ISSUE 267 : Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Over the years I've done my best to maintain my promise of staying away from politics and matters of race in America. Sometimes it's been hard. "What If Obama Worked For Them" was one of those times. I still think they put him up for the job to distract us, so they could pull off one of the biggest bank jobs in history. So much for follow-ups. You figure out the rest of it.

Now I'm about to break my second caveat. A word about race in America. More specifically, race in advertising. More precisely, race and me in advertising. This is not going to be one of those "woe is moi" stories about the immense unfairness of it all. This is just about how it feels to be considered, "less."

You have to have a certain strength of conviction to do this job. To conceive an idea that a Global 100 enterprise will invest 100s of millions in over the course of four decades is no walk in the park. To do it over and over again, year after year is slightly short of extraordinary. I should feel very proud of myself. And I do. A young black creative from Texas, Derek Walker said it best. "I love advertising. But advertising doesn't love me."

As anyone who watches the hit show "Mad Men" knows, advertising is not now, nor has it ever been, an equal opportunity employer. It is a world of under-educated, over-privileged, narrow-minded pretenders. Ad people pretend to be business people. That is because the advertising industry is a service industry and the service rendered is compliance. Advertising people comply with whatever the client thinks is right at the time. Advertising is said to set the values of our society. But in truth, advertising simply reflects the values of our time. But in matters of race, something went terribly wrong.

In their belief that they were somehow better than the common man, the people who make up the advertising industry did not follow the rest of American business into equal opportunity employment, integration or diversity. Madison Avenue decided that blacks and Hispanics did not "fit" their version of who they imagined themselves to be.

So Madison Avenue just shut them out. And for those few of us who were able to slip in, the welcome mat was snatched out from under us and we were marginalized in dead-end jobs and banned from any chance for advancement. So no matter how many awards my work won for my employers, my star never rose. They would rather promote a person with lesser skills and than assign me to make them look good. The newly-minted ACD would then claim credit for the work and be promoted to creative director and fire me or shunt me off to some horrible assignment that would send me packing to another agency for more of the same.

I soon learned the fine art of job jumping. I would duck just seconds before the axe of the headsmen swung. Sell a great campaign. Duck and cover. Win a prestigious award. Duck and run. Gain a client compliment. Duck and dodge. While the average white brand of agency creative would get ready for the fast track after a stellar performance, I got ready to bail. It gave me a whole new mindset. Dead man running.

I gave each agency exactly one year. Once hired I would hit the ground rolling. I knew better than even try to play office politics. I went directly into stealth mode. I would stay late every night and read every research report and client memorandum that had been circulated for at least two years before my arrival. I would roam the account management, media and research departments long into the night. Nobody noticed. They thought I was just another cleaning guy. Every day that went past, I got more and more client/market knowledgeable.

Then sure as bull-shit floats, I would discover the "key." The one fact that could make all the difference. And I would wait until the next "Gang-Bang" when they would call all hands on deck to submit campaigns that would save the account. During the day I would volunteer to help the top creative teams put their campaign hopefuls in shape. At night I would work on my own campaign, armed with the knowledge and insights that would set it head and shoulders above the rest. And I would win the shoot-out. And somebody else would take credit. And I would call Judy Wald, my headhunter and say, "Judy, it's time." I was her favorite piece of meat. I would have four jobs in the space of most of her client's tenure in just one agency. And she would fudge my resume so I didn't look like Jumpin' Jack Flash. It was a gas. I got rich in spite of these fools
by investing in each of my client's stock. Money could care less about color.

But all of this broken field career running was not without its price. And the toll was steep. I trusted no one. I made myself small to avoid detection or suspicion. I would beat guys to the men's room just to eavesdrop on their plots for world domination. I would use what I learned to take them out of the game. I became ruthless. Far more so then the devious Mr. Draper. My family came second and then third. I became a liar for hire. There was nothing I couldn't sell. I learned from the greatest minds of our time. But I was never invited to lunch at the Harvard Club. I lived on the creep. Of course by the time people got together and figured out what happened, I was long gone, so they could shake it off and go..."Naaaa!" I wasn't a "Mad Men." I was Bad Men.

The benign racism in hiring and promoting a diverse workforce that has been the subject of more than 40 years of government intervention, mandate, and censure, as well as a pending multi-million dollar class action suite, still persists. I am both black-listed and in exile from Madison Avenue as a result of my early efforts to integrate the industry with the backing of Ogilvy and 4A's chair-legend Jock Elliot. There are fates worse than death. To sell billions, yet never be acknowleged as more than "That black guy that used to work here." To wage wars with the Clio folks to spell my name right. To have black people put me on their white list out of fear of reprisal. Still, I soldier on.

I have no regrets. It was my own fault. I should have listened to Nat "King" Cole's infamous quote upon the cancellation of his amazing network TV show.
"Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark."

Note: (On November 5, 1956, The Nat King Cole Show debuted on NBC-TV. The Cole program was the first of its kind hosted by an African American, which created controversy at the time. The show was cancelled on December 17, 1957 for lack of sponsors.)