experience in life, and advertising is a career that no one is exposed to early on; I certainly wasn’t. I just knew that I wanted to be an artist. I grew up drawing. Anything creative I could get my hands on, I did. At Pratt, you had to declare a major sophomore year. My dad said, ‘What are you going to do?’ I told him I wanted to be a painter. He said, ‘Okay, what do you want to do for a living?’

  “This is my father, who grew up without shoes in a house of eight brothers and sisters in South America, came to the United States, and became a doctor. So to hear his son say ‘I want to go paint on canvases’ wasn’t something he thought was great. So that pushed me to things like graphic design, industrial design. Finally, someone mentioned advertising. It was a unique combination of all the things that I love—photography, motion picture, storytelling. The more I got into it, the more I liked it.

  “At the time, Chiat/Day was the best advertising agency in America. They were like the Yankees. When I graduated, I told my teacher that’s where I wanted to go. She said, ‘You should have a second choice. They don’t take a lot of people.’

  “I said, ‘That’s why I want to go there.’”

  And he went, first as an intern and then moving up to art director. “I was the only chocolate chip in the cookie,” he says. “I had no idea it was going to be that abrupt. Fortunately my name was not a barrier, spelled the way it is—Geoffrey Taylor Edwards. With that on my résumé, I don’t think anyone ever expected me to show up.”

  Vann Graves and Geoff Edwards were both Children of the Dream. Both came out of the same school and started out in the same job at around the same time. Both were at major agencies renowned for producing some of the best work in the industry. And both were almost totally alone in a vast ocean of white dudes, neither of them given a whole lot of guidance to help show the way. One of them had an easier time of it than the other.

  Much like Hollywood pats itself on the back every year with the Oscars and the Golden Globes, advertising agencies celebrate their own annual achievements with awards shows like the One Show, the Clios, the Cannes Lions, and through institutions like the American Advertising Federation Hall of Fame. Big-name creative directors submit their work to be judged, and other big-name creative directors do the judging. Then the following year they all switch places.

  The lawyers from the NAACP say they want the industry to institute a credentialing process and uniform standards for promotion, metrics for a racial accounting system. But there’s no rational standard for assessing the value of a commercial. You either like the creepy ETrade baby or you don’t. Some commercials are inspired ideas that in the end sell no products. The ads that sell the most products—discount coupons—require no thought or talent at all. There is no metric. Which is why the most sophisticated performance evaluation system the industry has ever developed is to have a bunch of dudes get together in a hotel ballroom, drink way too much, and then sit around telling each other that they’re awesome. You earn promotions in advertising by “getting your name out there.” You show up at events with the right look, shake hands, win awards, and generally create the impression that “you’re the guy.”

  “It’s all about street cred,” Vann Graves says. “There’s enough talented people out there to sell soap or shoes. It’s how you package that. It’s letting your client know that, good or bad, you’ve got their back. ‘You need me to make you look good.’ It’s how you approach the game, and a lot of it is a game. Some agencies spend more on producing the entries to awards shows than it cost to create the work that they’re submitting. There are people who hire their own PR firms just to keep their names out front. You get opportunity based on reputation, but no one is giving you the opportunity to work on the big campaigns that give you that reputation if you don’t already have it. So either you’ve got street cred, a little nepotism helping you out, or both.”


  When he started at BBDO, Vann had neither.

  Vann showed up at the tail end of the Mad Men era. Three-martini lunches. People smoking in their offices. Having come in through a minority internship program, he was probably the only guy in the building who wasn’t there because of a school or family connection. He got along well enough, but he didn’t really fit in, and he wasn’t getting ahead.

  Growing up in Richmond, Vann’s parents had moved across town to get him across the color line. There were barely enough black people at his high school to have a black cafeteria table, and Vann had made white friends with no problems. His parents raised him to sit anywhere in the cafeteria he wanted. “Almost to the day he died,” Vann says, “my father would say, ‘You have to run faster, work harder, and aim higher just to be considered average. You can’t make everything about race, even if it is.’” But then Vann went to Howard, which made him doubly conscious of his race. That would be both a blessing and a burden.

  “I was empowered by going to an HBCU,” he says. “The benefit of going somewhere like Howard was understanding the history of race and discrimination. They equipped me for that. I became a much more aware individual. But coming out of that environment and going into corporate America, there was also a level of defensiveness on my part. I had my back up, always thinking that racism was what kept me from succeeding, the reason people weren’t giving me opportunities. The hardest thing as a minority is to step back and say, ‘Are they being racist, or is this the process?’”

  Advertising is a shitty business for black people. It’s also just a shitty, frustrating business. The rock stars get to handle all the cool projects, and until you’re one of them you might spend five years in a cubicle thinking up new ways to peddle sugared cereal to fat kids and hating yourself for it. When your big break finally comes, you show your boss thirty great ideas and maybe one makes it to the final presentation. Then, the night before the big meeting, your one idea gets scrapped and left behind. Then you start all over again. Black people aren’t the only ones who quit.

  In a department of two hundred and fifty white guys—and we are talking mostly guys—there was no shortage of slights and affronts for Vann to be offended by. Never any overt hostility directed at him, he says, but more of a deep-seated lack of awareness and cultural understanding. And given the era, with white agencies fumbling awkwardly to cash in on this new hip-hop thing, he found himself designated “the black guy.” He was thrust into the middle of a lot of meetings where MC Hammer–grade train wrecks were waiting to happen, a lot of black men dancing for chicken and soda and four-door sedans. Vann didn’t know how to pick his battles, when to speak up and when to let something go. He picked a couple of the wrong battles early on. He might have flamed out completely if it hadn’t been for one person who cared enough to reach out and help. “The creative manager, June Baloutine, a great friend and mentor. She pulled me into her office one day and said, ‘I’m not going to let you ruin this for yourself. Once you’ve established yourself and earned some authority, then you can challenge the way things are done around here, but not before.’

  “Then she told me to open my eyes and said, ‘Look around. They’re hard on everybody.’ And it was true. There was a white guy right next to me, she pointed out, an incredibly talented illustrator and artist; he’d been there longer than I had but hadn’t gotten as far as I had. Was there some racist stuff going on? Sure. Did my color hurt? Sometimes. Did it help? Sometimes. But I realized that they messed with everyone. Everybody had to be pledged, and there were white guys who got pledged just like me. The way agencies worked back then, if you were there you probably knew someone, because you weren’t just rolling up into BBDO. So while I came in as a MAIP intern, I also just came in with all the other guys. As far as my department knew, I wasn’t the black intern. I was just another pair of hands like all the rest of them. I was given the same chances to screw up that everyone else got.”

  Vann also came to realize something else. As offensive as the lack of cultural awareness in the office was, part of that deficit was his own. They didn’t understand him, but he didn’t understand them, either. “I used to walk into the office dressed to the nines,” he says, “top to bottom, because that’s what Howard taught me. ‘This is what you do. This is professional.’ Then I realized, Huh, everyone here, including the senior management, is in casual clothes. I was making myself separate from them. I wasn’t a part of the culture.

  “So I said to myself, ‘I need to step up and learn what these people do. I need to understand not how I think they should play the game, but how the game is played.’ I toned down my clothes and my attitude, and I did more listening than talking. I learned it’s not a hard adjustment to make if you’re willing to make it. And that doesn’t mean you’re giving up your blackness. It doesn’t mean giving up anything. It’s not assimilating, it’s learning. It’s creating opportunities for yourself.”

  According to the NAACP’s employment figures, the average black employee washes out of advertising in less than seven years. Vann stayed at BBDO for fifteen, building a portfolio of award-winning work on accounts like Gillette, AT&T, Motorola, Snickers, and Visa. He was promoted to vice president and creative director in 2004.

  Across town at Chiat/Day, Geoff Edwards was learning to play the same game as Vann. “It’s impossible for you not to feel race in advertising in America,” Geoff says. “You name the meeting, I’m the only guy who looks like me at every meeting of the last nineteen years of my career. I struggled with it a bit. There were a few occasions where I was asked not to be in a client meeting, or a pitch; that’s where, for me, it was a little bit of an eye-opener.”

  The difference between Vann and Geoff, regardless of their respective talents, was that Geoff walked in the door with the tool kit to work around the problems he encountered. “Maybe it’s just the way I grew up,” he says, “but my experience has always been a healthy one in terms of my parents raising me to not see color as much as possible. My dad went to Indiana University in the 1950s; it’s pretty easy to find him in the yearbook. He experienced a great deal of racism. But he also came from a country where there were all sorts of people—black, Indian, Asian—who all considered themselves Guyanese. He didn’t raise us to think that we were any less or any different than anyone else. I had a mom who told me I could be anything I wanted. When I first went to school, it was just never an issue. I had friends who were white and I had friends who were black. So once I was in advertising I was always able to network at a very high level with people who weren’t black.”

  Consistently able to network one level up from himself, Geoff got his ideas in front of the people who mattered. His talents were quickly recognized. He jumped around to a few different agencies, landing at DDB in 1994. Soon, he was networking at the highest levels imaginable, on both sides of the color line. Looking for a director to helm a television spot for Budweiser, Edwards cold-called one of his idols, filmmaker Spike Lee. Lee signed on to do the piece, and they worked on it together. “We went to dinner one night,” Geoff says, “and he told me, ‘I’m gonna let you in on a secret. I’ve always kind of wanted to be in advertising. Remember the work I did as Mars Blackmon with Nike? Ever since then, I’ve wanted to be in this business. I love it. I think more of us should be in it.’

  “So I said, ‘Why don’t I talk to some higher-ups at DDB and try and make this happen?’ At the time, neither of us really knew what that meant. But I got Spike on a conference call, and before you know it, we’re crafting a deal to launch an agency together.”

  In December of 1996, Spike/DDB launched as a joint partnership, with Lee taking a 51 percent controlling interest. Edwards and his writing partner went with Lee to head up his newly minted creative division. Only five years in the business, not even thirty years old, and Edwards was already founding an agency with the most famous black filmmaker in America while the Mad Men wrote checks to cover the overhead. After DDB, Geoff leapfrogged to Foote, Cone & Bel
ding in Chicago, then back to Chiat/Day in Los Angeles, and finally to T.A.G. in San Francisco. In 2006, he was named Top Art Director in the Country by Boards magazine and a Creative All-Star by AdWeek, and his client Adidas was named Advertiser of the Year at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. “What’s amazing about this business,” Geoff says, “is that it’s a business of ideas, and ideas have no color. Once you’re in, it really is about the work. It really is about talent.”

  In the past decade, the Congressional Black Caucus, the New York City Commission on Human Rights, and now the NAACP have made a lot of noise about tearing down the walls of the old boys’ network, but none of them has made a whole lot of progress. In part, perhaps, because they seem to have fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. Madison Avenue doesn’t have an old boys’ network. It has two of them.

  “A few months ago, I went and signed up for LinkedIn,” Vann Graves says. With over one hundred million members, LinkedIn has become the primary online networking site for business professionals; in an industry that’s all about street cred, most people at least keep a presence on it to help get their names out there. “I was looking for folks to work for me and work with me. So I signed up, joined LinkedIn Plus and the whole package, and I started looking through my business connections, and then through my connections’ connections, and I was like ‘Wow. This is weird. There are no black folks on LinkedIn.’