16675: Regurgitated Reporting On Racism In Adland.

 

The New York Times published a lengthy report on the persistent dearth of diversity—aka systemic racism—in Adland. There’s no new news in the piece, replaying common knowledge and even quoting familiar faces of color. Yet it’s always worth reviewing the dismal state of affairs—especially from the perspective of the industry’s iconic Madison Avenue birthplace.

 

The ‘Mad Men’ Era Is Long Over. Why Is Advertising Still So White?

 

Despite corporate promises and hiring campaigns, the ad industry is among New York City’s least diverse job sectors. It shows in the work, critics say.

 

By Stefanos Chen

 

Last summer, KFC ran advertisements in Canada featuring Black people eating fried chicken and licking their fingers, their faces reflected in unused silverware.

 

Critics called the images racist, but the campaign was not canceled. Instead, it was submitted this spring for a prestigious industry award in New York.

 

Nate Nichols, the founder and creative director of Palette Group, a creative agency in Brooklyn, was one of the few Black members of the panel of judges reviewing submissions.

 

“My genuine response is sadness,” Mr. Nichols said. “It just means not enough of us have been able to make it into the room.”

 

The ad did not win, and KFC Global did not respond to requests for comment. But the episode was emblematic of a multibillion-dollar advertising industry that in at least one way still resembles the “Mad Men” era of the 1960s — namely, its lack of racial diversity.

 

That dearth, according to a new report, is keenly evident in New York City, the heart of the industry and also the largest advertising market in the United States. The disconnect could be costly at a time when shifts in media consumption favor younger, more diverse audiences.

 

There is also a need, as unemployment rates in New York City for people of color remain stubbornly high, for more diversity in an industry that pays above-average salaries, is expected to keep growing and requires relatively little formal training.

 

Of nearly 70,000 advertising employees in New York at the end of last year, less than 8 percent were Black, about 11 percent were Asian and under 15 percent were Latino, according to a report released on Monday by the Center for an Urban Future, a public policy research organization that seeks to increase economic mobility. Over 58 percent of employees were women, most of them white. The figures made advertising among the city’s least diverse industries in the city.

 

Expressions of Black culture are everywhere in advertising, even when few people of color are working behind the scenes to create them, said Adrienne Lucas, the head of diversity, equity and inclusion at the One Club for Creativity, an industry trade group in New York.

 

“Our essence, our creativity is wanted, but we are not,” she said.

 

In other ways, the business is rapidly changing.

 

By 2028, money spent on advertising in the United States could surpass $500 billion, a record, largely because of growth in digital media, said Paul Verna, a vice president of content for Emarketer, a market research firm.

 

Internet search ads, primarily on Google, have long been the biggest spending category. But social media, including sponsorships on TikTok and Instagram, is rapidly growing, and is attracting a younger demographic, Mr. Verna said.

 

Even the stretch of Madison Avenue that once defined the industry has lost some of its luster, as more firms move to trendy areas of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

 

The shift has brands and ad agencies focused on younger, more diverse audiences, even as their board rooms remain largely white.

 

Splashy diversity efforts in the industry in 2021, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent wave of racial justice protests, have stalled or reversed, according to a 2023 survey of over 100 agencies by the 4As, a national trade association.

 

White executives owned or ran roughly three out of every four agencies in 2021, the survey found. By the next year, the figure had jumped to nine in 10. A significant share of the industry is controlled by six major holding companies, including WPP and Publicis Groupe, that together own hundreds of agencies.

 

The report does not offer an explanation for the drop in nonwhite ad professionals, but found that 64 percent of Black employees had spent two years or less at their current agency, the shortest tenure of any racial or ethnic group.

 

Industry experts said the explanation was simple: a lack of career growth opportunities for people of color.

 

“There’ll be a lot of fake ‘we’re doing something about it,’ and as soon as the cycle dissipates, they go back to what they are — companies run by white men,” said Steve Stoute, the chief executive and founder of Translation, a Black-owned ad firm in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood.

 

People of color who do find a seat at creative meetings are often the lone voices of dissent in challenging culturally insensitive ideas, said Kai Deveraux Lawson, the head of culture and marketing at Valerie, a creative agency.

 

“Just because you have a Black or brown person in the room, and I personally have been in this situation, doesn’t mean that person has the trust or the empowerment to influence anybody,” she said.

 

Even when the views of people of color are heeded, the results are mixed, said Mr. Nichols, 36, of Palette Group.

 

“You’re being looked at as the monolith for your community, and that’s a very heavy burden to hold,” he said.

 

Jody-Ann Crooks, 35, who works in health care advertising, grew up in Jamaica. She recalled a past job when an executive asked her if Black people use coal or gas grills.

 

“All eyes were on me and, first of all, ‘What did this man just ask me?’” she said. “It’s lonely and isolating.”

 

Critics attribute some recent examples of racial insensitivity to a lack of representation.

 

In 2017, Pepsi pulled an ad that featured Kendall Jenner, a white woman, handing a can of soda to a police officer, amid cheerful protesters with signs that read “Join the conversation.” Critics panned the ad for trivializing the Black Lives Matter movement and police violence.

 

But advertising’s lack of diversity is also a work force problem, said Jonathan Bowles, the Center for an Urban Future’s executive director.

 

“There are a lot of jobs that are growing in New York, but not many that have good wages,” he said. He pointed to the explosive expansion of the home health care sector, which employs a large number of women of color but pays close to minimum wage.

 

Jobs that dwindled during the pandemic in sectors like retail have disproportionately affected people of color. The Black unemployment rate in New York City was nearly 8 percent in the year’s first quarter, compared with 3.3 percent for white workers, according to the city’s Economic Development Corporation.

 

That makes advertising an industry with big growth potential for people of color, Mr. Bowles said. In New York City, the median annual income in advertising is about $92,000, while the citywide private sector median income is $55,000, he said.

 

And job growth in the industry has been brisk. Despite a wave of layoffs during the pandemic, mostly in tech-related sectors, the advertising work force has grown nearly 50 percent in the past two decades, from 46,700 jobs in 2003 to 69,800 in 2023, far outpacing the private sector’s 37 percent job growth in the same period.

 

“Most people don’t know jobs like this exist,” said Melvin DeBerry, 37, an art director for a large tech firm’s ad department in Manhattan.

 

Last year, Mr. DeBerry was working at a steel mill in Memphis when he heard from a friend about the One School, a free program started in 2020 to help Black creatives build an advertising portfolio. A former aspiring musician, he was accepted to the four-month virtual program and attended classes two nights a week after work. He said his new salary tops $100,000, the most he has ever earned.

 

Hiring people from varied backgrounds is crucial to the industry’s growth, said Joel Rodriguez, 36, an executive director with the creative firm Translation.

 

“It’s not just in terms of skin color,” he said. “It’s diversity of thought.”

 

Some of his group’s recent work includes a campaign for AT&T and its high-tech helmets for college football players who are deaf or hard of hearing, and a well-received short film for the headphone brand Beats by Dre. The film asked: “You love Black culture, but do you love me?”

 

His career could have gone differently. Mr. Rodriguez grew up in an apartment building in Flushing, Queens, where his father, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, was the superintendent. While studying marketing in college, Mr. Rodriguez worked as a janitor to pay his bills.

 

As graduation approached, he had no job prospects and considered applying to become the super at a new building near his home. But he had a cousin who was a chauffeur for Mr. Stoute of Translation. Mr. Rodriguez asked his cousin to slip his résumé to human resources.

 

The move earned him his first internship. Absent that opportunity, he said, he would have followed in his father’s career footsteps.

 

“Without that exposure,” Mr. Rodriguez said, “all we know is what we see.”

 

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

 

16191: Bookmarking Mark Robinson.

 

Sure, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover—or in this case, its half cover—but predicting that this will be a brilliant read is a safe bet.

 

Mark Robinson has been a strong leader and clear voice in the industry for a long time. Check out the pre-hype for his upcoming book now.

16044: George Lois (1931-2022).

Iconic Adman George Lois passed away on November 18, 2022. Lois strongly represented—and even created—the Madison Avenue Era, yet his social sensitivities and cultural competence seemed unique in an exclusively White industry.

 

The New York Times noted Lois’ “stunning covers for Esquire magazine that rebuked American racism and involvement in the Vietnam War.” Indeed, his book—Damned Good Advice (For People With Talent!)—showed he was a diversity advocate and antiracist activist.

 

George Lois, Visionary Art Director, Is Dead at 91

 

He brought the counterculture to advertising and designed memorable covers for Esquire magazine, many of them wordless critiques of American society.

 

By Robert D. McFadden

 

George Lois, Madison Avenue’s best-known 20th-century art director, who put the counterculture of the 1960s and ‘70s into postwar advertising and created stunning covers for Esquire magazine that rebuked American racism and involvement in the Vietnam War, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.

 

His son Luke confirmed the death, which he noted followed the death of Mr. Lois’s wife, Rosemary, by two months. He did not specify a cause.

 

Irascible and uncompromising, Mr. Lois created witty, irreverent campaigns that shattered the ham-handed advertising conventions that had relied on testimonials and romanticized images. In one campaign, a chimpanzee demonstrated the simplicity of a Xerox machine; in another, the former heavyweight champion Joe Louis, who was deep in debt to the I.R.S., appeared in a brokerage ad asking, “Where were you when I needed you?”

 

Mr. Lois was also known for the Esquire covers he designed from 1962 to 1972, acid-rain critiques on society, race, politics and war, many of them wordless. One showed the boxer Sonny Liston in a Santa Claus hat, suggesting that he was the last person white America wanted to see coming down the chimney on Christmas. Another placed four Vietnamese children with a gargoyle-grinning William L. Calley Jr., the Army lieutenant who ordered the 1968 My Lai massacre. Andy Warhol was depicted drowning in a giant can of Campbell’s tomato soup.

 

In his six-decade career, Mr. Lois founded and led many advertising agencies, wrote books on advertising and art direction, devised award-winning campaigns that sold everything from soap to airlines, and was hailed by colleagues and peers as one of the most influential and creative admen of his era.

 

Some said he was the model for Don Draper, the suave, elegant central character of the long-running AMC series “Mad Men.” It was not likely.

 

Mr. Lois, a bald, bulky, arm-waving tsunami who talked a blue streak with a Bronx accent, scoffed at the idea, and in a CNN report in 2012 he insisted that “Mad Men,” with its depiction of compulsive smoking, boozing and womanizing, grossly misrepresented the advertising milieu he knew.

 

“That dynamic period of counterculture in the 1960s,” he said, “found expression on Madison Avenue through a new creative generation — a rebellious coterie of art directors and copywriters who understood that visual and verbal expression were indivisible, who bridled under the old rules that consigned them to secondary roles in the ad-making process dominated by noncreative hacks and technocrats.”

 

While conceding Mr. Lois’s pivotal role in Madison Avenue’s modernization, some critics called him a brash loudmouth and a shameless self-promoter who was sometimes given credit for the ingenious work of others, or who exaggerated his participation in creative processes that involved many people.

 

In the early 1980s, Mr. Lois, by his own account, almost single-handedly rescued MTV from an early death. The cable channel, launched in New York in 1981 with a 24-hour rock ‘n’ roll format, was in his words “an abject failure” after its first year, scorned by cable operators, advertisers, music publishers and recording companies.

 

Asked to step in, Mr. Lois produced a campaign of commercials with a voice-over ending, “If you don’t get MTV where you live, call your cable operator and say (with a cutaway to Mick Jagger bellowing), “I want my MTV.”

 

In six months, every rock star in the nation joined the parade, and MTV became the most popular phenomenon on television. Today, 90 million households receive MTV. Without it, fans say, generations might never have seen music videos or partied in basements.

 

Mr. Lois began his advertising career in 1956 as an art director with Sudler & Hennessey in New York. Two years later he landed a similar position at Doyle Dane Bernbach, which, under William Bernbach, who liberated art directors and copywriters to brainstorm freely together, was arguably the most creative shop in town in the 1950s.

 

After a year at Doyle Dane Bernbach, Mr. Lois joined two colleagues, Fred Papert and Julian Koenig, to form Papert Koenig Lois in 1960. With Mr. Lois as creative director, it became the first ad agency with an art director as a principal. It went public in 1962, raising its fortunes and starting a trend. By 1967 it was a major agency, with $40 million in billings and clients like Xerox, National Airlines and some Procter & Gamble products.

 

In 1962, Harold Hayes, the editor of Esquire, asked Mr. Lois how to improve the magazine’s covers, which were then conceived and assigned by an editorial committee. “Is that what you do when you assign a story to Talese or to Mailer — you have a group grope?” Mr. Lois recalled saying. “You need to get one guy who understands the culture, who likes comic strips, goes to the ballet, visits the Metropolitan Museum.”

 

Mr. Lois was hired for the job as a freelancer. His covers — photos or montages, sometimes with hand-drawn elements — were often textless, making their point strikingly with a single image. He was credited with 92 in all, though the origins of some were later disputed. Many were controversial — Sonny Liston’s Santa cost Esquire $750,000 in dropped advertising. But 32 of his covers were installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2008.

 

Mr. Lois pictured Muhammad Ali, who had been stripped of his boxing title and jailed for refusing to submit to the draft and fight in Vietnam, as an arrow-riddled St. Sebastian. Mr. Lois spoofed “the whole idea of a glamorous Hollywood,” as he put it in 2008, by applying smears of shaving cream to the face of the actress Virna Lisi to portray “a woman being manly and still beautiful.”

 

He portrayed President Richard M. Nixon having rouge and lipstick applied for a TV appearance during the 1968 presidential campaign, and, on another cover, Nixon’s rival that fall, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, as a dummy on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s lap. For a 1964 cover article by Tom Wicker, “Kennedy Without Tears,” he had a man’s hand extending a forefinger to wipe away a tear with a cloth from under the left eye of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy in a sepia-tinted official portrait of him.

 

As for the enigmatic Warhol cover that showed the artist falling into his signature Campbell’s soup can, Mr. Lois told Fast Company magazine in 2012: “A lot of people looked at it and said I had him drowning in his own fame. Some people said it was the end of Pop Art. Other people say it’s an iconic celebration of Pop Art. Well, OK!”

 

George Harry Lois was born in Manhattan on June 26, 1931, one of three children of Harry and Vasilike (Thanasoulis) Lois, Greek immigrants. His father was a florist. George and his sisters, Paraskeve and Hariclea, were raised in the Bronx.

 

He graduated from the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) in 1949. After a year and a half at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, he dropped out to work for the designer Reba Sochis.

 

He married Rosemary Lewandowski, an artist, in 1951. They had two sons, Harry, who died in 1978, and Luke. In addition to his son Luke, Mr. Lois, who lived in Greenwich Village, is survived by two grandchildren.

 

After being drafted in 1952, Mr. Lois served two years with the Army during the Korean War. He joined CBS-TV in 1954 as a designer of promotional projects and began his advertising career two years later.

 

He was a partner with Papert Koenig Lois from 1960 to 1967. He then founded Lois Holland Callaway and was its chairman and chief executive until 1976, when he joined Creamer/FSR. In 1978, he founded Lois/EJL, which went through several name and leadership permutations in the 1980s and ’90s. He was chairman and creative director when the firm went bankrupt and closed in 1999.

 

Mr. Lois and his son Luke then founded Good Karma Creative, an advertising and marketing venture. He was inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame, the One Club Creative Hall of Fame and the American Advertising Federation Hall of Fame, and he won lifetime achievement awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts and the Society of Publication Designers.

 

In 2016, Mr. Lois gave the City College of New York a trove of career materials, including recordings of radio and television commercials; copies of print ads, scripts, sketches, correspondence and photographs from his campaigns; and perhaps the last Tommy Hilfiger poster from the pre-cellphone 1980s, when they appeared in Manhattan phone booths and jump-started that designer’s career.

 

“George Lois is extremely important to us because we have a new program, a master’s program in advertising, branding and integrated communications,” Jeffrey F. Machi, City College’s vice president for development and institutional advancement, told The New York Times.

 

Mr. Lois was the author of several books, including “Damn Good Advice (for People with Talent!)” (2012), “George Lois on His Creation of the Big Idea” (2008), “$ellebrity: My Angling and Tangling With Famous People” (2003) and “The Art of Advertising: George Lois on Mass Communication” (1977, with Bill Pitts).

 

Since his heyday, the advertising world that once nurtured individual creativity has vanished, Mr. Lois told the magazine Creative Review in 2012. “What happened finally,” he said, “is these terrible conglomerate, no-talent, so-called marketing monoliths started to buy up agencies, and you have five or six or seven agencies running the world, and if you’re part of them you’ll never be a creative agency. It just doesn’t work.”

 

14474: “Male, Pale & Yale” Partners With “Male, Pale & Stale.”

Adweek reported on how The&Partnership is allegedly making the Wall Street Journal a less “male, pale and Yale” publication. Hey, that sentiment should go over as well with the WSJ audience as the JWT London creative department. Plus, it’s a pretty hypocritical statement coming from a predominately White advertising agency connected to a White holding company. Sorry, but Wall Street and Madison Avenue hardly represent the roads to diversity.

14178: Alphabet Poop.

Reuters reported Alphabet shareholders shot down proposals to tie diversity goals to compensation at Google. But the shareholders probably applauded the hypocritical continuation of Google Doodles saluting civil rights icons and celebrating multicultural figures. Then again, a Google search for “least-diverse workplaces” would still list Madison Avenue ahead of Silicon Valley.

Alphabet shareholders vote down diversity proposals

By Reuters

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Alphabet’s shareholders, including top executives, voted down several proposals on Wednesday, defeating campaigns to tie pay to diversity goals and to get the Google parent to provide more data about efforts to moderate user-generated content.

Alphabet management, which effectively has voting control of the company, had moved against the proposals.

Shareholders and employees said Wednesday that a gender pay gap and lack of diversity could make it difficult for the company to hire and retain workers, posing a long-term risk to its ability to innovate.

“At Alphabet, diversity and inclusion activities by individual contributors have been met with a disorganized array of responses, including formal reprimand,” Google software engineer Irene Knapp said during the shareholder meeting. “The chilling effect … has impaired company culture.”

Eileen Naughton, who leads Google’s HR operations, said the company remains committed to an internal goal to reach “market supply” representation of women and minorities by 2020, which could help bring hiring in line with the diversity of the candidate pool.

Reuters reported in March that several hundred employees formed an organized effort asking Google to adopt several measures, including human resources guidelines that specify protections for anyone involved in an internal HR investigation.

13614: Overreaction Of The Week.

Adweek reported Crayola will retire one crayon color from its famous box of 24 this week. According to Adweek, “The current 24-box line up is: red, yellow, blue, brown, orange, green, violet, black, carnation pink, yellow orange, blue green, red violet, red orange, yellow green, blue violet, white, violet red, dandelion, cerulean, apricot, scarlet, green yellow, indigo and gray.”

Hey, if Crayola follows the lead of Madison Avenue, the eliminated color will be brown or black. White is safe, of course.

12581: Early Black Mad Men.

From The New York Times…

An Early History of Blacks on Madison Avenue

Q. I was reading about the new “Mad Men” exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image, and I got to wondering: When did blacks manage to break down the barriers on Madison Avenue and become ad executives?

A. By the early 1950s, more than 40 black men were employed in “special markets” for American corporations, according to “Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry,” by Jason Chambers.

Some, like Moss Kendrix of Coca-Cola, helped create advertising approaches to blacks. Sometimes, their work consisted of keeping outright racism out of ads. A pioneer, David J. Sullivan, ran his own consulting firm, Negro Market Organization, on Fifth Avenue in the 1940s, and his dos-and-don’ts articles in the trade press spotlighted offensive marketing.

Mr. Chambers highlighted several black advertising men who struggled to open doors in the 1940s and 1950s. Among them:

Edward Brandford, a Cooper Union graduate and commercial artist, with two partners, Barbara Watson and Mary Louise Yabro, organized the first modeling agency for African-American women in 1946 in Manhattan; he followed it with his own ad agency. Unfortunately, companies eager to hire his models had little interest in his guidance. Most thought that all they had to do to reach black consumers was change the race of the models in their ads.

Like Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Brandford was ahead of his time.

William B. Graham had been a spectacular salesman for Pabst Beer in the early 1940s, making it the No. 1 brand in Harlem. He opened his own agency in 1944 with a fellow Pabst sales representative, Henry Parks Jr., who later became a famous sausage maker.

Clarence Holte was hired as an executive by Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn in the early 1950s, a move that caused considerable attention in the advertising trade press. “What BBDO executives wanted was their own version of Jackie Robinson — specifically, a man who was not only supremely qualified, but who they also believed could withstand any negativity based on his race without responding aggressively,” Mr. Chambers writes.

Mr. Holte drew on his vast collection of books on African and African-American history to create ads that brought attention to black achievements. “Ingenious Americans,” an award-winning series that he developed for Calvert Distillers, noted contributions that were ignored by textbooks at the time, including those of Harriet Tubman, Benjamin Banneker and others.

Another black executive at BBDO, Georg Olden, had been a graphic art director at CBS, helping to shape the look of early television. Joining BBDO in 1960, he was involved in all elements of commercial production. He won several Clio awards, the Oscars of the ad industry, and is said to have been the designer of the Clio statuette.

In his spare time, Mr. Olden drew several cartoons published in The New Yorker. In 1963, he joined the McCann-Erickson agency, and that year he became the first African-American to design a postage stamp, a broken chain commemorating the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation.

In 1955, Young & Rubicam hired Roy Eaton, a Phi Beta Kappa with a master’s degree in music from Yale. Mr. Eaton, who applied to the agency virtually on a whim, talked executives into letting him write tryout ad copy, and then sample jingles.

Charles Feldman, the agency’s creative director, hired him as its first black professional. According to Mr. Chambers, Mr. Feldman told the new employee: “The reason I had you write the jingles is that, though you obviously have creative talent, if you were white you would have been hired immediately, just on the basis of the commercials you wrote. But I want a Jackie Robinson. I want someone who is not only good, but superior!”

While pressure in the late 1960s and the 1970s forced some change, blacks remain underrepresented among ad executives, according to Mr. Chambers, who writes: “Similar to blacks’ experience in other white-collar professions like accounting, evidence shows that the advertising industry has dealt proactively with issues of race only when public pressure forces it to do so.”

12573: Walking With Harry Webber.

The ever-revolutionary Harry Webber presented more breakthrough thinking at LinkedIn…

A Company Is An Idea That Goes For A Walk.

By Harry Webber, Creative Director at Idean Enterprises, Inc.

I have been starting business entities for almost fifty years. All of them have been profitable. All of them have been based upon a simple idea. Help other businesses gain more customers. In all, the companies my companies have helped, have enjoyed more than one trillion dollars in sales. They have become household words. They have become global brands. They have dominated their product categories. This has made my reputation on Madison Avenue.

In five decades of doing the same thing over and over again, I knew that one day, my methods of working would ultimately outlive their usefulness. I knew that one day the world of business would change. 2015 has brought that change to light. Today, the customer is now in charge. That single event has changed the ways that companies go to market. Unfortunately, 99 44/100% of American companies have no idea that this change is now in force. Unfortunately, for them. Not unfortunately for me. I saw it coming a long way off. When the change arrived, I was ready and waiting to leave Madison Avenue behind and step into the future. The Era of CX is now upon us. Customer Experience Rules!

But this time I intend to play a different game. Rather than sell what I know about this brave New World of CX to the highest bidder, I will use it to build one more company. A company that takes this idea for a walk. Companies that are based on CX are structured completely different than other firms. Their structures are far more flexible. They are built to constantly change with their targeted audiences. When the customer changes, the company changes to accommodate them. When the wants and needs of the customer changes, so do the products that the company offers those customers. The products change to meet customer desires. Flexibility is built into the business model. The company anticipates changes rather than following trends. Products are designed to be produced and delivered digitally, when possible. Digital and analog aspects of the company are designed to be integrated and in many cases interchangeable. But the greatest advantage of these CX companies is that they are massively scalable.

Where as traditional companies earn revenue through the sale of physical products or offered services, this new generation of companies earns revenue through the delivery of experiences. These experiences combine product and service components into memorable experiences. These experiences begin as an answer to an unmet want, need or desire of the selected audience. Their cost is minimal, so as to provide the least amount of risk to the customer. These experiences are interactive so that they can be altered by the audience to suit their specific needs and interests. We strive to allow the audience to see themselves and their interests in the manifestation of the experience. Each experience strives to reflect the values and lifestyles of its audience.

Every touchpoint between the customer and the company is specifically designed to be friction free. The audience is a participant in the creative process that evolves the experience as well as the personas who are enjoying the experience. And as the experience grows and evolves the personas involved have the option of sharing these experiences with like-minded participants and communities. At will, these experiences can be unique or shared, simple or complex, realistic or fantasy driven. Ultimately, these experiences evolve into a massive feedback loops that stimulate and engage the creativity of all involved. Experiences can be active or passive. Experiences can be imaginary or physical. Experiences can be ongoing or episodic. The audience is in the driver’s seat for every moment of their journey.

The company will deploy these experiences from house to house, neighbor to neighbor, block to block, zip code to zip code, city to city, state to state, nation to nation. Only one aspect of each experience will remain constant. This common ground will draw those within the experience closer and closer. This common ground will provide the singular “reality” that manifests the reality of each experience. This common ground will allow the shared experiences to grow.

12559: Diversity Of NYC Culture.

The New York Times reported New York City will examine the diversity of its cultural organizations. Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Tom Finkelpearl said, “If you’re living in a city like we are in New York—with 65 percent people of color right now—maybe we’re missing out on some of the talent if we don’t have diverse audiences, staffs and boards.” Too bad this guy isn’t shining a spotlight on Madison Avenue.

New York City Plans to Study the Diversity of Its Cultural Groups

By Robin Pogrebin

In a major study to be undertaken this summer, the de Blasio administration will review the diversity of the boards, staffs and audiences of New York City cultural organizations, such as museums, orchestras and dance troupes.

“If you’re living in a city like we are in New York — with 65 percent people of color right now — maybe we’re missing out on some of the talent if we don’t have diverse audiences, staffs and boards,” said Tom Finkelpearl, the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, whose department will commission the study.

Mr. Finkelpearl said there was no good data on the racial, ethnic or gender makeup of New York cultural organizations and their audiences, and that the study, to be done by an outside vendor, would help make clear that diversity should be a priority for institutions when it comes to naming trustees or hiring employees.

“Over 90 percent of staffs at museums nationally are white,” Mr. Finkelpearl said.

But the commissioner said the city had no intention of instituting quotas or determining future financial support for arts groups based on their success in achieving diversity. (Only organizations that seek city financing will be surveyed, and their participation will be required.) The city’s consultant on the survey will provide the city only with data on overall trends, not the findings for particular institutions, he said.

“We’re not looking to be punitive,” Mr. Finkelpearl said. “We don’t want a moment when a list gets published that says, ‘Here are the least and most diverse organizations.’ The administration is committed to diversity as a general goal. We want to know by sector — what can we learn from how people develop audiences and staffs and boards, highlighting the positive, sharing best practices.”

The city’s initiative comes as the lack of racial diversity in culture has been widely noted, including Neil Patrick Harris’s recent reference to the whiteness of the Oscars. In addition, the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, just released its second “Hollywood Diversity Report,” which found racial and gender imbalances in film and television.

The Department of Cultural Affairs announced its planned survey at a meeting in January at the Ford Foundation that was attended by about 230 representatives of arts groups. An additional 200 attended a second meeting last month at BRIC, a nonprofit arts and media organization in Brooklyn.

Arts executives who went to the meetings said they welcomed the city’s effort and did not view it with alarm.

“I came away inspired,” said Claudia Bonn, executive director of Wave Hill, a public garden and cultural center in the Bronx. “It’s something that you don’t think about all the time.”

Gregory Long, the president and chief executive of the New York Botanical Garden, who attended the session at the Ford Foundation, said: “It’s fine to stop and focus on it,” noting that “there weren’t a whole lot of people of color in the room.”

At the January event, Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, which will help fund the study, told attendees that “the arts cannot be the exclusive purview and playground of the privileged.”

“The problem is that diversity has been framed as giving up something,” Mr. Walker said in a recent interview, “when in fact diversity adds value to the organization.”

The survey, to be conducted by a private nonprofit not yet selected, is the second broad cultural initiative undertaken by Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose profile as a supporter of the arts is still unclear. This year Mr. de Blasio used the promise of free benefits at city cultural organizations as an enticement for people to sign up for new municipal identification cards that are being given out to help undocumented immigrants.

Mr. de Blasio has made diversity a cornerstone of his administration. Of his total agency heads, 18 percent are African-American; 14 percent are Latino; 14 percent are Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders; and more than half are women.

Jimmy Van Bramer, the City Council’s majority leader and chairman of the Cultural Affairs Committee, said the survey would not be an “attempt to embarrass institutions.”

“What I would not want to happen is that cultural organizations are identified as bad operators here,” he said, “when everyone should be looking in the mirror at their own institutions.”

Still unclear is what the city will do with the survey results, which Mr. Finkelpearl said he expected back in the fall. “We’re not going to take any action at all until we have some answers,” he said.

At the Ford Foundation, Mr. Walker said the mostly white makeup of many cultural organization boards is a symptom of a larger problem.

“This isn’t about racism or purposeful exclusion of people,” Mr. Walker said. “This is about sophisticated leaders of boards simply not knowing who to turn to for help, because when they look among their own friends, their business associates, their neighbors, they don’t see much diversity.”

With rare exceptions, few of the city’s largest cultural organizations have ever had more than a handful of nonwhite board members. The limited roster of black executives who are typically pursued for trusteeships include Raymond J. McGuire, head of global banking at Citigroup, who is the chairman of the Studio Museum in Harlem and serves on the boards of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New York Public Library; Gordon J. Davis, a former New York City parks commissioner who is on the boards of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Public Theater and the library; and Mr. Walker, who sits on the boards of New York City Ballet and the High Line.

Each of the city’s two meetings featured a panel of speakers, including Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum; Mariët Westermann, vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and Cristián Samper, president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the city’s zoos and aquarium.

Mr. Long said almost half of his work force at the Botanical Garden is nonwhite. “It’s something we think about quite a lot here because we’re in the Bronx,” he said, “where there are more people of color.”

Anne Pasternak, the president and artistic director of Creative Time, the public art group, said that — based on census figures showing an increase in New York’s minority population — her organization has already been changing its hiring practices.

“Everything we do in the organization now is seen through the lens of equity,” she said. “If you want to have audiences for the arts in the city, where are they going to come from? It’s not only an issue of what feels good and what’s right. It’s an issue of survival.”

12441: Rewarding Exclusivity.

As Hollywood and Madison Avenue head through their respective award seasons, it’s disturbing to see the similarities in regards to exclusivity. That is, White men drive both industries, and it shows in the work that is ultimately lauded as being the “best” in the business.

The 2015 Academy Awards have already received criticism for the nominees’ lack of diversity. Film Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs tried to coordinate damage control, yet her response seemed disturbingly clueless.

The Best Picture nominations underscore matters with an exclamation point. It’s no secret that the academy is roughly 94 percent White, overwhelming male and old. With the exception of Selma, the nominated films essentially depict White males overcoming physical and/or emotional obstacles. But that’s the result when the criteria for excellence—as well as the privileges of production—are viewed and established through a mono-cultural lens.

On the other hand, Madison Avenue appears completely oblivious to its dearth of diversity at award shows, despite past attempts to publicize the problem. Integrating White women into the jury processes is a recent smokescreen—or Caucasian flesh-toned BAND-AID®—that avoids the real root issue of White man dominance. In the end, the advertising award winners are as blatantly Caucasian and male in appeal as the 2015 Best Picture nominees.

If Selma hoped to win accolades, the creators should have taken the Italian approach for hyping 12 Years A Slave. That is, just as an Italian promoter created posters highlighting Michael Fassbender and Brad Pitt for 12 Years A Slave, Selma could have presented itself as a Tom Wilkinson vehicle spotlighting the heroism of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The film’s chances of securing the Oscar would have significantly improved.

12386: Mad Men Don’t Change.

Adweek reported the final seven installments of AMC series Mad Men will begin airing April 5, playing off the theme: “People do change, but in a lot of ways, they don’t, unfortunately.” Additionally, Creator Matthew Weiner said the last episodes refocus on the six core characters. In other words, don’t expect to see much from Dawn Chambers, which is actually in keeping with the theme on a couple of levels.

First, Mad Men is staying true to modern-day Madison Avenue in that minorities remain invisible servants. Plus, Black representation is declining in the TV program and the real world.

Second, Weiner is not changing, unfortunately, in his cultural cluelessness. His inability to figure out how to integrate non-Whites into his story is painfully obvious. Hell, reflecting the nepotism so prevalent in the advertising industry, expect Weiner’s son to receive more screen time than Don Draper’s secretary.

12327: The More Things Change…

The New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott published his final column titled, “The Top 5 Changes on Madison Ave. Over the Last 25 Years”—and the old man ultimately showed that the more things change in adland, the more they stay the same (and even regress). Worth noting was the first change on Elliott’s list:

THE RISE OF DIVERSITY MARKETING As America has come to resemble the “gorgeous mosaic” of David N. Dinkins, advertisers responded—slowly at first, certainly—with inclusive, multicultural campaigns. The results of the 2010 census, which showed the Spanish-speaking population becoming a national presence, produced a boom in Hispanic marketing.

And as same-sex marriage becomes more prevalent and accepted, Madison Avenue is running ads with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender consumers in mainstream media, not only in media aimed at this market. This year alone, brands climbing aboard the rainbow bandwagon included Beats Music, Brita, Cheerios, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, Heineken Light, Honey Maid, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Mr. Clean, Revlon, Starbucks, Taco Bell and Tide.

Unfortunately, the rise of diversity marketing—which is highly debatable—has not sparked a rise of diversity. Representation of Black executives has actually declined in the field. On Madison Avenue, Mad Men era exclusivity lives on. Diversity remains a dream deferred and denied. Hell, the very definition of the term has shifted in recent years to focus on elevating White women.

For Elliott to state “advertisers responded—slowly at first, certainly—with inclusive, multicultural campaigns” is a little misleading (and perhaps a lot mistaken). The majority of clients responded inadequately; plus, it could easily be argued that a growing number are responding improperly with their non-White initiatives.

As for the “boom” in marketing to Latinos, it’s more like the backyard beating of a piñata—that is, it’s an event isolated from the general market fiesta. Multicultural marketing constitutes a separate-but-unequal ghetto where practitioners scratch and scramble for crumbs from the overall marketing pie. Change is essentially spare change. Plus, executives at minority advertising agencies within the White holding companies are almost indentured servants.

The LGBT pride parade seems fabulously segregated too. Additionally, some advertisers recognize a legitimate audience while others recognize an opportunity to spark interest via borrowed interest. Elliott is right to dub it “the rainbow bandwagon”—and it’s only a matter of time before Skittles incorporates its “Taste the Rainbow” campaign in the selfish hopes of landing a Cannes Lion.

Oh, and although White women are enjoying progress at Cannes, minorities are more apt to be the entertainment or wait staff versus active participants.

Elliott witnessed five top changes on Madison Avenue over 25 years. Minorities witnessed a twisted, discriminatory version of Groundhog Day.

12068: The Dumb Leading The Dumber.

The New York Times reported Google is schooling Madison Avenue on digital. Not sure who would lend a helping hand to whom if the subject shifted from digital to diversity. Google and Madison Avenue could endlessly swap stories of abject failure, cultural cluelessness, institutionalized ignorance and deliberate discrimination.

Google Lends a Helping Hand to Madison Ave. on Digital Proficiency

By Stuart Elliott

GOOGLE is inviting Madison Avenue to go to the head of the class, offering tutorials to up-and-coming employees of advertising and media agencies on how to more effectively use digital tools like mobile, social platforms and video for marketing purposes.

Google is calling the digital school for agencies Squared, after the idea that squaring a number or letter in a formula — for instance, e = mc2 — exponentially increases its size or power. The Squared program is coming to the United States after being tested in Britain in 2012 and given a green light a year later; more than 300 employees of more than 60 agencies, including Carat, DigitasLBi, JWT, Mindshare and Starcom, have taken part there.

In this country, the first classes are being held in New York, beginning this week, for more than 40 employees of 17 or so agencies like Leo Burnett, Carat, Initiative, JWT, Ogilvy & Mather, OMD and Starcom. Some additional employees, of client companies, are also expected to take part in the program, which is scheduled to run for six weeks.

In addition to presentations by people who work for Google, participants will hear from other digital firms, among them BuzzFeed and Twitter, and from agency executives recognized as digital leaders. (Twitter recently announced a training program of its own for agencies, an online tutorial named Flight School.)

The Squared sessions are the most recent in a skein of efforts by Google to reach out to agencies. Among them were Google Partners, an online educational program; Project Re:Brief, which gave modern-day makeovers to vintage campaigns for brands like Alka-Seltzer (“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”) by adding digital components; and Art, Copy and Code, which reworked Project Re:Brief to concentrate on present-day ads for brands like Volkswagen.

“The purpose is to make digital core to the agency experience by helping to educate the next generation of agency talent,” said Torrence Boone, a former senior Madison Avenue executive who is now global head for advertising sales and services of Google, and “exposing the industry to the possibilities unleashed by digital.”

Although “there’s been an incredible amount of progress in terms of the agency ecosystem’s embracing of digital platforms and products, the ask for the industry is, How do we get digital more embedded as a way we think about campaign development?” Mr. Boone said. “Digital acumen still can be thought of, used as, an add-on. We want to make it a starting point.”

The decision by Google to offer the Squared program reflects that while digital advertising may have come a long way, baby, to quote another vintage campaign, digital specialists like Google could certainly benefit further if Madison Avenue became more skilled at — and comfortable with — the likes of social media, search engine optimization and web video series.

“We are simply trying to provide a baseline of exposure to all of the amazing things that are happening across the digital landscape,” Mr. Boone said. “It’s not just about Google; it’s about the entire digital landscape.”

As for what Google is spending, all Mr. Boone would say is that “it’s a significant investment, and something we plan to scale, assuming the pilot here in the U.S. is successful.” The agencies are making an investment, too, he added, in paying the salaries of their employees for the 30 weekdays the workers are detached to attend the Squared sessions.

That, said Kathleen Brookbanks, chief operating officer for the OMD U.S. unit of OMD — part of the Omnicom Media Group division of the Omnicom Group — represents “a big commitment” for the agencies, and “it’s obviously something we gave more than the usual thought to.”

“We are sending three people from OMD in New York,” she added, “based on feedback from our U.K. office as to how valuable the learning was” from the Squared classes in London.

“As more and more money goes into the digital space, it’s a great opportunity for our people to get a deep dive into it,” Ms. Brookbanks said, adding: “We feel a strong confidence there will be more teaching about the space than just about Google. If it’s just about one vendor, you’re not going to send people for six weeks.”

Although Google competes in some ways with Madison Avenue — inspiring references to the company as a “frenemy,” as once famously remarked by Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP — “that doesn’t change our belief this program has a lot to offer,” Ms. Brookbanks said.

That sentiment was echoed by Sarah Baehr, executive vice president and managing director of Carat; Carat and its parent, the Dentsu Aegis Network unit of Dentsu, are sending six employees to Squared. “As managers and proponents of our industry, we should be training people to be bigger thinkers,” Ms. Baehr said. “We don’t always do as good a job as we can in helping people be successful in their roles.”

As for fears that Google might use the sessions for “recruiting the best and the brightest” from agencies to work at Google, “that’s not a great way to endear yourself,” she added, laughing.

Mr. Boone sought to reassure participating agencies about Google’s intentions. “The dialogue we’ve had with our agency partners has been productive,” he said. “They’re looking at this as a way to retain and develop talent, and drive differentiation in the marketplace.”

“What’s important to recognize is that the agencies have asked us for this,” he added. “It’s absolutely a friendly initiative where we’re coming together to invest in the next generation of talent.”