Pitch Black: Introduction

AUTHOR'S NOTE

"If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon or make a better mouse trap than his neighbors, though he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door."

This quote has been attributed to nineteenth century American essayist and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson, and published by the Cincinnati Enquirer shortly after Emerson's death in 1882. This quote, and the philosophy behind it, has become a foundational principle of American enterprise. It reflects the power and effectiveness of innovation. Corporations both great and small rise and fall by the mission, "Find something good, and make it just a little bit better." Success is a battle for inches.

Yeah. Well, that rule does not apply here.

That rule is for people who stand on a level playing field, a place where fair-play counts. That rule is for people who hold the same chances for success or failure as everyone else. But this is America. And in America, "everyone" almost never actually means "everyone."

Hopefully, this book will help reveal that in the exclusive and restricted world of American advertising agencies, "everyone" – historically – was not intended to include Black-owned ad agencies. In fact, it took more than 75 years after the opening of J. Walter Thompson in 1864 and N.W. Ayer in 1869 before there were any identifiable Black ad agencies. And once these agencies did finally emerge, their existence and operation was limited to the world of Jim Crow.

Multicultural marketing agencies, and in particular Black ad agencies, have always struggled – for recognition, for client business, for inclusion and ultimately for respect. Even today, it remains a subject of open debate whether any of these struggles have yet achieved their goal.

As this book will explore, Black ad agencies did not have the luxury of finding something good and making it just a little bit better. Building a better mousetrap requires first having an equal seat at the table. Not only did Black ad agencies not have a seat at the table, for decades, they were locked out of the conference room.

For Black advertising agencies, and for Black professionals in the ad agency business, the mission is not to build a better mousetrap. It is not to find something good and make it better. The mission is to create something from nothing. To build where nothing stood before. The mission is to perform magic.

Understandably, many have fallen short of this higher, much more daunting bar. But the ones who have succeeded are more than deserving of whatever recognition this book hopes to provide.

Creating something from nothing. Performing magic. This book is a celebration of those Black advertising professionals who somehow pulled a rabbit out of a hat.

INTRODUCTION

In 1956, Nat King Cole was one of the most successful entertainers in the world. Of ANY color. His gentle, romantic style endeared him to millions, and his record sales were phenomenal. Nat released more than 100 Top Ten singles and two dozen Top Ten albums, more than Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston combined. No one has matched his record.

There was every reason to believe that a TV show starring Nat King Cole would be a huge hit. But this was 1956, and civil rights was an active battleground. America was not ready for Negroes to host their own TV programs, no matter who that Negro was. Nat signed a contract with CBS, but the network got cold feet, and the deal fell through. NBC stepped forward, and on November 5, 1956, The Nat King Cole Show was on the air. The show featured the biggest performers of the time, including Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Sammy Davis Jr., Tony Bennett, Count Basie, and Harry Belafonte. The orchestra was conducted by Nelson Riddle.

There was just one problem. Not one single advertising agency was willing to buy national airtime on the show for any of their clients. National airtime meant that the ads would run in southern markets, and advertisers were afraid of Southern white boycotts of their products. Advertising is the essential diet of television, and the Nat King Cole Show was being starved to death.

Despite the losses they suffered, NBC kept the show on the air for a second season. Nat even used his own money to underwrite expenses. Finally, after 64 weeks, Cole made the decision to cancel the show. In an interview afterward, Nat King Cole placed the blame squarely on the advertising industry.

"Madison Avenue," Cole said, "is afraid of the dark."

Advertising is a mirror. It reflects our world, our own lives and stories. It is our ability to see ourselves and our everyday situations in these manufactured, strategically precise, quick messages that makes it so easy to embrace. The advertising mirror can be remarkably accurate. At other times, the mirror can have a funhouse effect, distorting reality just enough to make us smile. It tickles the brain, bypasses our natural defenses and successfully gets under our skin. Sometimes, even when we hate the ad, it has its intended effect.

From the very beginning, Black people were always in advertising. Always. And yet, for the first 100 years of commercial product advertising, the images we saw in our ads reflected an America that was most definitely separate and unequal. What we saw were Black and white Americans living two very different realities. White Americans purchased and consumed the wonderful, branded products: Gold Dust soap powder that made cleaning effortless, Uncle Ben's rice that cooked perfectly every time, Maxwell House coffee that made your husband smile with satisfaction. Black Americans cooked and served those wonderful branded products to the white Americans. That is precisely how the corporations selling those products wanted it.

In advertising that graced American newspapers, magazines, and billboards from the 1890s to the 1950s, showing a Black person in an ad was an effective way of communicating superior quality and sophistication. The Black people, of course, were the butlers and porters and maids serving those products to white people who only enjoyed the very best in life. Aunt Jemima was always in the kitchen cooking the most delicious meals.

These were not ads by obscure or long-forgotten, obsolete brands. These were the brands that consumers continue to use and enjoy today – Hines Root Beer, Jell-O, Maxwell House Coffee, Budweiser, and many more. American advertising would not have been the same without us. The important difference – the whole difference – was that the advertising was not created by us. It was not created for us. For those first 100 years, Black Americans were like ghosts who never saw their actual image in the mirror.

For a long time, Black advertising agencies and Black advertising professionals did not exist in the world of advertising. The mainstream advertising world never thought that it needed to include us. Until, in the early 1950s, a small handful of national brands began advertising to Black consumers. As these brands began to recognize Black consumers, David Sullivan launched his own Black advertising agency, The Negro Market Organization. It was the first Negro ad agency to make a serious pursuit of national brands from white-owned product companies. Sullivan began publishing a series of articles with a detailed list of Dos & Don'ts for advertising to Negro consumers. A handy and practical guide. The articles caught the attention of mainstream national advertisers.

The founders of the first Black advertising agencies understood that advertising is more than a mirror. It is a culture maker. From the simplest little image and words on a page, to giant billboards and epic, extended videos, advertising is storytelling in ways that shift, retouch and terra-form our world. Do not adjust your set. This message from our sponsor will be tomorrow's reality.

The reflection was finally starting to change. At this same time, the very first Black advertising professionals were being hired in game-changer roles at huge mainstream agencies. At first, just a small few, yet before the world awoke to what was happening, Black people were taking ownership of their own story by using advertising to reshape and tell a new Black story, to paint a new self-portrait. We created something out of thin air. We created magic.

Today, we are masters of culture and art and commerce. Today, there is no pop culture without Black people. And there is no commerce without pop culture. But it has been a long journey. How we got here is the story of Blacks in advertising of the past fifty years.

* * *

One of the very first mainstream brands to feature Black people in their advertising was Jax Beer, which recognized the size and importance of its Southern Black customer base as early as 1948. They produced the very first Black TV commercial, called "Whistle Up A Party", and a print ad featuring actress Dorothy Dandridge. The use of Dandridge in the ad was significant because it acknowledged the cultural relevance and influence of a Black celebrity.

Coordinated lobbying efforts by the NAACP, the Urban League and the National Negro Publishers Association (NNPA) pushed tirelessly for Black representation in advertising, both in front of and behind the camera.

Advertising created by Black people and for Black people became one of the most effective tools – and weapons – of the Civil Rights movement, changing the world's perception of Black America. Advertising enabled America to get to know Black people in ways that would have been impossible otherwise.

But we went far beyond that. We exceeded our own expectations, or even our own intentions. Advertising that was never actually intended for a mainstream audience – that showcased our fashions, our music, our style, even our ways of turning a phrase – spilled over into American consciousness. Just look at how these ads – created for a general population, mainstream audience, use Black culture and language in order to be more cool, more current, more engaging.

Black identity and culture, in all its freshness and different beauty, turned Blackness into a brand that mainstream America wanted to buy. We became one of America's most popular – and most influential – brands.

A brand is far more than simply the generic, anonymous goods or services we buy. A brand is an identity that has a look and a feel, a personality that is three-dimensional. A brand has a backstory. As consumers, we don't just buy our favorite products, we embrace the people that we see in those ads.

When we embrace the brands, we don't always realize the changes in our hearts and minds, but it is real. When Willie Mays graces the front of a box of Wheaties, we begin to see him as the champion we aspire to be. When Campbell's Soup shows us an adorable little boy getting the "airplane spoon into the hangar" treatment from his two dads, we see that situation as both loving and ordinary. When Lincoln uses a hip-hop music track to show its latest car cruising down the highway, it all feels pretty cool to us. Our perception of the world changes. Our world changes. Advertising does that. Advertising changes the world.

Kentucky Fried Chicken realized that they needed more than Young & Rubicam, their mainstream agency, to market fried chicken to Black consumers, so they hired Mingo-Jones Advertising. For their new campaign, Mingo-Jones creative director Caroline Jones developed the tagline, "We do chicken right." The "we" is an implied association between KFC and Black people, suggesting that they shared a common understanding of the "right" way to cook delicious fried chicken, "a Black thing" that KFC learned how to do. The advertising message was a specific reassurance to Black consumers that the fried chicken served and sold by KFC would not disappoint them.

The campaign, which ran for more than a decade, was so successful that KFC went back and told their mainstream agency to change their advertising and embrace the Mingo-Jones tagline and campaign. The mainstream advertising would now use this coded short-hand to tell white America that KFC's chicken was just as good as if a Black maid was in the kitchen cooking it for them. I doubt that either the client or Young & Rubicam fully understood why that line worked so well, but they used it and America bought a lot more fried chicken.

We were rising way past just selling products. We saw our heroes being recognized and celebrated. Crest Toothpaste featured Nina Simone on TV. Langston Hughes drank Smirnoff in magazines. America was signaling that they knew – at last – what and who was important to Black people. We were becoming less and less invisible. Our perception of the world changed. Our world changed. Advertising did that. Advertising changed the world.

Why do I care so much about all of this? Why is this a passion for me? I have been in the advertising agency business for 45 years. Advertising is not just what I do. It is a part of who I am. If I wish to take some pride in what I do and who I am, I must do my part to reconnect us to our history.

This history is very, very personal for me. Years ago, while rummaging through my parents' basement, I found a store display card for Ballantine Beer that featured five beautiful African American models enjoying the beer. Ballantine was at its height in the 1940s and 1950s. Back then, it was twice the size of Anheuser Busch and was one of the largest privately held corporations in America.

The ad, which may have been shot by my photographer dad, included my mom, Rita Robinson, as one of the models. One of the very early ads to feature Black models for a major national brand, from America's first Black modeling agency, featured my mom.

But by 1966, my mom had left modeling behind and was a rising young professional at Time Incorporated, the parent company of Time Magazine, Life, and Sports Illustrated. She received a call from someone who was creating an ad campaign for a "big-time national brand" that would be targeted to Black consumers. The campaign would feature real people; attractive young, Black professionals, and authentic aspirational figures enjoying the product in their everyday life. They asked my mom if she would be interested. The product was Coca-Cola.

"Enjoying the product in their everyday life" meant shooting the ad in our home. The concept was that my mom was a successful businesswoman and a successful mom, and of course, Coca-Cola made it all possible. The ad was shot right in our living room, sitting on the floor in front of our fireplace. Mom (while holding a bottle of Coke) was playing chess with my older brother Michael, while I sat observing the game. I was nine years old at the time, and I must say that I was absolutely adorable. We looked like the perfect, upwardly mobile Negro family, which was exactly the point.

Here is the headline and copy from the ad:

Rita Robinson: She leads the two-career life.

With Coke to help her all the way. A successful publishing executive at Time, Inc., she's also a devoted wife and mother of three boys. Both careers require equal time. And yet, Mrs. Robinson manages with ease. Of course, she always has plenty of Coca-Cola on hand to help keep her going.

The ad ran in Ebony and a whole bunch of other Black publications in 1966. So, I was in the ad business even before the age of ten. And apparently, it stuck with me.

Most people begin adulthood wholly uncertain what they want to do with their life. But not me. In my gut and in my heart, advertising was always the right career choice for me. Over the past 45 years, I have worked for several outstanding agencies. I have worked for some of the most respected, most sophisticated and most demanding clients in the world, including Johnson & Johnson, Bristol Myers, Kraft Foods, Unilever, HBO, Coors Brewing Company, the U.S. Army and Diageo. Most executives would be proud to claim 1 or 2 new product launches in their career. I have helped develop and launch seven, all successful. I have started and run ad agencies, run advertising training programs, and lectured to both corporate and college audiences across the United States.

I have been in advertising since I was a child. And now, as I look back on my life in advertising, reflecting on the journey and the things I have seen and learned along the way, I find that the photo album is empty. So, this became my personal quest. Where can you go to see examples of the best and most successful advertising created for – and created by – Black Americans? The answer, I discovered, was nowhere.

There is no central archive, library or museum where a collection of this great and historic work is accessible or exhibited. As part of my research for this book, I purchased a copy of "Mid-Century Ads" by Taschen. Its 714 pages claim to be the most influential ads from the 1950s and 1960s, the period when Black advertisements began to exert real cultural power. Naturally, I wanted to see how many Black ads were included in the book. There were ten. 1.4%. I kept re-checking, thinking this must be a mistake. Where was our reflection in the mirror?

Even an extensive digital search unearthed only the smallest, isolated records spread across the country. Tragically, there is no publicly available archive or display of all of that achievement and excellence. No library or museum of award-winning Black advertising. It is invisible. Forgotten. The implications of this absence should not be minimized. We are absent from our own history. Where is the record of our story? If we have no past, then we have no present and no future. That is why this book is so damn important.

At a time when the advertising industry is just beginning to recognize and embrace its obligation to inclusion and representation, we find ourselves adrift with no link connecting us to our past, no record of the best work ever done in our industry.

Look, I know it's not cool to say you like ads. Everyone loves to say they hate ads. But everyone has an ad that makes them smile. Everyone has an ad that makes them cry. (There is an ad for "I Love New York" that aired a few weeks after 9/11, that made grown New Yorkers weep openly.) Everyone has an ad that makes your mouth hang open as you wonder how they did that. And everyone has an ad that they rush to share with someone else they care about.

In 2017, Procter & Gamble released a series of commercials under the campaign, "The Talk." If you had a heartbeat, if you had a soul, these commercials touched you.

None of these should be forgotten or ignored.

Esteemed poet, Sonia Sanchez (my former professor and mentor) once said,

"A people without a thorough knowledge of roots and history cannot move into the future, cannot rest in the proper chair of life."

It's time to correct that.

To create this book, I asked four of the most talented and experienced Black creative directors in the business to choose the ads that would appear in this book. This was simply too great a responsibility to leave to myself or to just one person. They are my expert advisory panel. Each creative director was assigned a specific decade and tasked to make their selections from that decade and tell us why they chose them. These are the results.

This book shares some of the best ads created by Black people and for Black people of the past 50 years. The images and messages chronicle a previously unrecorded chapter of the history of American business, fashion and culture. More than that, this book is a gallery of our self-portraits.

Invaluable reference tool. Cherished keepsake. Testament.