Some of My Best Friends Are Black (27 page)

Big applause.

“Madison Avenue is like the segregated graveyards of the South where unrecognized and unnamed black people and their talent and ambitions lie buried.”

“Amen!”

“The money that we spend as consumers drops to the bottom line of the companies that we support, these Pepsis, these AT&Ts, these Johnson & Johnsons, these Procter & Gambles. They take that money and it becomes their advertising budget and with that money they subsidize the growth, proliferation, and ascendancy of white media, which does nothing more than advance and perpetualize and institutionalize white supremacy in America!”

“Tell it!”

I’m not in church. It’s July 12, 2009, and I’m in a conference room at New York’s midtown Hilton Hotel for the centennial convention of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, legal architects of
Brown v. Board
. In the coming days, dozens of panels and seminars will convene here to reflect on the past hundred years of race relations in America—and to plan for the next hundred. The week will end with a roof-raising speech from the freshly inaugurated President Obama. The
event I’m attending at this moment is a Continuing Legal Education seminar. The topic at hand is workplace discrimination in America’s advertising industry.

“You’ve heard of a show called
Mad Men?
Well, I think it should be
Gone With the Wind,
’cause there ain’t no difference.”

Up on the dais, a panel of lawyers, activists, and disgruntled former advertising employees are all taking turns lambasting the hostile, unconscionable racism they’ve experienced in the business. At the microphone just now is Sanford Moore, onetime account executive at the BBDO ad agency.

“Madison Avenue is the last bastion of corporate segregation in America. They’re the Men in the Gray Flannel Sheets, and it’s time to take the hoods
off!”

Crazy applause. Emotions in the room are running high, because the NAACP is getting ready to sue the crap out of some white people.

From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, the dearth of black faces in the ad business was not a matter that received much public attention. Part of the problem, as one lawyer here explains it, is that there weren’t enough black people in advertising to get mad about the fact that there weren’t enough black people in advertising. Over the past decade, that has changed. (The getting-mad part, not the having-enough-black-people part.) In January 2009, the NAACP launched the Madison Avenue Project, which is having a coming-out party here at the centennial convention with the very ambitious slogan “Ending racial discrimination in America’s advertising industry.”

“Madison Avenue” is the colloquial catchall term for the advertising industry; the name derives from the fact that the nucleus of the industry was once located along that particular stretch of midtown Manhattan, much like investment banks are associated with Wall Street. Today, the industry is no longer clustered geographically. It’s clustered corporately. Eighty percent of America’s ad agencies are consolidated within four major holding companies—WPP, Publicis, Interpublic, and Omnicom. They’re the ones on the hook, as far as the NAACP is concerned.

A few months back, the Madison Avenue Project published an extensive report on minority hiring patterns in the four conglomerates. The median share of employment for black managers and professionals in
advertising is 5.2 percent, but that includes black-owned agencies that specifically target the black consumer market. Once you factor the black agencies out, the percentage is substantially lower. Then, once you move beyond the back office and into the upper-level creative and client-facing positions—the writers and art directors who actually make the advertising, and who make the real money—the numbers fall off a cliff. According to the economists who compiled the NAACP’s report, the black-white employment gap in advertising is 38 percent worse than the U.S. labor market as a whole. When the study was published,
USA Today
called Madison Avenue “the poster child for the death of diversity.”

Employment figures aside, what advertising has, ironically, is an image problem. It is seen as a “racist industry” in the same way Vestavia Hills is seen as a “racist suburb”; the business doesn’t so much
practice
discrimination as it
is
discriminatory in its nature. Today’s hit TV show
Mad Men
, about the lives of advertising professionals in the 1960s, has drawn critical raves for its portrayal of that era’s retrograde racial and gender politics. It’s also proven to be a handy visual aide for those who insist that the business has barely changed since. Whole websites exist just to vent frustration about the deplorable state of race and advertising.

Madison Avenue is Whiteytown. It is, according to Sanford Moore, “The last business where undereducated, undercredentialed white people can make big money.” On this point he is certainly correct. I should know. The poster child for undereducated, undercredentialed white people making big money in advertising is the author of this book.

Advertising used to be a closed shop. On the creative side, agencies took on very few entry-level hires, weeding out most of them with a brutal apprenticeship process. Anyone who got in the door to begin with probably came from one of a handful of places: the expensive portfolio schools that feed the industry or the social class of friends and relatives of people already in the industry.

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act banned discrimination in the workplace “on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” But the law didn’t say what discrimination
was
, just that you couldn’t do it. Since the act of hiring or promoting someone is discriminating in and of itself (i.e.,
choosing one person over another), arresting bias in the workplace has always been a hit-and-miss proposition. And as racial attitudes have slowly improved, overt discrimination has become that much harder to document and prosecute. For the fight against workplace discrimination to continue, new legal standards are constantly seeking judicial precedent.

Lawyers for the NAACP are offering a standard they call “second-generation discrimination,” hiring based on “informal social groups that over time tend to exclude nondominant groups.” The NAACP isn’t really after the four media conglomerates. They’re after the old boys’ network that feeds them. The guy they’re after, really, is me.

I wasn’t born a member of Madison Avenue’s elite club. “Tanner Colby” is really just poor white trash who cleans up okay. My working-class grandparents were born to Louisiana sharecroppers; I’m only two generations and a college diploma away from a life of subsistence farming in the swamp. But eighty years and a piece of paper will get a white guy in America pretty far. I graduated from college in the 1990s, the early Stone Age of the Internet. Media outlets and major retailers were just making their first tentative forays onto the web. Few, if any, were turning a profit. Still, certain visionaries proclaimed, if people can look at it then you can sell advertising on it, which means eventually it has to start making money. “Interactive advertising,” people were calling it. Clients wanted it, and since nobody really knew what it was, if you were standing in the right place at the right time, people would throw money at you for no reason at all. Compared with the hardship of today’s job market, it seems almost criminal that we had as much luck and opportunity as we did.

In 1999, I lived in New York. I had a history degree and not a whole lot going on. I knew almost nothing about the Internet and even less about advertising. I did know one thing, though: I knew somebody who knew somebody. I knew an actress who was dating my college roommate and who happened to be temping as an admin at the Ogilvy & Mather agency. When she heard that the interactive advertising department was looking for writers, she offered to pass on my résumé and writing samples. Two weeks later I was a copywriter at an ad agency.

For a brief window, Madison Avenue’s closed shop was wide open.
You could get a job in interactive advertising if you could write your name in the sand with a stick. And once you were in, you were in. My cubicle-mate had a degree in furniture design, not web design. Didn’t matter. He knew somebody who knew somebody, too. One colleague of ours got in because somebody remembered him as “that guy who writes those funny emails.” One of our art directors had some experience in traditional advertising, but wasn’t really up on the web stuff when she got hired for interactive. “I remember designing an email for Sears,” she tells me. “I didn’t know what an email was.”

And if you did know computer stuff, you could pretty much write your own ticket. I had one friend who’d taught himself those digital animation programs while he was trying to get his rock band off the ground. With that, he was billing the agency as a computer animator at four grand a week. And since he was hired by a pal, he’d never even given anybody a résumé. “For all anyone knew,” he says, “I might not have graduated from high school.” Of course, all of us had graduated from high school. And college. But nobody really needed to check because we’d all gone to the right colleges, which is how we all knew one another. Everybody hired everybody they knew, and everybody that everybody knew was white. Or Asian.

At the exact same time this was happening, in the spring of 1999, Representatives Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-MI) and James Clyburn (D-SC) of the Congressional Black Caucus began publicly denouncing Ogilvy & Mather, expressing “alarm” over the agency’s “lack of diversity.” Ogilvy was, at that point, a contractor for the federal government, responsible for making all those commercials to get kids off drugs that don’t actually get kids off drugs; as such, affirmative action law mandated that a percentage of the agency’s workforce be composed of minorities and that a percentage of all government accounts be subcontracted to minority-owned businesses. Whatever Ogilvy was doing, it wasn’t enough. In 2000, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order mandating that the allocation of government ad dollars be “fully reflective of the nation’s diversity.” And in 2004, the New York City Commission on Human Rights (NYCCHR) led a protest in front of Ogilvy’s world headquarters in midtown calling for “an end to Jim Crow on Madison Avenue.”

Ogilvy, of course, was just being made the example for a problem that was industry-wide. Shortly after the protests, the four holding companies agreed to submit to hearings with the NYCCHR. In 2006, sixteen major agencies came to a voluntary agreement with the city, vowing to increase hiring goals for minorities, particularly in the creative, professional, and managerial ranks. One of the conglomerates, Omnicom, even pledged $1.2 million to fund an executive-level Diversity Development Advisory Committee. Various agencies announced new programs for diversity training and diversity outreach. And come Black History Month, the industry trade papers
Advertising Age
and
AdWeek
were all flush with wall-to-wall, full-page ads from ad agencies advertising their passion for, and commitment to, diversity. Two years later, despite its newfound love for diversity, Madison Avenue was still the poster child for its demise, and the NAACP stepped in.

“We think the advertising industry is laughing at black people,” says the NAACP’s interim general counsel, Angela Ciccolo. “I think they’re laughing because it goes back to ‘We’re special and this is a special club and we’re so talented and smart and we’re entitled to this lifestyle.’ It’s great that people have friends and connections, but when you have public companies, you have laws that are designed to protect people and give people opportunity, and they should be obeyed. Men in particular have preserved their social standing and economic status by perpetuating networks. ‘We’re gonna bring in who we want to bring in and goddamn anybody else who wants to challenge that.’ The whole industry is like they’ve never heard of the EEOC or equal opportunity. It may turn out that they have to be sued. Sometimes, that’s the only way you can get someone to listen.”

By 2008, my last year in advertising, I was mostly freelancing part-time, but I’d spent close to nine years working on and off at a total of five different agencies, all of it during a time of mounting legal and public pressure to hire minorities. Yet I can count the number of black people I worked with on one hand—not including the ones who emptied the wastebaskets or installed the telephones.