Some of My Best Friends Are Black

by Tanner Colby

  “I had been at BBDO for fifteen years. When I started, there were three African Americans in the creative department. When I left, there were three African Americans in the creative department. The world was evolving, especially in a time with a black president, clearly moving in a different direction. I wanted my work to be a part of that change that was happening.”

  The change that’s happening, of course, is in the fabric of America. All the demographic indicators now point to the year 2042, when America will become a “majority minority” country—all the black, brown, and yellow people will tip over 50 percent of the population, and the white cultural hegemony, we’re told, will be in retreat.

  Byron Lewis at UniWorld is especially bullish on the next decade. “You’re really talking about a marketing opportunity that is now very apparent to everyone,” he says. “I’m passionate about it. I believe in the validity of what we represent. Consumers of color represent most of the best known, most visible, and most influential folks in the domestic and global culture, in music, sports, entertainment, and street fashion. Why shouldn’t multicultural agencies be the lead agencies on major accounts? My attitude is that I feel totally capable of competing in a space where I think there’s equal opportunity. I don’t want to work on pieces of accounts. I think the road for us is to follow the trend of the population. It’s not time to divorce it; it’s time to elevate it.”

  So in 2008, UniWorld reached out and hired Vann Graves to serve as its new chief creative officer, to bring his corporate agency experience to the multicultural ad space and help make a new paradigm for the shifting population: the ethnic market as the general market, and vice versa. For Byron Lewis it was a chance to move beyond the political limitations of his company’s past. For Vann, it seemed an opportunity to make a stake in something he felt was relevant to the country’s new direction. It was an opportunity to bridge the gap and bring black agencies into the big game. But the missionary zeal of the census watchers and the aspirations of UniWorld—the whole business of racially targeted media, in fact—has run into one very significant obstacle: the Internet doesn’t care if you’re black.

  In 1996, some web-savvy entrepreneurs launched a dot-com start-up named DoubleClick. The company positioned itself as a new kind of media buyer for the web, purchasing ad space on websites for all those banners and pop-ups. Shortly thereafter, a black-owned media company in New York launched the AdHere Network—“the black DoubleClick”—to execute the same media-buying functions across the growing number of black-oriented websites. While my friends and I were working on the Internet, it turns out, the Children of the Dream were off working on what might be called the black Internet.

  In 2007, Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in cash. The AdHere Network, along with a large chunk of the black Internet, was already long gone. “The whole thing failed,” says Neal Arthur, managing director for the New York office of Wieden + Kennedy.

  Arthur, who is black, started out at W+K as the company’s director of strategic planning, responsible for analyzing cultural demographics to map out where and how ad dollars are most effectively spent. His job is to know what every kid in America is going to eat for breakfast tomorrow, how many hours they spend on Facebook, and how much their parents are going to spend on back-to-school clothes this year. In the early 2000s, Arthur was watching closely to understand how, and why, black Internet companies stumbled so quickly.

  “There used to be a top-down pipeline for black culture,” he tells me. “We created BET instead of thinking you could have black content on MTV. Then people tried to do that with the web. They were thinking, ‘Oh, we’ll give black people this pipeline, and that’s all they’ll consume.’ But the Internet is a consumer-driven medium, and they underestimated black people’s interests—that’s what’s so fascinating. Black people had underestimated themselves for so long that the web was like a slap in the face. ‘Oh, wait, black people like sushi? I had no idea. I’d been selling them Kentucky Fried Chicken for so long.’ The Internet has made it clear that black people like a lot of shit you didn’t know about. That pipe has blown wide open.”

  It has, but black companies are still out there trying to duct tape it together. Rushmore Drive—“the black Google”—launched in 2008, offering to push black content to the front of the line based on users’ searches. That same year saw the launch of Blackbird—“the black browser”—which likewise purported to filter and present the web through the lens of black interests. The list goes on and on: a black MySpace (OurSpace.com), a black LinkedIn (BlackBusinessNetwork.com), and even a black YouTube (quite original: TheBlackYouTube.com). No policy of discrimination exists to keep blacks off the mainstream iterations of those sites. There is no Troost Avenue on the Internet. Yet here black America was building its own. Even as black Americans streamed online in massive numbers—68 percent, and 90 percent of teens, are now online—the black Internet stalled. Rushmore Drive went under in fourteen months. The black browser? You won’t find too many people using it.

  The Internet has offered black writers, artists, and journalists more freedom of expression than ever before. But it’s precisely the breadth of that opportunity that has hobbled the primacy of the black-centric business model. Among the most successful black-owned media enterprises on the web is Interactive One, the online subsidiary of urban radio powerhouse Radio One. It includes several properties like The Urban Daily and the social networking site Black Planet. The company bills itself as the destination for the online black community, drawing 9 million unique visitors a month. But 28 million black Americans are now online. Nobody can claim anymore that only they can speak to the black consumer—and that scares the hell out of the people who for decades have made their living claiming just that. The door between black and white America has been fiercely guarded by its self-appointed gatekeepers: black politicians, Jesse Jackson, black media owners, and black ad agencies. The reason their legitimacy is on shaky ground is because it’s never been based on the consent of the black masses, but mostly on the ignorance, guilt, and anxiety of white people. “They’re the ones who are violating the system,” Arthur says of the gatekeepers, “because you gotta make that dollar. The easiest thing for me to do is to make you insecure as a white marketer and say, ‘Look, we know how this shit rolls, and you don’t. We know the music, et cetera.’ It just feeds on that white insecurity.”

  It’s testimony to just how ignorant and insecure white people are that this game keeps getting played. Corporate America keeps pouring billions into all these propositions that sell the white man on the fact that he needs an intermediary just to talk to black people, even as the demographics of black America call for it less and less. “You used to be able to buy a ‘black’ media plan,” Arthur says. “Essence and Ebony, BET and ESPN. That was how you reached black people. Now, when you think about your audience, you have to be much more sophisticated. The Internet is democratizing the urban experience. What’s fascinating is how quickly and how broadly the cultural references travel. What black kids are sampling is incredibly wide. Now the question is what type of African American are we going after? I do focus groups for Jordan all the time. I was in a group the other night, and there was this black kid from Houston who was like, ‘Yeah, my style is mainly Japanese.’ Really? Okay. It’s become quite cool to push the boundaries of what the African-American experience is.”

  Black-owned media grew out as a necessary alternative to America’s white cultural hegemony, but it became a cultural hegemony of its own, monolithic in its orthodoxy and its point of view. Ditto the black advertising that supported it. “You look at black advertising from the seventies,” Arthur says, “it was blaxploitation. All that Billy Dee Williams shit? You talk about perpetuating the problem—we created that. And we still suffer from it. Back then, just having black people in ads was a breakthrough, so much so that it provided disproportionate power to those brands. The beauty of now is that that’s not enough. You have to say more.”

>   Today, a lot of black advertising has become a watered-down version of a formerly Afrocentric self: bourgie black yuppies gettin’ down with their Big Macs to an R&B-tinged “I’m Lovin’ It.” Some of it’s difficult to watch. The black political and business establishment protects its interests by insisting that blacks have to be marketed to as blacks through black media. Black consumers, on the other hand, are decidedly split on the matter; some find it pandering. The biggest sea change of the digital age is not that companies can go around the gatekeepers; it’s that black people can go around them, too. The Internet is changing everything because it cares only about what you want, how you behave. What are your “likes”? Google’s search engine is just a mathematical algorithm driven by user choices. The web is just ones and zeros flying through a series of tubes. The tubes don’t care whose are which. If you’re on YouTube watching a JayZ video or a Phil Collins video, the computer serving you an ad isn’t concerned with what color you are. The computer only cares that you like JayZ or Phil Collins (or both), and it will serve you an ad based on something else it thinks you might like. A nice JayZ/Phil Collins mash-up, perhaps. Targeted media has gone light-years past targeting your race; it targets you.

  Advertising is aspirational. It takes what people want to believe about themselves and then sells it back to them in the form of a car or a house or an iPod. At the end of the day, people don’t really aspire to whiteness, or to blackness. Back in Kansas City, J. C. Nichols wasn’t selling segregated housing. He was selling status. The Brother in the Blue Dashiki wasn’t really selling black pride, either. He was selling a salve for wounded male egos. The veneer of an ad may be racial, but the sell is always personal. If you’re a person who understands people, you can sell anybody anything.

  Ethnic marketing will always have its niche; it’s critical when there’s a genuine cultural or linguistic barrier to overcome. But it’s a small niche. The gold standard for any brand is to achieve a global status that transcends those barriers, that needs no translation. Nike. Apple. BMW. They’re not black. They’re not white. They’re just cool. That’s the brand that makes money. And the only way to be that brand is by connecting with each individual personally while still having a message that resonates universally. Which is why good advertising is really hard to do, and why most of it sucks.

  When the NAACP announced its Madison Avenue Project in 2009, it did so in a state of mild self-delusion. While insisting that major agencies integrate their staffs from top to bottom, the civil rights group is simultaneously insisting that black advertising agencies be allowed to maintain their politically protected status. “In doing this project,” says the NAACP’s general counsel, “we don’t want to dilute what the African-American advertising firms have created.” But if Madison Avenue were racially integrated top to bottom, as the NAACP says it should be, the major agencies would be fully capable of giving clients the whole spectrum of ethnic sensibilities, including white people, under one roof and at considerable economies of scale. If that happens, the entire rationale for black agencies evaporates.

  The emotional attachment to the black agencies is understandably strong: they’ve played an important role in black America’s cultural history. Like Vann Graves, at one point or another, nearly every black creative in the business has wanted to be the one to bring black agencies into the game, or at the very least save them from obsolescence. Geoff Edwards gave it a try when he joined the Mingo Group in the 1990s. “I just didn’t believe that black advertising had to be bad,” he says. “I fundamentally did not believe that you had to dance for chicken, that you had to do the Running Man to sell burgers. Between blacks and Hispanics, you’re talking about buying power of over two trillion dollars. Amazing potential. So I went there to change the world. I failed. I heard some things in my one and a half years there that I’ve completely deleted from my memory bank, because I couldn’t believe those kinds of things were being talked about in the mid-nineties—sitting in meetings where white clients would say, ‘I don’t think it’s black enough.’ It’s unbelievable.”

  As nauseating as the ignorant white people were, the thing that ultimately put Edwards off was the attitude of the older black managers above him, the fact that they had acquiesced to their second-tier status in the industry. “That was what hurt the most,” Geoff says. “The system that’s created in a lot of those shops isn’t conducive to doing big ideas, because at the end of the day they’re responsible for coming up with an insight that’s ‘black.’ My partner and I would come up with great ideas. Then we would go to our creative director, and he would say, ‘Okay, this is good, but what’s black about it?’ I actually had someone sit me down and say to me, ‘You understand that if we do work like general-market agencies, then there’s no need for us.’ And that was the last thing I needed to hear before I started to get my résumé on the street.”

  Soon after taking the job as chief creative officer at UniWorld, Vann Graves realized he didn’t have the stomach for it, either. And Vann survived a convoy bombing in Iraq. “When I came here,” he says, “Mr. Lewis felt like, ‘Okay, it’s time I really invest in making my agency not only a good agency but a great agency, to elevate ourselves in the public eye, to show that we can do great creative.’ That’s really what my focus was.” But when the new chief creative took his team and tried to forge that new path, he found himself sitting in a lot of the same meetings that had made Geoff so queasy. “In every pitch,” Vann says, “the first question always seemed to be ‘What’s black about it?’ What do you mean, ‘What’s black about it?’ Every person who’s worked on this is African American. It comes from their personal insight. It’s fully thought out, it’s planned, it’s executed, and just because it isn’t some stereotype, you’re asking me what’s black about it?”

  That’s the racial assumption this industry was built on: white people don’t understand black people, so they shouldn’t even try. And whenever they do want to try, they should go to the gatekeepers, and the gatekeepers will tell them how that shit rolls—this is the highly scientific process through which billions of media dollars are allocated in America every year.

  Vann Graves and Byron Lewis thought they’d had a meeting of the minds. They didn’t. They had a generation gap. Graves wanted to build a general-market agency that had multicultural assets seamlessly woven in. Lewis, along with the other census watchers, was banking on the general market coming around to the multicultural mind-set, continuing to treat each ethnic segment as unique. But that’s not the way the market is going. As minorities become the majority, minority consumers are more important than ever. Which means the real opportunity for minorities is across the street in assimilating with the majority. The melting pot is running away with it.

  The Internet has fundamentally questioned the balkanized, racialized business model of Madison Avenue. Whiteness alone doesn’t cut it anymore, but neither does blackness. It has to be both working together. Advertising simply has to be culturally competent across the board. To get there, integrating the white hierarchy of the big agencies is going to take years. In the meantime, black agencies are still asserting ownership of black consumers, but their seventies-era, race-based business model isn’t any better suited to the new media universe than the white guys’. Which is precisely where the NAACP’s Madison Avenue Project runs into major problems. Do black people want to be in the game, or do they want to be on the other side of the street? It can’t be both. The reality is that it isn’t really a choice. “The only way that I see black agencies surviving,” Neal Arthur says, “is by legislation.”

  That’s exactly where they’re turning. The more marginalized black agencies feel, the more they’re turning back to the same affirmative action playbook. In 2000, President Clinton’s executive order on diversity in government advertising set an ambitious target: that 23 percent of all government media dollars should go to minority-owned businesses. As determined by a congressional audit in 2006, however, minorities were still gettin
g just 4.7 percent. So a group of black agencies formed a new trade association to lobby Congress to fight the “persistent bias” of white companies that had kept Clinton’s order from being followed. Yet the government’s audit found that efforts made by the federal media buyers were “consistent” with the rules outlined in Clinton’s directive. The law was followed. It just didn’t work. Because it never has.

  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1997 black-owned businesses made up 4 percent of all U.S. firms, yet accounted for only 0.7 percent of employment and 0.4 percent of revenue. Five years later, at the end of the dot-com boom, the number of black-owned businesses had increased to 5.2 percent of all U.S. firms—yet accounted for only 0.7 percent of employment and 0.4 percent of revenue. A quota is a quota. It’s a ceiling, and it’s fixed, no matter how many minorities are clamoring for a piece of it. Today, black agencies and Hispanic agencies are fighting with each other for a share of the diversity supplier business—and the black agencies are losing, because the language factor gives Hispanics the justification to take a bigger slice. The minority agencies are squabbling over loose change, and at the same time demanding that the government ramp up enforcement of the policy that keeps them squabbling over loose change. “At some point that legal credit becomes an issue,” Geoff Edwards says. “It becomes a barrier between doing great work and being able to say, ‘We’re supporting diversity’ or ‘We’re working with black vendors.’ It was a model that was established when I was a baby, and it hasn’t changed. But if those agencies are going to survive, they have to evolve. Otherwise they’ll disappear.”