Sean DallasKidd

If you have aspirations of being an agency owner one day, then you might get some great insight from this week’s guest, Sean DallasKidd. Sean is the co-founder and chief creative officer of DemonstratexDDW, and he uses his decades of experience to help brands define their story and communicate with their audiences.

Sean told me more about his new role, sharing what it looks like to run an agency from the C-suite and help it stand out from the competition. We also delved into Sean’s background, where he spoke about attending SCAD, getting into the publishing world, and how his shift to agencies helped prepare him for his current leadership responsibilities. Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable has been the secret to Sean’s success, and it’s definitely paid off! (Big thanks to George McCalman for the introduction!)

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

Sean DallasKidd:
Hello, my name is Sean DallasKidd. I’m partner, chief creative officer at DemonstratexDDW. I would say what I do is make brands culturally relevant, and that takes place from brand development, naming, brand architecture systems over to go-to-market strategies. So really trying to create programs and experiences that resonate within culture, drive talkability with media and can be shared digitally and socially.

Maurice Cherry:
How are things going so far this year for you?

Sean DallasKidd:
This is a very interesting year. We’ve got lots of tensions in the US, globally, and so I think this year has been another year of quick adaption to socioeconomic sort of movement that’s happening around lots of new technologies that are turning on and a lot of disruption. So it’s a very interesting year to roll up your sleeves, learn a little bit more, and I’d say get creative.

Maurice Cherry:
Is there anything major that you really want to accomplish this year?

Sean DallasKidd:
Let’s see. This year, I think the main goals for me probably start with AI literacy from a sort of personal and business growth perspective, also want to take care of my people. I think as we’ve kind of seen on channels like LinkedIn, being able to create a business that can sustain over time, that puts its employees and its culture first, that’s one of my sort of big goals. And then obviously, working with brand partners that want to do very interesting, fun, provocative work.

Maurice Cherry:
Any sort of personal goals though for this year?

Sean DallasKidd:
Personal goals, to see more of the world. I’ve been historically a big traveler and the other thing that I love is food. So the over the course of the pandemic, have definitely been leaning more into traveling via my mouth and stomach. And so, this year I would like to actually get out into the world and see what’s happening in different countries and regions in the US.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk more about DemonstratexDDW. As you mentioned, you’re president and chief creative officer there, pretty recently as of last year, right?

Sean DallasKidd:
Correct, correct, correct. What’s really interesting with DemonstratexDDW is last year we announced the acquisition of Deutsch Design Works, DDW, which is a 27-year-old branding agency that was based in Sausalito. And so, what we did was acquire the agency for the brand building capabilities that they had, and we thought it was a great fit because Demonstrate focuses on go-to-market strategies and campaigns and programs, and so this gave us the opportunity to not only bring brands to life and market, but really start with the fundamentals, which you often find missing when you’re working with brands. So what are some of the cultural artifacts built into the brand DNA, the purpose, how do you find actions, and so we felt as though being able to help set the bar and the tone at the upfront and being able to pull that into a market will do nothing but good things for our brand partners that we work with.

Maurice Cherry:
What does a typical day look like for you?

Sean DallasKidd:
Ooh, let’s see. Phigital, it’s physical and digital. So Zoom meetings, hybrid meetings, writing some design, and then the most fun part of being a business owner is Excel spreadsheets of things. That’s one of the sort of growth spaces when you become more of an executive creative person is getting right with the Google Sheets.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, was it a big shift moving from partner to president once this acquisition happened?

Sean DallasKidd:
I would say it was different, but it’s been an accumulation of experiences over time. I think that my history starting in publishing, moving into earned media, moving into advertising has become a brick by brick process. The transition didn’t or hasn’t to date been as dramatic of a shift because I have a network to help support and educate me on components and parts I might not be as familiar with on day one. So I would say the transition wasn’t crazy, not to say it’s not crazy. You get what I’m saying?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, I would imagine whenever there’s a acquisition or things like that, you’re bringing more people in, of course, you’re merging company cultures, so there’s always going to be, I think, some clashing or things just as that acquisition tries to reach equilibrium.

Sean DallasKidd:
Exactly. You always have different ways and means, ways of working, different kinds of processes, lead times, you have different billing cycles, all sorts of stuff that you have to work out. I would say the best case scenario in any merger is a mullet. It’s business in the front and a rock show in the back because you’re trying to figure out how to get one set of systems to work with another without clashing in any sort of crazy way. But luckily for us, we’ve been able to make it through that stage and I think we’re starting to get into stride right now which is great.

Maurice Cherry:
And now you mentioned that part of your typical day still has some design in it. Are you still available to get hands on working with clients and with campaigns?

Sean DallasKidd:
Yes, yes. I feel as though I’ve always had, you would say, a problem with people who guard themselves off in the ivory tower, right? And so, one of the things I always tell our employees is that you want to have lived experience before you can recommend a strategy to someone, and in order to stay current, you have to do. So even if a design direction that I might develop doesn’t get picked, it helps me stay current on tools, timelines, amount of resources, different design trends so that when I’m talking to brand partners, I’m using language and referencing things that are happening now and not when I did it back in the day, 5, 10, 15 years ago.

Maurice Cherry:
I had an agency owner on here a few years back, I’m not going to call out who it was, but for folks who listen to the show, they’ll probably remember when this happened, but this person was mentioning that they have an agency and was talking about how they were the only Black agency owner that they knew and that. He’s like, “I don’t know about any other Black agency owners.” And I was like, “Well, that’s not true. I’m pretty sure there’s others out there because I’ve had them on the show.” But have you noticed during your career in advertising many other Black agency owners?

Sean DallasKidd:
I’ve definitely kept an eye out on it, but I will say it’s hard when your head’s down managing the work and the business to take the time to do the proper recon and outreach to folks. It’s a bit of a balancing of time and energy, but I definitely have seen the spark and the growth in that space. I know a couple of folks myself that have some small studios and then there’s some folks that I’ll look out to and see what they’re doing in the New York area that are really tearing it up which is great.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I mean, they’re out there. It’s certainly like you said, they’re at all sizes. Whether it’s small studios, big agencies, et cetera, we’re out there, but it’s about visibility as well too.

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah, I would say it’s visibility, and then there is, I would say, the system of agency and connection. And so, I think that… What’s a good way to phrase it? The hurdles for growing an agency to the point to where you get visibility is tricky when you’re not a part of the club to start. I could be a great designer, but do I have the connections to be considered or backing to be considered for some of these medium size, large term clients is a different story, right?

There’s a procurement process as you start to grow your agency and payment terms that shift, and do you have the financial backing and resources or credit to be able to invest that manpower into going through one of those processes for the chance to win the business, and then can you float the business in a way that can deal with payment terms of a larger client on a bigger scale, right? You might move from payment terms of I’ll do a project and things get paid out 15, 30 days, 40 days to 90 days to 180 days as you get bigger and bigger clients, and so you see there’s different hurdles in order to be able to even get a bite at the apple that you have. I think that’s one of the tensions that you face as a Black agency owner historically which is why I think that’s one of the reasons why you have a lot less of them with that level of visibility.

Maurice Cherry:
There’s clients out there that are paying net 180?

Sean DallasKidd:
Yes, there are. There was, forgot what the brand was and I won’t even mention it, but it was a CPG brand, consumer packaged good brand that got called out on Adweek and in the industry because I think they wanted their payment terms to be a year.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, come on. A year?

Sean DallasKidd:
A year. And so, when you talk about diversity, equity, inclusivity, you can have a very talented agency, just call it a graphic design branding agency, and you have a staff of five to seven people, you’re doing really good work, and normally you’re getting paid in 30 day terms. Now that bigger client might be like, “Oh, I’ll want to work with you,” but then they give you a term payment of, well, instead of you getting paid a month later, you’re going to get paid six months later. How’s that diversity and equity model going at scale at that point with these small shops? And so, those become some of the bigger systemic issues, I would say.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, you’re right, the balancing act of making sure that your clients and your cash flow is terrorist or at least coming in at a point where it appears to be consistent cash flow, especially when you’re paying employees, that’s tough. But net 365, that’s wild. Wow.

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah, that’s [inaudible 00:15:31].

Maurice Cherry:
What do you think makes DemonstratexDDW stand out from the competition?

Sean DallasKidd:
I would say the way in which we stand out from the competition is we take a culture-forward lens with the work that we do. What we really try to do is drive this term we call talkability amongst target audiences that we’re looking to drive brand awareness, consideration, or conversion with. We also focus on brand or business objectives, number one. We start there, and as an integrated agency, we do, like I said, brand, naming brand architecture, packaging, but we also do integrated communication. So that’s paid media, earned media, social, digital content strategy, traditional above the line advertising. And so, what we look at are all the different levers of communication to drive those business objectives and then based off the audiences that they’re trying to engage with, what’s true to the brand, and timeliness as well as budget, what’s the right mix to help drive that messaging home to help spark conversation overall.

That really stems from, again, that background that I’ve had of being in earned media, being in traditional advertising and being in publishing, and at each step always seeing that for some of these integrated programs or brand initiatives, the PR team is not in step with what the advertising is doing and the advertising team isn’t in step with what the PR team is doing. As we look at this crazy new communications landscape, it’s kind of like it’s better to look at it holistically and then go based off these sets of truths, what is our best route into the market, looking at all the different components and parts we have access to across paid, earned, shared, and owned channels.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, not to give away any trade secrets or anything that you’ve got cooking at DemonstratexDDW, but what do you think are some of the biggest opportunities in the creative industry right now?

Sean DallasKidd:
Well, for me, I definitely would say AI is the biggest opportunity. I know people are frightened about it, ChatGPT and everything else that’s happening, but I feel as though with any new technology there’s definitely going to be category leaders, new roles that come into the market, and so becoming literate in what AI is and can offer and how you can work with it is the biggest opportunity. Actually, in my mind, Web3 is AI because if you think about being able to become an expert prompter, a creative prompt strategist to work with an AI machine so that it can find information that can then be fact checked to create more nuanced, quickly adaptable copy or design territories for you to explore, I think that’s a really interesting job opportunity. There’s some cultural anthropology that you can mix in with it.

I think there’s a lot there because it helps you tie in not only sort of brand DNA, but it helps pull in to design trends that could be pulled live or recalibrated and personalized for specific audiences. I think it could be a very compelling tool, but at the same time, the literacy is important because you got to know what the trade off is, right? I think we all ran into social as consumers of it, not realizing that the trade off was us and privacy and our data. And so, everyone is excited to use things like ChatGPT right now, but one of the things for me is what’s the terms and conditions? Are they going to get a piece of it?

You go and say, “Oh, great, I’m going do a Super Bowl ad using ChatGPT.” Will they have some sort of way on the backend to identify that this copy or this concept came from that, and then they want points? So I think we need to really understand what the technology can do and also who’s making the technology because whoever’s making the technology is creating a certain lens on where the technology starts to look for information.

Maurice Cherry:
Now we’re recording this the Friday before the Super Bowl, and I bet you there’s going to be a Super Bowl ad that has some kind of ChatGPT, I don’t know, punchline or something in it. I feel like it’s got to be in there somewhere.

Sean DallasKidd:
Oh yeah, yeah. I would definitely say. There are agencies that are losing sleep right now because three weeks ago everyone was hot to trot with ChatGPT and Ryan Reynolds did a ChatGPT ad, and everything they’ve been working on in the last year just got thrown out the window and they’re going to do something so that they’re timely and can make a splash of some kind.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I mean, you know what we won’t see during the Super Bowl? Crypto ads. I remember those from last year, and boy, have the times changed.

Sean DallasKidd:
It’s funny. To your earlier question of staying in the work, the reason why you have to stay in the work is because you don’t want to give bad strategic advice to a brand partner. The easy trap for someone my age that got into social at the MySpace and early iteration of it and kind of settled, gave up on Facebook, does Instagram primarily to not stay current, right, to not check out TikTok and BeReal, and some of these sort of crypto based social channels and some of these niche social channels, you fall into the trap of recommending old and then you become irrelevant, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Sean DallasKidd:
And so, agency is all around the fight for relevancy, and I think the separator for us is knowing the nuance between relevancy for demo that everyone typically goes after 18 and 34 and nuance around the psychographic drivers and different folks because share of wallet goes from anywhere from a 10-year-old up to octatarian. People have needs, and the nuance comes from understanding what’s going to be that right audience that you need to tap into. So you have to stay current.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, absolutely. Now we’ll get more into your approach and your work a little bit later, but for now, let’s get into your background. You’re in San Francisco now, but you’re originally from D.C., is that right?

Sean DallasKidd:
Correct. Southeast D.C.

Maurice Cherry:
Tell me about growing up there.

Sean DallasKidd:
Well, let’s say the D.C. today is not the D.C. of the years I grew up. I grew up in ’80s in Reaganomic D.C. It was definitely a lot rougher around the edges in Southeast where I was. But I would say one of the things that always kept me curious and creative, I always loved to draw as a kid and since, and I was also a latchkey kid, so I chose to take advantage of latch keydom, if that’s a word, to take advantage of all the free museums and zoos and public transportation you had as a minor. I’d spend my summers going down to the National Mall, going over to the Smithsonian or Museum of Art, Portraiture Gallery, all that kind of stuff, and so that’s really what sparked and maintained my interest in creativity.

When I went to high school, I was lucky enough to get into an architecture program. So I actually started doing that in 9th, 10th grade, actually drawing plans and really had a great teacher. His name was Mr. Fotos. He was think of angry Santa Claus with a Greek accent. He taught us everything and was just an amazing teacher, and that allowed me to go to SCAD, Savannah College of Art and Design for architecture actually. I think I started on the sophomore year as a freshman just because of my portfolio and what I learned, and then got into graphic design and illustration along the way.

But the lesson he taught me, and I guess this has always been ingrained in me, he said, “If you’re going to be a great architect, you need to be able to design from the building down to the spoon.” And so, that was one of those sorts of thinking of where it’s not just about the whole, the big idea. It’s down to the details and the nuance, right? And so, that’s just been a philosophy that I’ve carried with me which helps you dig a little bit deeper to kind of understand how people move through spaces, or how people engage with an experience or a design, or how a message needs to be flexible to be able to sit in an internal communications program and be explained so that your workforce is on board, and how it can help inspire creative outputs out in the real world, whether it’s on the side of a bus or some sort of 4D, 3D billboard, or if it’s an augmented reality experience. So really being able to be transmedia and understanding does this thing have scale and flexibility.

Maurice Cherry:
What made you choose SCAD?

Sean DallasKidd:
Well, the city, downtown Savannah is beautiful. It’s hot in the summer, but I would say I loved the architecture there. The teachers are cool, the programs are really interesting, and for me, as you look at the, I would say the standard East Coast go-to design schools, the Pratts, the RISDs there was less… Well, I’ll just say, it was a less sense of entitlement and bourgeoisie in Savannah.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Okay.

Sean DallasKidd:
I felt like I could actually learn things and experiment versus do things the way the teacher did them.

Maurice Cherry:
Gotcha.

Sean DallasKidd:
I kind of saw a bit of that trap as I was looking at some of the different schools of… I think for anyone that’s taking a life drawing class or something like that, you definitely have those teachers that are like, “This is the way to do it,” and it happens to be the way that they do it. And so, I definitely wanted a place where it seemed like I could be more collaborative with different departments as well, and so SCAD just really stood out in that way.

Maurice Cherry:
Gotcha. I gotcha. Yeah, you were in college, I think we were in college right around the same time. You started in like the late ’90s, like ’99?

Sean DallasKidd:
Yep, yep, yep.

Maurice Cherry:
Graduated in ’03?

Sean DallasKidd:
Yep. [inaudible 00:27:33].

Maurice Cherry:
Yep. Same here. Same here. Tell me what you remember from that time.

Sean DallasKidd:
Ooh. Well, when you say that, the first thing that comes to my mind was 9/11, just because I remember that moment very specifically. I was an RA at SCAD and woke up to one of the towers falling.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Sean DallasKidd:
That was just a trip of a day, and the ripple effects of that are felt today. This is why we take our shoes off at airports, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Sean DallasKidd:
So 20-something years later. But beyond that, I would say some of the things that really were interesting to me at the time was the evolution in music. I remember there’s a funny moment when I was walking around River Street or that sort of downtown area in Savannah, and I saw a bus outside for this band called OutKast, and I went, “I wonder what they’re all about.” Little did I know that the OutKast was coming to us all, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Sean DallasKidd:
It’s the same sort of time when the Gorillaz made their first album which is just a mix of every kind of genre possible with layered animation for this sort of virtual band, and they’re still making amazing music now. And so, it was just a really, I think, funky time because it was this age, similar to now, of transition, right? So when you’re a designer, a couple years prior, everyone was using hand tools to do typography and all that sort of stuff, and we were there at that moment when it was like, “Okay, so we’re getting into Pork Express and we’re doing Adobe,” and you’re learning these new programs. Now in hindsight, you know those teachers barely knew those programs too because it was so new.

And so, you’re getting into the age of digital publishing in the middle of this sort of like what’s happening in the world because everything, America’s the safe space and now this thing happened, and everyone’s unified for six months. It was just a wild time. Then you’ve got this technological boom happening, and then you get sped out into this world where a couple years later, an iPhone pops out. It’s a very reminiscent, minus the pandemic part, what’s happening today. It was just chaos.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, you really had to be around during that time to realize the gargantuan amount of technological advancements that have happened from 2000 to now. I mean, you talk about iPhone, but then just a whole bunch of other technologies and stuff, even the way that we do design online. I mean, back then design was slicing up a table in Dreamweaver and posting that on the web. Now it’s all browser with layouts and flexbox and all that sort of stuff, not to mention other service side technologies and stuff.

I mean, I was in college in ’99. I had started as a computer science major, computer science, computer engineering because I wanted to be a web designer. I had cut my teeth in high school in the computer lab at my mom’s job because she taught at a college. I cut my teeth reverse engineering websites, and I made something on GeoCities, and my mom was like, “Why you putting our address on the internet?” I was like, “We live in rural Alabama. Nobody knows who we are.” But I went to school, went to Morehouse, majoring in computer science thinking that was web design, right?

Sean DallasKidd:
Well, it was. I mean, I remember I had to do HTML coding because I was taking some program classes, and for people who don’t know, there’s a program called BASIC and Pascal.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh yeah, yeah.

Sean DallasKidd:
C++. I was taking all those. The internet back in the day was code. ,And then you’d upload images and like you said, you’re doing slices and all that, and now you’ve got… But what was cool about that is lacking today, it feels like to me, is that there was all this experimentation, right? You’d have these Easter eggs on the side, you’re like, “[inaudible 00:31:50] scroll left or right, up or down. Am I navigating through this weird wormhole?” Whereas now everything’s on these sort of modular boxes, and so there’s shades of vanilla essentially, and then however powerful your imagery is, but people are also picking up the same sort of trends on en masse at this point, which is one of the sort of fears or outputs that might become AI down the line is Marvel movie number 856.

Maurice Cherry:
Right.

Sean DallasKidd:
But I think back then there was a great experimentation and we were all sort of learning and playing around, and I think that was probably part of the happiness people were experiencing originally with sort of the Web3, NFT space, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Sean DallasKidd:
It kind of had that same energy. It had some wrinkles to it. It had a little bit of dirt in the fingernails of we’re figuring it out and we’re going to make art and it’s going to be awesome and we’ve got our own closed loop, and then [inaudible 00:33:00].

Maurice Cherry:
I attended a metaverse conference in the metaverse. Was that last year? I think it was last year. It was last year I’m thinking about it, yeah. I attended a metaverse conference in the metaverse, and one of the sessions this guy was talking about digital real estate, and he’s like, “Yeah, we have this digital world and you can buy these plots of digital land.” Somebody during the presentation bought a $10,000 plot of land that only exists in the metaverse, and it made me think of, do you remember The Million Dollar Homepage?

Sean DallasKidd:
No.

Maurice Cherry:
The Million Dollar Homepage was basically, it’s probably still online, to be completely honest, but it’s basically you bought pixels on this homepage. Say you had a 88 x 31 ad tile or something, you could buy the area of that 88 x 31, and it’s like a dollar per pixel and put an ad up there. People were just buying spaces and putting up all kinds of stuff on there, and that’s what it felt like. It’s like this digital real estate that doesn’t really exist, but you’re kind of buying into it for the hopes of it becoming something in the future which I guess is like real real estate.

Sean DallasKidd:
It’s so funny to me, the whole digital real estate now. Whatever it starts to morph into in five, 10 years will be what it is, and everyone will come back to this podcast episode and laugh at me for saying it, but the reason why real estate exists and has value in real life is because we live on one planet. It’s literally a finite resource, right? This is where we breathe, hopefully, and have food and light and all this sort of other great stuff. And so, there’s X amount of space for X amount of people, and there are prime pieces on it.

In a virtual world, much like if we didn’t have to worry about time or eating or breathing, we live in this vastly, huge universe like in the real world. The digital world is the same thing where it’s like it’s infinitely large. There’s, in actuality, no real prime real estate because you can own one square inch and have it feel like a million square inches or you can just go to a different section of virtual town and make your own thing. Yeah, the real estate part is quite interesting in terms of how they attain it or how they attribute an X, Y, Z coordinate to it. It’s not a place.

Right, right. Yeah, in a way, it just sort of felt like it was kind of just like you’re buying a plot in a subdivision because it only exists in that particular metaversal world that we happen to be in, because the metaverse is many different worlds. It’s not, as you’re sort of saying how earth is one finite resource, the metaverse is a whole bunch of stuff.
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah, I could literally make my own planet in the metaverse, in my own solar system in the metaverse. So why do I need to buy a 50 pixel by 800 pixel piece of property across the street from Snoop Dogg’s one place?

Maurice Cherry:
Right. And Sean, he paid $10,000 for it, and the guy was wearing an NFT suit or something, and he kept showing off like, “I can show off my NFTs on my suit.” I was like, “This is giving me a headache. I don’t even know what to make of this.”

Sean DallasKidd:
That’s probably a slam. I think there’s always what’s presented on the surface and then what’s happening on the back end and part [inaudible 00:36:48], “Hmm, did you really buy that? Was that a plan?” Like, okay.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Those early days, in the 2000s, as you mentioned, on the web, it was really sort of experimental with publishing and stuff. Now after you graduated, tell me about your early career because you got into media and publishing afterwards, right?

Sean DallasKidd:
Correct. Yeah, so I had a couple of gigs prior, but I would say my professional career really kickstarted in the publishing world. I worked for Future Publishing, Ziff Davis, and Maker Media. I started over at Ziff Davis and now Ziff Davis was really about video game magazines. I was working on their PC focused gaming magazine and then started getting really curious. I’ve always been, I would say, hardworking and curious, sort of always looking to push my edges. And so, I was proactive about reaching out to other publisher or other magazines if they needed help designing pages. And so, I was very proactive and worked with Electronic Gaming Monthly or PlayStation Magazine or Xbox Magazine and all these things just so I can get more experience quicker.

Then I transitioned over to Future, which is like the sort of, they were essentially Coca-Cola and Pepsi as holders, and so they had the reverse version of everything. While I was at Future, I started their custom content division, and so that was working directly with brands to develop branded, independent magazines, websites, apps, podcasts for folks like Best Buy or NVIDIA, brands like Paul Reed Smith Guitars, did a crocheting magazine, all sorts of stuff. And so, that helped do a couple of things of giving me a brief and a business objective for the brands we did partner with, and then gave me the license to concept and develop an entire magazine, for example, that would service those needs and what those sections would be and sort of design language that would go into that, not only that printed piece, but the digital footprint as well.

And so, it was a really great time because at that moment we were making the transition, the death of print was happening, as I said at the time, and so not only were we doing magazines, but it allowed me to do websites, it allowed me to do apps because the iPad had come out. And so, we were looking at how do you translate brand DNA into a digital platform space, which was a really interesting moment that I would call back to the sort of tensions that are happening today. It was really weird because people had this sort of cognitive dissidents between this magazine I’m holding is the brand. And it’s like, no, the brand is the brand, what your brand stands for and your tone and how you sort of approach things and it happens to be a magazine, but it can also be a website, it can also be a podcast, it can also be an iPad app or a tablet app.

You can start to see the split of people that didn’t want to adopt or learn, and then the people who leaned into it, and I’m always been the one that just leans into the chaos because it never looks as crazy on the inside as it does on the outside, and that’s where all the opportunity is. And so, that was a really great moment to go and take that experience over to Maker, because instead of working on multiple brands, this was making one brand that had the business, Maker Media, it had the printed magazines, Craft Magazine and Make Magazine. It then had a body of different websites and then it also had Maker Fair.

And so, now you’re looking at how do you take a brand and have it stretch out into these various forms because they found themselves there and then create order around it and really sort of bring it home so that it could grow and thrive in the midst of the quote, unquote, “death of print.” It’s still around. It’s still doing very well because I think part of it was learning that your brand, believing and knowing that the brand is bigger than the mass at the end of the day or has the ability to be.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, was it kind of a shift to go from working in these publishing companies to going in-house, working with agencies? You also have worked with JWT, worked for FleishmanHillard, now you’re at DemonstratexDDW. Was it a big shift making that change?

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah, I mean, the days are different. It was interesting. I feel like I had a soft entry, I’ll call it soft, because before going into fully external agencies, I worked in-house at Discovery Communications. They did Discovery Channel, Learning Channel, Animal Planet, and so I was helping with the Investigation Discovery launch and show launches there as well as Velocity Network, and so that was the agency inside. You had to develop a pitch concept, pitch it to the marketing team or the showrunner and come up with marketing campaigns that way. And so, that was a good segue before going fully agency because FleishmanHillard is one of the big global PR agencies, so was J Walter Thompson which is now Wunderman Thompson, and so one’s Omnicom, a sort of agency holding company.

I guess I always did this. I went from Pepsi to Coke or Coke to Pepsi, and so went over to J Walter Thompson and did the same thing, but I think the transition at Discovery really helped out because it gave me insight and understanding on what are the different outputs that come in advertising, what the digital lens, what are people looking for in terms of making commercials or campaign programs. It started to really give me the language and became a good test bed for me in that transition.

Fleishman gave me, I would say, my PhD in quickly pivoting your mind. I worked not only nationally but sort of globally as well. And so, I worked on everything from sort of data security to consumer goods to FinTech to healthcare, you name it. And so, I would get briefs that range from internal communications programs, crisis management programs, general awareness programs, and really focused on creative and content strategy while I was there. At nine o’clock in the morning, you’re talking about the future of electronic payments in developing countries. In the afternoon, you’re talking about the future of medicine. And so, your brain has to be able to pivot because you’re going to be in a room with a bunch of C-suite executives talking about and really having to understand the background information and sort of ways in which culture was moving.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, from this point where you’re at in your career, what does the future of agencies look like?

Sean DallasKidd:
I would say that the future of agency is going to have to be personal. I think that interesting part, and this is why I think AI literacy is so important right now is it gives smaller, medium-sized agencies an opportunity to scale up outputs if done properly, if integrated properly into your workflows. I think that because we’re going to have so many different digital touchpoints that are super niche, you’re going to have to get very personal and personalized in your messaging. I think that the physical interaction and experience is going to be highly coveted, and people are going to appreciate that a lot more because no matter how amazing that virtual experience is, people still need, just have a genetic need to engage with other people and smell the same thing, be in the same room in a very real way. That’s not to say that in 20 years there’ll be some matrix version of that reality, but until then I do think that people getting together and engaging with each other is going to be super important, but I do think those will be more curated, more selective kinds of engagement points with folks.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I think there’s been so much talk about data-driven outcomes and seeing what the data says and all that, but at the end of the day, you’re still dealing with people. I mean, even with this AI stuff, I see so many videos on TikTok and YouTube about people telling you how to craft the perfect prompts for GPT and all this sort of stuff, and I think what it’s still boils down to is that at the end of the day humans are still the entry point.

Sean DallasKidd:
Well, you’re still going to be the decision-maker at the end of the day.

Maurice Cherry:
Right, right.

Sean DallasKidd:
If you are essentially at a 12th grade level and GPTed your way into life and you find yourself there as a 26-year-old, really do the math on that. You started out and you GPTed your way from 18 to 26, the wheels are going to fall out from under you because at a certain point you’re going to be in a room and you need to be able to answer the questions and defend the solution to someone else, and if you don’t know your stuff, because you’ve been essentially the parrot for this fishnet of an answer that your AI gave you, the trust won’t be there. That’s what all the access and the ability to repeat opportunity comes from earning, cultivating trust over time, and that’s a human thing. And so, if you get to the point to where you are pointless, then you won’t as a person have any need to be in the room with people. And so, I don’t know if I lost the point on that one, but I do think that’s a bit of-

Maurice Cherry:
No, no, no, I think you’re spot on.

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah, it’s a balance.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What have been some of the most important lessons you’ve learned in your career?

Sean DallasKidd:
Being comfortable, getting uncomfortable is the most important lesson I’ve learned in my career. I’ve touched on it over the course of our conversation, but being proactive when transition happens, jumping into the chaos, because I firmly believe that’s where the opportunity lies, and when that new messy space opens, if you’re over there first, you get to make mistakes on a small scale, right? Imagine putting out a bad tweet when Twitter just started or putting up a lame Instagram post when Instagram first started. That’s the best time to do it. You can learn how the audience interacts on the channel and get feedback and get better. You do not want to be doing that high wire act in the middle of the Super Bowl for the first time.

Getting into that space, understanding the language, understanding the nuance and the flow of energy there gets you smart on it because people will eventually come there because that’s where all the changes, that’s where all the new is, that’s where all sort of cultural influencers are being born and sparking new kinds of innovations. Eventually everyone’s going to get there. So always being comfortable with getting uncomfortable is hard, it’s uncomfortable, but I think the reward there is the most fruitful for a long-term career as a creative, not as somebody.

I think you’ve probably seen this over the years, there’s lots of people who used to be a designer, used to be a creative, used to be in marketing, and the difference is not just some of the systemic stuff, but it’s staying relevant, right? In order to stay relevant in today, you need to be smarter than what’s happening today, which means you need to be ahead of the curve a little bit, and that’s a hard thing to keep up with. You got to be the Lil Wayne of the industry. He’s been doing it since he was 12, so he just stays up there. And so, you got to be the Lil Wayne of whatever you’re doing in life.

Maurice Cherry:
I still remember Lil Wayne from those CDs in the ’90s, No Limit and everything.

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Sean DallasKidd:
And Cash Money.

Maurice Cherry:
Cash Money.

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
What is it that keeps you motivated and inspired? Because I can imagine this is not an easy thing to sustain, this kind of thing with being comfortable with being uncomfortable because you’re sort of always kind of jolted out of balance in a way, I would imagine.

Sean DallasKidd:
I mean, to be very straightforward with it, family keeps me motivated. I have a kiddo and she is a spark of joy, and so that situation keeps me motivated to keep wanting to do better from just a sort of fundamental lizard brain section of my mind. Creating room and space and opportunity for her and creating, I’ve seen my dad do that so I can do it and I can one-up him, right? Having that yard stick in front of you I think is a great driver.

Then I would say for me another motivator is just I am curious and I feel like my brain is creatively broken. It’s like a faucet that doesn’t turn off. You hear the conversations with people going through these dry periods, and I’m not trying to toot my own horn or anything there, but it’s like my brain just does not shut up with things it wants to do or think about or see. I think that comes from living that, trying to have a more balanced life of… And you ask me the question, what are some of the hobbies and things that you like to do that kind of spark you, those are the sustaining breaths that help keep passion and curiosity going.

And so, when you cultivate or try to cultivate a life where Monday is not a dreadful day, Monday is just Monday, and now the dreadful part of the day is, well, now people are going to expect me to respond to an email because it’s not the weekend. But at the end of the day, I’m writing or designing or talking to people or trying a product or trying this or going to an event. I’m like, “That’s dope.” It’s a good thing and it just takes effort to stay on the ball, but I think that just comes with it.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, who are some of the people that have helped you reach this point in your career?

Sean DallasKidd:
I would like to think myself for… No, I was like, I couldn’t remember that new [inaudible 00:53:25] quote. I’d like to thank myself for the hard work. But honestly, I think it’s a bit of that, just you got to know your center and you got to know your truth and you got to play to your strengths and you got to build up your weaknesses. I’ve been blessed in meeting very kind people that have cracked the door open and given me opportunity. That comes again from the fact that proving or being in that sort of energy state where you are proactively looking to grow. I’m more willing to open the door to someone that I see that’s working hard and looking to grow and looking to be challenged than someone that’s sitting on their laurels. Luckily, the people I’ve engaged with were willing to open the door.

Then I have a great network of friends and colleagues to be able to bounce ideas off of, hear what they’re going through, take lessons from that, and make connections and references. You can’t do everything by yourself. It’s one of the sort of points that I always teach. I always stress to my daughter, she wants to become the next Hayao Miyazaki. And I go, “That’s awesome, and Hayao Miyazaki not only is a great drawer and a writer and all that sort of stuff, but he also has studio space that he has to pay mortgage on and employees, and so he has a CFO and he is got da, da, da, da, da. He is got to work about licensing deals and everything else.” So it’s like you got to have a good network as well and make those connections.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What kind of work do you want to be doing?

Sean DallasKidd:
Man, on my bucket list, I want to do some shit in space. I really want to do something in space.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Sean DallasKidd:
I’m going to put that energy out on this podcast. If somebody knows someone in any country that’s doing something in space in the next five years, it would be great. I think that would just be a trip. I don’t want to go underwater. I don’t want to go into any of that deep sea stuff, but space would be kind of just like I feel like that would be a mind-altering, crazy thing and inspirational thing to do. Something dealing with logistics. Doesn’t that sound cool? I’m working on an interplanetary logistics program, or I’m like, this new bougie hotel that’s in low earth orbit, and so I’ve got to do a promotional campaign or video or collaboration thing. That just sounds dope to me. So that’s what I want to do.

Maurice Cherry:
I interned with NASA for two years when I was in college. So it’s funny because we were talking about college and you mentioned 9/11. 9/11 was one of a turning point for me too because the program that I was in, the way they had it set up, it was based off of Ronald E. McNair who was in the Challenger explosion, and so his family put together a foundation, whatever. So I was a McNair scholar at Morehouse, and the part of the NASA thing was that you interned at NASA for two years and then afterwards you basically had your pick of any NASA facility to work for. So I was like, I had done my first one in California, did my second one in Alabama, and I thought I was all set, until 9/11 happened, and then the funding shifted towards the creation of this new department called the Department of Homeland Security.

Sean DallasKidd:
[inaudible 00:57:22].

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, and they were like, “Yeah.” I remember they called us all into the office and they were like, “Yeah, the seniors will still be able to go forward to work at NASA facilities,” and I was a junior at the time, but they were like, “the rest of y’all, you’re on your own.” I was like, “Oh man.” I say all of that to say that I think now, certainly 20-plus years in the future from when I graduated, there’s probably more opportunities for designers to work with NASA and space than there were back then. I think back then it was still pretty, I don’t want to say confined to academia, but you’ve got even people on TikTok who are budding astrophysicists that are doing stuff that has to deal with space and everything. I feel like it’s possible.

Sean DallasKidd:
Well, yeah, I mean, definitely think it’s possible. My mom actually used to work for NASA. She’s a mathematician, and I think the terms they used to use back in the day though for people like my mom was data analysts.

Maurice Cherry:
Ah, yeah.

Sean DallasKidd:
Give them a data analyst title versus a data scientist title, save yourself a hundred thousand dollars, and they’ll hide those fingers in the back somewhere. I do think that the opportunity today is a lot more open, but the work, it’ll be curious to see how willing people are to do the work because you always see do the work as the hashtag, but the sort of underlying effort, sustained effort of doing the work is the great equalizer in a lot of ways. You will get tired and then you’ve got to get that seventh and eighth wind at the end of the day.

Maurice Cherry:
Look at you. Your mom was a hidden figure. Look at that.

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah, it was weird. It’s funny, I’ve got these old photos and stuff of her on some airplane thing.

Maurice Cherry:
Really?

Sean DallasKidd:
Well, the thing about D.C. is back when I was there in the ’80s, it’s like a bunch of little Black ladies that run all the sort of inner operations of the government at a certain point because they were all the secretaries and they were working in, they were the data analyst or this kind of thing, and they were just working in the back.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Sean DallasKidd:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to kind of wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, about your work, and everything? Where can they find that online?

Sean DallasKidd:
I am so Google-able at this point in time. You can literally type my name in, but you can follow me at kidisgoat, K-I-D is goat, G-O-A-T. You can look at the company, we are demonstrate.com or you can look at ddw.com if you’re interested in branding work. But that’s where you can find me. Look me up, I’m out there.

Maurice Cherry:
All right, sounds good. Sean DallasKidd, I want to thank you so, so, so much for coming on the show. I really think that your authenticity and the passion that you have for your work really shines through. I mean, even just from your early days of getting into publishing with the work that you’re doing now for Demonstrate, I like what you said about having to be in the work so you kind of stay one step ahead. It’s that sort of thinking that certainly I think is going to take all of us as creatives far, but certainly it’s been such a boon for your career and for your life, and I’m really excited to see the Sean DallasKidd project in low earth orbit one day. I think it’s going to happen.

Sean DallasKidd:
Thank you so much.

Maurice Cherry:
So thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Sean DallasKidd:
All right, thank you.

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André Smith

Networking is a valuable skill for designers and creatives to have, which interestingly enough is how I met this week’s guest: André Smith! His career has touched several fields — advertising, music, education — and now he runs his own firm called Appendix where he offers strategy and branding services for companies from all over the world.

We talked about his recent shift back into agency life, and he shared a bit about his day-to-day work and gave a peek into his creative process. André also spoke about his time at Morehouse, his early post-grad career, attending NYU, and his forays into art curation and being a university lecturer. André’s advice to Black creatives is simple: learn to think wider and deeper, and you’ll find many opportunities to succeed. How will you expand your horizons?

Happy Holidays from all of us here at Revision Path!

Transcript

Full Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

André Smith:
Hey, my name is André Smith. People call me Dre. I am a strategist, an educator, and a recovering curator.

Maurice Cherry:
A recovering curator?

André Smith:
A lot of my work has to do with… I guess you could say the confluence of the fine arts, academia and advertising. And I’ve been in and out of curatorial since about 2015, but I had a bit of a pivot in about 2018 when my gallery became the classroom and my canvas became a syllabus.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. We’ll get into that a little bit later. I was just curious you threw it out there like that. How has 2021 been going for you so far?

André Smith:
Better than 2020. 2020 was dope though, it was like a victory lap for me. If you listen to Nipsey, you know what I mean. Yeah, I went from the classroom to brand side for an e-learning platform and then agency side for agency of the year 2020, and what was considerably the hardest year for any business, particularly marketing, media and comms. That was pretty cool. And 2021’s been better still.

Maurice Cherry:
Has it been hard kind of adjusting to working from home?

André Smith:
Not per se. When I was teaching at UYC, that’s when the pandemic had hit and I began working from home doing hour and hour and 15-minute long sessions with 40-50 students. So, I got used to seeing [inaudible 00:04:28] pretty effectively. And then working from after class, which was based in San Francisco at the time when I was based in Chicago, had to perform servicing those hours. And then when I was with Martin, I was in San Francisco servicing hours on the East Coast. Like I said, better still.

Maurice Cherry:
Man, you were burning the candle at both ends, it sounds like.

André Smith:
Yeah. I have a seven-month old, Chloe. So, that plays a role too, and day by day, week by week, month by month, she’s crawling and starting to stand on her own now. Working from home… you’re adjusting on multiple clocks. Hybrid work model, the work from home model as well as the growing baby model.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Talk to me about your agency, Appendix. What’s an average day like for you?

André Smith:
Okay, yeah. I opened up Appendix… Think of it like a boat shop for go fast boats, right? For planning services and future proof strategies. I started Appendix, I want to say February. So, basically right after Martin. And a day at Appendix is waking up around 7:00 AM, watching some Bloomberg, watching some CNBC, spending about an hour on my phone, and then seeing what the algorithm feeds me depending on what platform I start with first. Start the rabbit hole of what I’m researching.

André Smith:
And then my research might lead to me thinking about someone in my network and that might lead to a text. And then that reply will lead to, “Dude. I was just thinking about you.” Or what I say to them., and they said, “That’s crazy. I just had a conversation about that in my Slack.” That’ll lead to leads, right? And getting those leads warm, especially through the network, on a Monday might lead to a conversation about a brief by a Wednesday, and that might lead to paperwork, et cetera, by a Friday. The Tuesday and Thursday are spent holding it down at home, tracking those things and getting other things in the queue.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, your work involves brand strategy, it involves culture research. And it also sounds like it involves some creative development as well. When you have a new project that comes in, what does that process look like? How do you approach it?

André Smith:
My practice area is really… at pure brand wise is really a lot to do with brand purpose, brand casting, just really a lot around inclusion and diversity, branded entertainment and social impact. And as far as brand strategy in particular, it’s really a lot to do with organic social, paid social, social commerce, and experiential.

André Smith:
Where that sits, to answer your question, is it’s a lot more to do with what is the opportunity or the brief asking of my skillset, how do I do design or strategize a vector of what’s relevant and what’s relative for that opportunity?

Maurice Cherry:
What are the best types of clients for you to work with? Because I mean, it sounds like your work really can span a number of different fields.

André Smith:
Oh, certainly. Yeah. Just most recently, I did some brand identity work for Gallery 88. That’s that’s spearheaded by Alex Delotch Davis. She’s an inaugural member of Hennessy’s Never Stop, Never Settle cohort. I do a lot of brand identity work for Kei Henderson. She used to manage 21 Savage. Now she manages Asiahn, who’s the voice of Karma on Karma’s World, on Netflix. And I’ve also most recently consulted for CSOs and CMOs at different agencies. So, working on Cricket Wireless, and Quilted Northern, for AT&T and Georgia Pacific respectively for the CSO of their AOR, likewise at Martin in that way, for Haynes UPS and Unilever’s acts.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, before you were at Appendix, you just now mentioned the Martin Agency, you mentioned Masterclass a little bit earlier. What did you kind of gain from those experiences that you still use today?

André Smith:
The CEO at Martin, Kristen Cavallo, she has a phrase, “It takes tension to get attention.” Of all the amazing gems, I picked up working across $3.5 million worth of marque accounts, that’s the phrase that always sticks out. That’s the phrase I think I draw from, my best memory from working at Martin, and learning that in numerous context, whether that was on the accounts that I was staffed on as the planning director for the social studio, or if it was more project things like AmeriSave or Happy Egg or [inaudible 00:09:14].

André Smith:
Prior to that, the most recent experience Masterclass phrase or takeaway or big thing from that. I think I heard on a Zoom, someone said, “There are different dials to diversity and knowing at least that that’s part of the energy or attitude or thinking,” at a tech company, essentially, was great for me. I think I reflected a lot of what I was most happy about with Masterclass and that [inaudible 00:09:43] feature I did back in February.

André Smith:
And prior to Masterclass, where I was consulting for their CMO, I was in the classroom at UIC. And I think a big favorite quote of mine experience that can be put into a quote or alchemized into a quote is, “Google, and then go outside.” My friend, Andy Deza, said that when he came to guest lecture for me amongst a host of other awesome guest lecturers, like Joe Fresh Goods, Ferris Bueller, Sam Kirk, Midori McSwain, who’s now the AD of a brand strategy at Spotify. But that was, I think, my most favor quote, because that was something that the students would say back to me over the semester and the students who would then take me for other classes.

André Smith:
When I was at UIC, I taught consumer behavior, global marketing and advertising and sales. But the students who started with me in taking me for consumer behavior, who took me for global marketing and ad sales, that’s a phrase that they would impart back to me. So, it was nice to see the ripples in the pond, I guess.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It’s interesting; sometimes with those past experiences you have to be out of them to really learn or know what you’ve learned from them. Because when you’re in it, it’s a bit of a different

André Smith:
Couldn’t agree more.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s switch gears here a little bit. We’ve learned a bit about kind of the work you’re doing now, but let’s hear more about your origin story. Tell me where you grew up.

André Smith:
I think of myself as a global citizen, but at the end of the day, I’m still just a kid from the North Bronx. I grew up just shy of Gun Hill Road on Burke Avenue in, I guess what used to be very Italian and Jewish [inaudible 00:11:32], ’86 is my year. By the time I was on the scene, right, I came to life, it was predominantly Caribbean. And to this day it still is very much Jamaican, Trinidadian, Guyanese families that historically have occupied these homes. Generationally have occupied these homes.

André Smith:
And my origins, I guess, besides being kid who grew up in the Bronx and still frequently go back, even just to sit in a car in front of the house I grew up in, just to keep that connection, I guess. My origins that I grew up in the Bronx is… Well, a lot of people don’t know maybe about me because they see me in art galleries or they see me in advertising or they see me in the classroom is I started in music.

André Smith:
My mom’s younger brother is a successful music director and bassist. He went to [inaudible 00:12:23] purchase with Amanda Seals, Amanda Diva, Tiffany from Insecure. And short story about him, he had the opportunity to tour with Lauryn Hill and the Fugees’ global thing. It was going to be his first day; it was going to be in Japan, but it was between going on tour with the Fugees and going to college. And my mom was like, “If you get your teaching license and you get your degree, you can tour with anyone and you can also have the backup plan of having other options.”

André Smith:
He was torn about it, but decided to go to school and pass on the opportunity. At the same time, my dad’s older brother had a recording studio in his basement and he would have local acts who end appearing on the halftime show on NYU or City Hall Radio. He worked with [inaudible 00:13:11] or artists like that. And I guess between seeing my mom’s younger brother’s conflicts between the bright lights and the steady road, and my dad’s older brother’s approach of having a steady road, but also having an entrepreneurial spirit because he split the basement with my aunt who had a hair salon. So, the basement of that house was basically all business, right? It was like cash and carry operation.

André Smith:
That had a very big impression on me, I think. Understanding how to keep a main line, but also keep your eyes open for other bigger opportunities. And then talking about looking for bigger opportunities., I was always a ferocious free, even if I didn’t like class and I loved reading XXL, and The Source and Bonsu Thompson, Jason Rodriguez, whether or not… I’m calling them as friends.

André Smith:
But reading their words in those magazines about the artist that I was starstruck by, that played a very big role in my understanding of the music business. So, when I had the opportunity to meet Joaquin Waah Dean, one of the co-founders of Rough Riders, of all places at a Cheesecake Factory. I can’t say I needed the right thing to say, but I think my passion and my sense of understanding was evident to him.

André Smith:
So, short story, I ended up interning on Jadakiss’ sophomore album, Kiss of Death. And that had me working out of Worldwide Plaza. And if you know music, that’s the headquarters for Def Jam and the labels that they distribute for [inaudible 00:14:50]. And I spent my senior year of high school interning on Kiss of Death, and I spent the summer before college going to Morehouse and turning on [inaudible 00:14:57] Purple Haze. I didn’t have a favorite in the verses bible between The Lox and the Dip Set until Jadakiss said, “Cam lives in Miami.”

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like early on you kind of were more geared towards music because of the exposures from your uncles to recording artists, to recording studio, but you got to Morehouse, you didn’t study music. What’d you study at Morehouse?

André Smith:
At Morehouse, I went into study political science and Keith Hollandsworth told me, “That’s not for you.” And then I heard about Phillip Johnson and then I realized, “Maybe not.” And I thought it was going to be business marketing, but me and business policy weren’t going to get along.

André Smith:
But then after interning at Bloomberg in my sophomore year, I came to realize that my real skillset and my strong suit was really more in comms. And I realized that the sharp edge of the Sabre for me would be English through degree, right? And focusing comms as my way into marketing.

André Smith:
But the road doing music… And the other thing that I really loved about my time as an A&R intern for Alimah Shamsid-Dean, who ironically up would later go on to work at Translation with Steve Stoute. What I loved about the work I was doing, or the work I was learning, coming to understand was where all the dots connected, right? Fast forward, leader strategy. But also, my eye, my ear for product placement, it was always mentioned in bars and raps, but then you also go on to see it in music videos.

André Smith:
And I was wondering, “How’d that get there?” Being a Jamaica kid from the Bronx, when my mom [inaudible 00:16:36] spent time with my granddad, I would always end up in the box with all the James Bond movies, 007. And it was always just like the best product placement. Whether it was the Aston Martin or it was the Omega, or it was the Bright Lane, or it was the BMW, or it was even Avis, talking about cars. But I was always groomed or cured to see where things connect and where brands fit.

Maurice Cherry:
Interesting.

André Smith:
And going into college in Atlanta at that time, 2004, Vote or Die was the brand on campus. Morehouse’s the brand and Spellman is the brand. Not just because they’re the brand and [inaudible 00:17:15], but nostalgically, they’re the brand because you see them in Boys in the Hood. You see them on the Fresh Prince. You see them referenced on a different world. You might see it pop up in Living Single.

André Smith:
For me, I distinctly remember in my senior year, I was deciding which school to go to, and I graduate high school with honors, so I had options, but I chose Morehouse for… I think influenced by two big scenes. I’ll never forget there was a couple scenes or episodes of Making the Band where Puffy, who’s ironically from my hometown… I moved from the Bronx, I moved to Mount Vernon, and Mount Vernon’s the hometown of a couple of legacy individuals, most notably DMX Rest in Peace, but also Sean Holmes and Denzel Washington, whose son, John David, went to Morehouse and Denzel’s house [inaudible 00:18:03] from Morehouse.

André Smith:
But seeing Puff in that Morehouse Letterman just always like put something in my head. And I know he went to Howard, I know he didn’t finish Howard, but seeing him wear that, it just puts something in my head. And then there was this one scene in the real world, San Francisco, ironically, as I live here, on the West Coast and the Bay primarily, there was this one scene with [Jaquis 00:18:25] where he was confronted with an instance of racism, and the way he handled it. And then he went to Morehouse and seeing him in the Morehouse shirt, that just left a real big impression on me also.

André Smith:
For those reasons, and as well as the school’s legacy and Benny Mays and Dr. King and Spike and all these amazing people, those are really big reasons why I think I chose Morehouse and going to Morehouse. And doing the internships I did at Bloomberg from sophomore year to senior year, I came to just realized that comms was really my gift, strategy and connecting the dots authentically and organically for brands is another gift that I have. And I’m not going to probably have the best shot doing and delivering against that if I go the traditional road of getting a business management degree or a political science degree.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Because those degrees are pretty common at Morehouse. I just remember, even from the years that I was there, right outside of Wheeler Hall, everyone’s out there in their suits, political science folks, the business folks, I was a math major. We just walked right past them.

Maurice Cherry:
I know what you mean though. I mean, Morehouse itself, outside of all the names and stuff that you mentioned just sort of has this draw for a lot of people, but it’s so interesting because in a way it sort of depends what you end up going into kind of either during school or after school. Because I started going into design right after school, and even working at places in Atlanta where I was not the only Black person. I was surprised how many people had never heard of Morehouse. Didn’t know what it was, didn’t know where it was.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m like, “It’s here in Atlanta.” I remember my first day at AT&T when I had told some of people on my team I was at Morehouse and they were like, “Oh, where’s that?” And I was like, “Well, if you look out the window, you see that green roof way off in the distance? That’s Morehouse.” And they’re like, “Oh, I didn’t know Atlanta went down that far.” I’m like, “Give me a break. Come on.”

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, you had these opportunities for doing these internships. What was your kind of early career after you graduated? What I’m hearing is that you probably had something lined up once you graduated for Morehouse.

André Smith:
Yeah. I could have stayed at Bloomberg and did the A desk, analytics desk thing, but going from A&R to comms, and then looking at analytics just didn’t feel like the best fit. And to my parents, it looked foolish at the time, but I had a vision for the bigger idea.

André Smith:
I ended up, honestly, working for free in Tribeca for Damon Dash and Coodie & Chike. Chike Ozah and Clarence Coodie Simmons, creative control TV and DD172. And I think for free, because it was an apprenticeship in every sense, in the sense that you really have to get in there for yourself. But also the things, you were learning from real masters of their craft. Kanye on [inaudible 00:21:32] was just talking about the degree of reverence and respect he has for Damon, despite whatever issues or bad blood, Jay Z would’ve been remiss if he did not acknowledge Damon in his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech.

André Smith:
So, having the opportunity to be a strategy apprentice to Coodie & Chike, and work on product placement for brands like Pepsi, Adidas, Heineken, Porsche was really, really a great opportunity for me. And it brought future forward that early eye and appetite I had for connecting dots authentically and organically with brands, from when I was a kid watching these 007 movies. And then, from working on Purple Hayes, my summer before college, and then getting a chance to kind of learn from the master, so to speak.

André Smith:
After college was really great to me. In my time at Bloomberg, I worked across ad sales for print, one of their print titles called Markets Magazine. I worked across key accounts at the time when the subprime mortgage crisis hit, I was actually staffed on Bear Stearns. So, talk about learning trial by fire. And then in my last summer I worked event planning for key territories, North America.

André Smith:
And that Bloomberg is stacked in a way of its radio TV and print and, and terminal. And similarly, as I learned in my time working in Tribeca there, they had the gallery, they had the mezzanine for creative control TV, but they also had executive suites and offices and filming space. And they had an event performance space downstairs, as well as the recording studio that was manned by Ski Beatz, the producer who did the bulk of Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt. And I looked at them as two sides of a coin, almost. As parallel learning opportunities.

André Smith:
One was a big global enterprise by a billionaire, even though he was the mayor at the time. And the other was a factory led by the idea engine that birthed two billionaires, speaking about Jay Z and Kanye West. Granted they weren’t billionaires at the time, but it was evident with the way that, from what I learned of Damon’s process, it was a great compliment to what I had learned at Morehouse. Ironically, working on Heineken at DD172 Creative Control led to me working on Heineken at Team Epiphany, an agency owned by a Morehouse alumni, Coltrane Curtis.

Maurice Cherry:
So, during that time, when you’re kind of working as a strategy apprentice, and as you say you were doing it for free, how were you feeling during that time? What was going through your mind during that time?

André Smith:
At the time, I initially loved peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And by the time I was done with that, I hated the idea of paste anything. Justin’s peanut butter otherwise, I was over it. But at that time, DIY, do it yourself, was a new phrase and new concept. Social was still very fresh. And when I wasn’t in Tribeca, I was spending the rest of my time in the Lower East Side at the Alife Rivington Club Courtyard or at Reed Space, found by Jeff Stable, or at Prohibit, which was helmed by Chace Infinite, who later went on to become the manager for ASAP Mob and Griselda.

André Smith:
At the time, I was just always in the mode to learn. I knew there were things I learned on campus and in school. One thing I didn’t mention in my time in Atlanta is for a while, I was an apprentice to Clay Evans, who is the road manager for a lot of successful southern hip hop artists, but notably TI and Travis Scott.

André Smith:
One of the things I really appreciated while running with Clay was there’s a lot of things that you don’t learn in the classroom. There’s a lot of on-the-job learning and understanding and expertise that you have to observe in the moment to get good at the job. It’s like being a page at NBC or something.

André Smith:
I spent a lot of my time, when I wasn’t on campus, I was up in Castlebury Hill at Slice or over at City of Inc with Tuki and Maya. Tuki Carter and Maya Bailey. And at the time, like I said, I was just always in the mood to learn. And what I was thinking and feeling at that is there’s a lot of opportunity for influencers. And later on, obviously that became really true.

André Smith:
But at the time it was just seeing things in motion. Your online presence didn’t matter. People really had to know you outside. If you weren’t getting inside, you weren’t going to make it, unless you knew the right thing to say or you came with the right people. I saw a change coming, but I also just really appreciated the time and the moment when people really had to know each other.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I know those kind of times where, especially once you first start to get out there and you’re not going right into a particular job, there’s so much networking that you have to do. Let’s see. You say you went to Morehouse in ’04, so this was around ’08, ’09 when you were doing a lot of this?

André Smith:
Correct.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I remember being in the city during that time. It was a really sort of buzzy time, particularly if you were doing things around design or tech or something like that. It was just a lot of energy and activity going on in the city. You could go down to Octane and end up meeting up with folks or you’d go to some… meet up in some other event or something like that. Of course, now with the pandemic, a lot of that-

André Smith:
That was a phrase. A meetup. The meetup. Event Bright. Event Bright was it. Early QR codes.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

André Smith:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. there was a lot of that during that time. And I mean, of course now with the pandemic, it’s not the same, but you certainly had… Oh God, I remember that so vividly, because that was right around the time I was at AT&T and I quit my job and then started my studio. And so I just had free days all the time because I had some clients, but you go, you talk to other creatives, you see what other work you can get into, see what other projects you can fall into. Something like that. Atlanta sort of facilitated that type of creative spark, in a way, to go out to these places and meet people and do things. I mean, in hindsight, it was so easy.

André Smith:
Well, it looked easy. Dave Chappelle talks about expensive experience. I do it in five minutes because you’re paying me for the five, seven years it took me to learn how to do it in five minutes. You’re paying me for the time I did it. You’re paying me for the time I prepped to get it done, at the level as projected and as expected.

André Smith:
But to the tune of Atlanta and training, Jedi-level training, home coming in itself, but then also Market Friday, Wednesday on the Yard, the City, Rocky Road over there by Piedmont Park, Little Five Points. I was just talking to a client the other day and working on some brand identity work and she was referencing her time in the early shaping of Wish, and how it’s now basically a cultural institution [crosstalk 00:28:49].

André Smith:
The whole thing about it is even Little Five Points, you have to move carefully. You don’t know what [inaudible 00:28:56] or what guy would FaceTime… You don’t know who’s who. So, act accordingly. And this is Atlanta in ’04, ’09, 2011, 2013. I can talk about Atlanta today.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s a totally different… I mean, you’ve been to Atlanta recently. It’s a totally different vibe over there now because largely because of gentrification.

André Smith:
Gentrification and decriminalization, I think, and the dual pandemics have certainly played a role in how leadership and community have to respond and adjust for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. That’s true.

André Smith:
It’s also a gold rush at the same time right now. If you’re up, you’re up.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s true. Yeah. You’ve worked at quite a few agencies. You mentioned Team Epiphany, you’ve also been at IPG, you’ve been at Momentum. When you look back at those agency experiences, what do you think was the most impactful based on where and what you do now?

André Smith:
I guess just going off of networking and best… [inaudible 00:30:00] muscle memory, trade craft, right? Where that’s learned, how that’s shaped steel on steel, and how it’s optimized and where that’s applied or deployed. You mentioned Momentum. I’ve done three tours with IPG. Momentum media brands, I consulted for a while with Octagon and Adidas. I just got a text from a Morehouse bro who is now at Adidas covering Atlanta, NY, and ATL and wanted to talk about some ideas. So, look at God, right?

André Smith:
I guess I’ll talk about Momentum first, since I spoke about Martin. I can talk about Momentum second to that. Media brands, I think that the biggest memory or experience I had with Media Brands was hosting the Super Bowl USA Today Ad Meter Watch Party in New Orleans. That was heavy just because it was post Team Epiphany, post doing some post grad studies at Rutgers Center for Management and Development, the CMD, and being in a room with the CMO of Subway, Susan Creedle, to name a few people. Serious stakes.

André Smith:
And I really credit the Five Wells from Morehouse and so on and so forth with kind of giving me that training and that base practice to know how to move in that room. Talking about moving in rooms, talking about global, my favorite memory, I guess, or learned experience from Momentum is shortly after I had left momentum. I took my first leadership director role as strategy chief at 1stAveMachine, which is actually a production company, not even the ad agency.

André Smith:
But part of my deal with 1stAve is I went with two other partners to come for the Creative Lions. And I bumped into the CEO of Momentum, Chris Weil, on La Croisette. And watching his head spin. I said, “Hi, Chris.” Because he’s used to see me in New Orleans. “What you’re doing here?” And I gave him my answer, but walking down the rest of La Croisette on the way back to Palais des Festival, I was thinking like, “Yeah, what am I doing here?”

André Smith:
You’re hanging with [inaudible 00:32:04], having rose on a pier. And you’re all of, what, 25, 27? It’s dope to even be able to have memories like that. So, when I stay in touch with people, like Bonnie today, whether it’s about anything, I have that memory and that connection or… I don’t know what you call it, what do they call it? A sign of early promise or whatever? As a reference.

André Smith:
So, that’s Momentum, that’s Media Brands, Martin. Yeah, just being there with them for agency of the year at the part where it’s really gridlock in the mud, like any given Sunday, rainy day stuff, answering briefs, when the world’s upside down, it isn’t an easy job. I’ll just leave it there on that. And learning from their leadership, Elizabeth Paul, and the leaders who I report to it’s just a really great experience.

André Smith:
To switch, I think I spoke a bit about the classroom, “Google and then go outside,” knowing that they remembered at through three classes and that some success stories. I have a couple students who… Some of my Padawans who learn some of my Jedi ways, I guess, but they’ve gone on to do well for themselves. And one of them is associate project manager at Fluent 360, AAPR at Nissan. Another student is an account executive for Whirlpool, for corporate orders.

André Smith:
Two of them decided to start their own shop, hopefully gets absorbed by a bigger shop one day because I know they have chops to do it. And I guess before that, in my curatorial space, working as a curator and commissioning private commissions and sales, I would say biggest memory from that… I’d say like the opening day of my first show was… I’m literally doing everything. I’m getting food delivered, buying a case of wine and getting champagne.

André Smith:
And that same day, a review came out written by Antwaun Sargent, who’s now the director of Gagosian Worldwide. And at the time he wrote the review, he wrote it for Vice. And that came out in the afternoon, and before the show closed, I sold my first piece and it was a four-figure photo essay. That was hard to top. But then I topped it by doing a three-month… That No Window Shopping residency ran for five months in Williamsburg. And that was followed by a three-month residency in The Mission in San Francisco later that year.

André Smith:
And the only reason why I didn’t do Brexit… The only reason why I didn’t do No Window Shopping UK was because of Brexit had just hit at the time. But yeah, those I think are my big memories and takeaways, outside of my time in music. And I guess knowing that I worked on Jadakiss’s Sophomore album that hit Billboard when it debuted, and I worked on Curren$y’s Pilot Talk, and I was at DD172. And that made a big debut when it hit Billboard. Those are my memories from those times. And I guess all the rest of them are a blur, lots of late nights.

Maurice Cherry:
You’ve been achieving all the success. After you graduated, you really kind of like made your own way, starting out doing this kind of free apprenticeship thing, and then working with agencies. You produced this No Window Shopping event. And then during this time, you ended up going to grad school. What spurred that decision?

André Smith:
Yeah. I graduated Magna Cumme Laude NYU Tisch with my Master’s in art and public policy, and connecting all of the dots from going to Morehouse and… I’d be remiss if I didn’t credit this.

André Smith:
A big impression on me from my time at Bloomberg was Bloomberg Philanthropies. And I think it kind of groomed my eye to the power and duty of big global interests and those types of firms when it comes to corporate social responsibility, which I guess we now call social impact, for all intents and purposes.

André Smith:
And with my work with social clubs, like Noya House or Soho House, or even co-working spaces like The Yard, [inaudible 00:36:02]. I was always very intent on being accountable for the diversity in the room and the diversity I brought to the room. And in time, being around the four A’s, and ADCOLOR and those types of organizations and initiatives, I just come to see inclusion, diversity and equity and social impact really more married than they’re recognized for.

André Smith:
And a big part of what drew my attention to the art and public policy program is I saw it as a way to bring forward my passion for the arts through music and my experience, and my, I guess, you could say success as a curator. And the way I see the relationship of art, community and artists, whether you call them influencers or otherwise, how that relates to brand. When you look at it, even if you go to the Whitman or the Underground Museum or the Studio Museum in Harlem or the High Museum in Atlanta or [inaudible 00:37:07], whichever institution you want to patron, you’re going to see it’s sponsored by these big brands.

André Smith:
So, I was really interested in that initially, but the real reason why I ended up going to do the program is I found, as I was getting more press in Vice or Hyperallergic or so forth, some of the questions I was being approached with by the writers, and maybe sometimes even the questions I was being approached with by collectors or representatives of institutions I’d meet, who came to my openings, who came to the events that I put together as part of the culture programming to stem my shows or my exhibitions and my group exhibitions from opening to closing, I will be honest.

André Smith:
I don’t like the phrase, “I don’t know.” Coming out of Morehouse, it’s not a phrase you hear very frequently on the yard. And if you do hear, it’s met with raised eyebrows, “What do you mean you don’t know?” Either you’re not invested or you’re not trying. But being approached with questions that I didn’t have ready-aimed fire answers for wasn’t something I was used to, happy about or comfortable with.

André Smith:
When you don’t know, that means you need more knowledge. It just worked out that my academic advisor was the artist Karen Elizabeth Finley in my time at Tisch, and I had the privilege and opportunity to do electives at NYU Stern, NYU Steinhardt. And in that time, I was a teaching assistant to Rosalie Goldberg, the founder of the Performa Biennial and Director Emeritus of The Kitchen, which is like a legacy institution in Chelsea for anyone who knows about the arts from the ’60s and the ’70s and the ’80s.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you’ve mentioned earlier about… excuse me, about being a lecturer at the University of Illinois Chicago. How did that opportunity come about?

André Smith:
Yeah, that is serendipity. And luck is really just preparation, patience and timing. And you could just boil it down to that because at the time I just finished my Master’s and I had envisioned or fancied myself going to a firm like LaPlaca Cohen because that would be a beautiful marriage of the things that I had done and the interest I’d cultivated and cured to that point with my Master’s program.

André Smith:
In the time I was at Tisch doing my Master’s, I did my graduate field work with Twitter and Creative Time. It didn’t take. And then 45 crushed the endowments for the arts and the humanities with one pen stroke. So, the funding for the things I wanted to do, the pool got a lot smaller. It was going to be limited to fellowships and things like that.

André Smith:
And my wife, Nicole, decided that she wanted to pursue her Master’s degree. So, she got into the 2Y program at Northwestern Kellogg and spent a lot of time in Chicago looking to maybe explore and expand my curatorial practice in that city. It was slow motion on that, and it just happened one day I was at a restaurant and some individual, the lovely lady that sat next to me, this was all pre-pandemic, no face mask required. We started up a conversation and she was sharing about her daughter and her daughter going to Notre Dame and looking to do business and looking for internship opportunities, and I, empathetically, generously offered to say, “Well, if she has any interest in Bloomberg, if she’s trying to start her way in through media, I’d be more than happy to make an introduction. I actually know one or two more house alums who were still there. It wouldn’t be a problem.”

André Smith:
And she gave me her card and we got in touch and I was looking for opportunities maybe with the school. And when she looked up my LinkedIn and she kept me back, she just said, “We should talk.” I was like, “Yeah. I looked at some opportunities on the site. I’d like to talk about.” She’s like, “No, you should teach.” And I was like, “Okay.” I joined the faculty as an adjunct lecturer. Within a semester, I was promoted to visiting a lecturer of culture and innovation in the managerial studies program, the college of business administration at UIC.

Maurice Cherry:
When you look back at that time, what did your students teach you?

André Smith:
Oh, wow. A lot of my students were first gen college attendees. A fair number of them were new immigrants, ESL. They taught me a lot about patience and empathy, but they also taught me, I would say… My pedagogy at UIC was really cured around critical thinking, immersive play, team dynamics and group work. And what they taught me is that this generation needs a lot more help training, coaching, and practice in group work. A lot of, “I, I” focus: iPhone, iWatch, Instagram.

André Smith:
And a lot of the appetite for instant gratification, I think, makes it hard to develop the patience and empathy to be a good team player. That’s why in my two-year tenure at UIC, I passed on midterms and finals, and I ran my classes like agencies. 14-week sprints. And ironically, that was really good practice and training for me, doing sprints for Masterclass and then Martin.

André Smith:
But in the way I ran the classes, or the agency as class, it was to do with your four… Teams are broke up in fours, right? Account, media, creative and art direction. And giving them those, I guess, buckets to play in, seeing how they use that to acquiesce to… Using immersive play to acquiesce to better group work by making it immersive was very insightful for me. And I was not shy about using and applying that to the juniors I managed as a planning director at Martin.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, let’s say someone out here is listening to this and they’re picking up all the names you mentioned and all the different opportunities and things that you’ve done. If somebody out there wants to sort of follow in your footsteps, what advice would you give them?

André Smith:
Besides Google and go outside? I would say, know your power. Leonard [inaudible 00:43:27], he has a show on Comedy Central. He has a book out about knowing how to apply and leverage… The word he uses is privilege. But I feel like that’s a bit cagey. We want to be careful with the teeth on this.

André Smith:
But knowing how to learn and leverage your superpowers is really important. I wear glasses, right? I’m a New York kid. I talk fast. There are times I’m in the room where I’m overdressed, there are times I’m in the room coming from another series of a couple of events or meetings where I’m client facing to that audience and I might find myself underdressed, which isn’t really true because I’m always confident about it. I wore a Yankee cap into City Hall, which I’ve actually done before. So, there’s that.

André Smith:
But I’ll use my Yankee cap as a springboard because it’s me being true to myself. I’m from the Bronx, I’m proud to say it. I’m from the same place as Ralph Lipchitz and Calvin Klein, [inaudible 00:44:18]. So, I’ve always been keen to know and not be shy about what my superpowers are. At the same time, I would caution and advise, be mindful of other people’s superpowers and their sensitivities.

André Smith:
But make one of your superpowers curving sensitivities and amping room for empathy and collaboration. One of the big takeaways I also remember from my time at Momentum was the idea of… Really, the philosophy and the practice of co-creation. Answer the brief with the client. Don’t just answer the brief for the client. And likewise in relationships, whether they’re emerging or continuing, be the friend that’s like the therapist, not the friend that’s the friend that people need to see a therapist about.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you think your life would’ve gone if you weren’t doing what you do now?

André Smith:
That’s a really good question. When I was a little boy, I thought I wanted to be a judge. And as I got older, volume two on cassette, I saw myself working in management because I really have a passion for the artists. Evident to any artist who I ever paid a studio visit to, who I ever featured in the show, or even if they weren’t in the show, I featured them in some culture programming I was doing for a social club or a client.

André Smith:
It’s not so much more about like the power trip with judges and lawyers, but about having the power to defend and to represent, for people who might not be best equipped to represent themself or their value. But I think working as a creative, whether that’s a creative strategist or curator or a creative producer, in a lot of ways, you have almost more responsibility and power than a judge because while a judge can set precedent as a creative, you can inform or almost even at sometimes, dictate culture.

André Smith:
And ultimately, culture is the law of the land and it rules the day. It almost rides higher than the law in a lot of cases, which is one of the things that leads to us redrafting and reshaping culture. So, what I just said is basically what I learned in my Master’s program, art and public policy because there’s culture lowercase C and there’s culture capital C. And then their culture is lowercase C. But culture informs public policy and public policy ultimately informs legislative and written policy.

Maurice Cherry:
What do you want your legacy to be? When you look back at your career, you look back at what you’ve accomplished to where you are now, what do you want to do in the next few years or so, something like that?

André Smith:
In the next few years, my big bet is automated retail. And I have a smart answer for that. More coming soon. But I guess when it’s all said and done, a lot of people will laugh and libate to my memory and say, “He sometimes had a long voiceover. And sometimes it was a lot to follow, but it all came with a lot of passion. And if you’re listening, you understand. And even if you don’t understand, he always cared enough to break it down. He was the type of guy who would sit with you for an hour, helping you with a problem. When you asked him for $5 and he was like, ‘You don’t need my $5. I just gave you $5 million worth of insight and energy.'”

André Smith:
And it wouldn’t be bad, I guess, if people say, “He loved hard and he played hard.” Because I think for me ultimately that’s what it comes down to. Frustration is just fun with a lot of filling letters in the middle. And I’ve always, probably why, I guess, I chose English and leadership studies at Morehouse instead of business, marketing or political science is because in those more constrictive spaces, it’s hard to start the tape with, “Let’s cut down frustration. Let’s just get to the fun.”

André Smith:
What does that mean? How does that work? What are you talking about? I’m talking about the answer to the brief, I’m talking about the way to start today’s lecture. I’m talking about a way to get over worrying about the glass breaking on the shadow box and the show starts in a few minutes. Let’s go Banksy with it. Let’s put it through a paper shredder. Let’s see what happens.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more about you and about your work and everything online?

André Smith:
Dre Powers. D-R-E P-O-W-E-R-S. Dre Powers. Everything’s basically Dre Powers. You can find me on that, and you can see some of my legacy work and some of my latest work on AppendixWorks.com, A-P-P-E-N-D-I-X W-O-R-K-S.com.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good. Well, André Smith, I want to thank you first so much for coming on the show. One, just for sharing your expansive career and the work that you’ve done. But I think also it’s good, certainly for people in our audience to hear, like you mentioned, sort of the passion behind the work that you do. Clearly you have a love for this. You have a knack for it. You have an affinity for it. And I’m glad that you were able to really share that with our audience through this interview today. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

André Smith:
Thank you for the space and the time.

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Vida Cornelious

When you think of people who are masters of their craft, there’s no doubt that Vida Cornelious would be part of that list. Her 25+ year career in the advertising industry reads like a who’s who of agency titans — GlobalHue, DDB, Burrell Communications, Walter Isaccson…the list goes on. Now, Vida’s latest role as VP of Creative for New York Times Advertising will allow her work to reach a global audience.

After a quick end-of-year check-in, Vida spoke about her work at the Times and the launch of their first ever creative franchise called “Soul of Us.” From there, she talked about growing up in New Jersey and being surrounded by the arts, attending the venerable Hampton University, and dove deep into some of the campaigns she created over the years before landing her current role. For Vida, the importance of mastery is key to her success, and it’s definitely paid off in a big way!

Transcript

Full Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

Vida Cornelious:
Hi, my name is Vida Cornelious. I am the Vice President of Creative for New York Times Advertising. I oversee all the custom creative and the operations of our content studio, T Brand.

Maurice Cherry:
What has this year been like for you so far?

Vida Cornelious:
It’s funny how to answer that because as we all know, 2020 was definitely a challenge, and I would say 2021 has been a year of recovery in many ways, like coming off of that year, a year of reckoning so to speak. I just feel like there was a lot of emotions. It felt like 2021 was a time to heal, so to speak. Personally, I feel like I’ve definitely learned the meaning of resilience over the course of this year. And staying the course, staying focused has been my personal mantra in the workplace. As a leader, for one, I’ve really been trying to be as empathetic to my team as possible. I’ve really had to dig in and think about everyone is processing this whole upheaval in so many different ways, and in some cases loss. So I want to be mindful of that when I’m still trying to manage to the demands of the business. So yeah, that’s what the year has been for me.

Maurice Cherry:
Are you already back in the office or are you still working from home?

Vida Cornelious:
No, we’re working from home still, but we can go into the office as we choose. We haven’t officially returned, but I go in probably two days a week now.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Vida Cornelious:
Yeah. And so do some of the other people on the team.

Maurice Cherry:
How was it adjusting to that work from home life with being over, I would imagine, a pretty large creative team?

Vida Cornelious:
Yeah, it was a challenge at first to really think about the ebb and flow of how to make sure people stayed motivated. I also think there were fears that people may have had on the team thinking that their currency of not being able to walk the halls and talk to people and be seen was going to somehow affect their work and the perception of their work. But I think once we all settled into a groove of what needed to get done, just putting our heads down and understanding that, hey, this collaborative work style, being on Zoom calls, we can still brainstorm. We can still utilize one another to get inspired creatively. The work didn’t suffer. We set a path and then drove full steam ahead towards it. So I would say that actually people found their own ways to be productive working from home and still maintaining a level of integrity and excellence with the work that I was personally looking for.

Maurice Cherry:
I talked to so many folks, I guess, right at the beginning of the pandemic, like spring going into the summer, and it was interesting because you’d have folks that were definitely seasoned creatives that were like, “Oh, I’m trying to adjust to how do I work from home?” Some people, for example, got a new job, moved across country, and then they may have worked in the office for two days and now you have to work from home in this new place that you just moved to. But then I also talked to graduates who had just started new jobs, and this is all they know, is working from home. This is their normal as it relates to doing a creative job is working from home and being a part of a distributed team, which I think is a really interesting shift.

Vida Cornelious:
Yeah, It’s interesting you say that because I don’t want to necessarily say it’s generational, but for sure like myself coming up in the industry where it was very much about brainstorming and sitting in a room and hashing out ideas, you get very accustomed to the tactile nature of working with people face to face and sharing ideas back and forth, bantering back and forth with a partner and all that kind of thing. So the working from home could feel very isolating for some and feel like there becomes a little bit more writer’s block, you feel a little bit more stuck because you want someone to bounce ideas off of or you want to be able to just have someone to dialogue with or talk through ideas. It doesn’t feel as natural if you have to do that over a Zoom call.

Vida Cornelious:
But you’re 100% right. I mean, there were people who obviously started new jobs during the pandemic where they never met anyone. So it is interesting to see you get a different perception of the value of the connection you make personally with people when you’ve had an opportunity to work with them versus just meeting them for the first time in the square on the screen.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, I think for all of us it illustrates just how my much we have to do during the day, especially if you’re just at home working by yourself and you don’t have those moments of comradery of just talking to someone for a few minutes and then getting back to work. You realize just how much you have to be focused on getting the work done. Not saying people slack off at work, but people slack off at work. But that’s also part of the creative process in a way.

Vida Cornelious:
Right. Exactly. I used to make a joke that everybody… For folks who were smokers, it used to be a thing those people to go downstairs, have a cigarette break. If we add up those breaks, that was like an extra hour [crosstalk 00:08:39]. But now it’s funny because working from home, I’ll be honest, hey, in between a meeting or two, of course I’m going to go throw some clothes in the laundry, you know?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Vida Cornelious:
And I’m going to clean up my kitchen or something that I neglected doing. So there do become these moments in the day where you can woosah, I guess, take the pressure off slightly for a moment and take your mind away from it and then come back. But I still find that for the most part, my experience with my team has been that people are very productive and responsive, which is great.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, it also sounds like you allowed them just the grace to just acclimate themselves to the situation, you know?

Vida Cornelious:
Yeah, I mean, the hardest part about the pandemic for everybody was just trying to figure out, and I hate using the term new normal, but what was going to just be their way of operating. I don’t have children, but I felt for people who had kids at home who were trying to figure out how to homeschool and still be attentive at work but having very restless children at home that didn’t understand the whole scenario of not being able to go to school or see friends or having their own emotional meltdowns of sorts. And that was a lot. That was a lot for people to process and deal with and also just trying to deal with how out of work and be productive. For sure, we saw it in the real estate boom where people just literally realized, especially living in New York, raising a family in a one-bedroom or two-bedroom apartment just wasn’t the move anymore. [inaudible 00:10:11] ran to the suburbs. Of course, we saw that.

Vida Cornelious:
So that, I think, is also a manifestation of how the pandemic just changed all of our perception around the value of work and how that balance between work and personal has to be reevaluated.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Let’s talk some more about your work at the New York Times. What’s an average day like for you?

Vida Cornelious:
The day is, well as we just said, I mean, it’s definitely full of Zoom calls, I would say a pretty steady stream of them from 9:00 to probably about 6:00 PM. But for the most part, I feel like right now the majority of what I’m doing is a tremendous amount of work around new initiatives, product development, working with our newsroom on any types of brand collaborations where appropriate or alignments. But the team has really been delivering some imaginative custom content. I oversee all of our creatives, so working with the team on what those creative franchises are or brand stories and collaborations we’re doing. So I’m really excited about that.

Vida Cornelious:
I mean, an average day definitely is meeting with my direct reports, tending to operations type needs, making sure that there’s a full outline of what we’re trying to accomplish with regards to a certain number of RFPs or making sure that a program is launching or we are doing recruiting. So it varies in the course of a day what I have to turn my attention to, but I always try and make sure there’s a very nice chunk of my day committed to creative endeavors. I would say if I had to break it down, probably 65% of my time is something creatively motivated, and the other 35% of my time is operational.

Maurice Cherry:
Speaking of projects, there’s a project from the Times that you were a part of or oversaw called Soul of Us. Can you tell me some more about that?

Vida Cornelious:
Sure. I’ll start by saying as an overall philosophy of the creative team and T Brand, we adhere to what we call our storytelling commitment, and it’s how we really keep diverse perspectives at the forefront and pursue representative storytelling in everything that we do. There’s been a few programs that actually are great manifestations of this passion for diversity and inclusion, Soul of Us being one of them and probably the primary one. And it is a creative franchise that was created by T Brand really to expand the narrative around all aspects of the black life in America that are rarely portrayed in the media. What I mean by that is it really is a franchise that we are crafting and collaboration with brand partners to give voice to black creators to tell stories of black love and joy and success and beauty and pride and wealth and empowerment and progress. The more brands that join us, the more chapters of this story we will unfold.

Vida Cornelious:
The reason we do it is because at the time that Soul of Us was concepted, there was so much narrative around Black Lives Matter and the opposite side of that coin of like, “Why should a black life matter? All lives matter.” We saw a lot of that. Soul of Us was a way of saying, “You know what? The only way to help people understand why a black life matters is to really show them what a black life is.” And more of black life is it’s beyond the narrative that we’ve seen which is the narrative around disenfranchisement and struggle and the fight for equality. There’s so many other aspects of black life that media doesn’t really portray. So Soul of Us was an opportunity to expose some of those more nuanced, beautiful stories in a way that shows that black life really is rich and full and robust and worthy of a narrative larger than just what the media has currently shared. So that was the impetus behind that franchise.

Maurice Cherry:
I like that it’s called Soul of Us. Well, I think if someone were looking at it and not really thinking about it as us, it could also be seen as like Soul of US, like Soul of the United States. I remember reading through the press release and it was mentioned that it’s about helping brands elevate the conversation of representation in America. I know that’s during that last summer when there was so much going on in the streets and, of course, that spilled over into the board rooms and such, theoretically speaking, because nobody really was in board rooms because of the pandemic. But companies were now starting to get in on this conversation around racial equity and what does that mean for us and this individual business. Like, yes, there’s what’s happening out in the streets in terms of protesting police brutality, but our black employees, unfortunately, they suffer from that as well. They have to inherit all of that trauma and that pain, and they have to bring that to work.

Maurice Cherry:
I think it was really good that companies were starting to try to, at least in some small way, get in on the conversation even if it seems like it was just a fleeting thing. I remember seeing now how a lot of companies have faded back from that initial talk about it, but I think it was good to see it when it happened, certainly.

Vida Cornelious:
Right. Yeah, I mean, there were a few brands that misstepped, and it felt as if it was a passing fancy for them or something that was a trend to get in on at the time. The things that we really wanted to make sure, as we put this franchise out in the universe, it was to make sure we were letting brands know, “Hey, this is an opportunity for you to join us in telling these stories on a narrative. It’s not for the purpose of you being able to rectify any wrongs that has been done in the past by your brand, but rather to support what should be a part of your mission. So if your mission is, say, to put out products for the betterment of families, then let’s tell stories of why black family is important. You can support that, that’s already in your DNA.”

Vida Cornelious:
We were very specific about the type of brand partners and collaborators we were looking for as a way of helping us bring these individual chapters or narratives, if you will, to life. It wasn’t as if we were looking for inauthentic connections. We legitimate connections to the black community, to black storytelling, and we wanted brands that supported that because it’s work that they’re already doing.

Maurice Cherry:
One of the most interesting parts I noticed throughout the project is that even the typeface that was used, the halyard typeface, was done by a black designer. That was done by a black typography designer, Joshua Darden.

Vida Cornelious:
Yes. Yep. Absolutely. Every contributor we’ve used on the project and was very intentional, and that was part of it, was to elevate not just in the storytelling but elevate black voices and creators. All of our illustrators, typographers, photographers, designers, writers are all black contributors to the project. We have a hub, which is where you can see the work, and within that hub, there is a page of contributors. So it’s very clear. You can read each of those persons’ bio and have a better understanding of why we wanted to partner with them, why we work with them, the passion that they have for what they do. And that was important to us as well, to make sure that those were the voices that were elevating these stories.

Maurice Cherry:
How has the project been received so far?

Vida Cornelious:
It’s been fantastic. I mean, we have had quite a bit of press around it. Our inaugural partner in the effort is Starz, the network, and they told with us stories of black leadership. What we explored there was the journey and the pathway to how leaders are made in the black community when it starts from childhood, those moments of affirmation where you’re basically told or you’ve been taught things like, “I am somebody,” all the way through college where you maybe are a part of your first taste of being a part of a black student union or a fraternity or sorority, all the way to the boardroom, where you could find yourself being the only person of color in an organization but you have to walk into the room with the same premise that Maya Angelus taught us, which is, “I come as one, but I stand as 10,000,” right? So knowing you have to bring your ancestral strength with you in order to be effective. We explored this journey of leadership in partnership with Starz because they have an amazing program called Take The Lead, which is all about creating space for black leadership and creators to emerge in the entertainment space. So it was a perfect alignment in that way for us to tell these stories together.

Maurice Cherry:
Did you have a favorite story from the project?

Vida Cornelious:
Yes. From this first go-round, I think one of my favorite stories was about a teacher in Philadelphia who has taught her students a mantra called Push Through, and it was really great. We used some of the actual soundbite of her doing the affirmation with her little second grade and third grade class, which they do every morning. That was a part of the pay post, so it was wonderful to be able to actually use the actual audio of her doing the affirmation.

Vida Cornelious:
But I also remember myself as a child, your own parents telling you things like, “You have to be smarter. You have to be better. You are somebody.” There were so many ways that your family would teach you these little affirmations basically to help you know that you were going into the room strong and that you had a right to be there. And whether you knew it or not, in first, second, third grade, that’s essentially what was being instilled in you. So seeing someone, a young woman doing that today for this generation of children, it just kind of warmed my heart and the writer’s heart that worked on it when we discovered her.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see the initiative going next? I know you mentioned Starz being the initial partner. Are there other companies lined up that are going to talk about other stories as well?

Vida Cornelious:
Yeah, we do. We have quite a few partners out there, collaborators, brand collaborators that are looking at proposals right now and how we can align with them on their efforts. I think if we’re successful, we’ll have a chapter about black progress and wealth. That gives us an opportunity to talk about things like the black elite or how people have created whole communities around going to the vineyard and what that whole lifestyle is like and the bonds that tie those individuals together. It gives us an opportunity to talk about home ownership and some of the famous neighborhoods that were inhabited by or created by black wealth, things like Striver’s Row in Harlem and how that was a bustling place of economic development and empowerment for blacks. So that could be an angle that we have. Another brand that we’re talking to would allow us to explore stories of black beauty. And last one would be about black family. Hopefully, if those brand partners come on board, that becomes three more chapters right there that we would be really happy to see come to fruition.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s awesome. I’d have to say it’s especially awesome seeing it come through such a large imprint like the New York Times. That’s really great.

Vida Cornelious:
Yeah, it’s amazing.

Maurice Cherry:
When you look at your work, not necessarily with this project, but at the New York Times in general, what would you say is the hardest part about what you do?

Vida Cornelious:
I really don’t find there’s necessarily a hard part, but I do feel as though one of the things that, I don’t know, I’m always just so fascinated by is there’s just so much richness of storytelling at the New York Times. In my world, I feel like my responsibility is to just make sure that the work that the team is doing on our side, on the business side of the house, if you will, is befitting of sitting alongside that superior journalism. We want to make sure that we are continually rising and upholding the standards that we know that the Times is so famous for and so respected for. So we want to make sure that the way we do our custom creative work and supporter brands is indeed living up to that same standard and expectation. So I would say that’s probably the hardest part because there’s so much amazing journalism and innovation that comes out of the newsroom every day. It’s just a matter of our team just keeping up with it, if you will.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s switch gears here a little bit because I want to know more about your origin story, how Vida became Vida. Tell me about where you grew up.

Vida Cornelious:
I’m a Jersey girl. I grew up in Neptune, New Jersey, which is a town on Jersey Shore. One of five girls, no brothers. Mom and dad both professional people. My mother, she sang at the Met when I was a kid. She took opera. She’s sang in college and took opera lessons and developed her voice and sang as part of the chorus at the Met when we were kids. So I got introduced to the arts and the fine arts early in life. I had an older sister who was amazing painter and just as part of just a hobby, I guess you could say. But there was always some artistic pursuit going on in my house when I was growing up. My dad was an engineer, so he was a solid, science, math person, so I guess that gave us a certain amount of well-roundedness. It wasn’t all artsy-fartsy in the house, so to speak.

Vida Cornelious:
But growing up, it was fun. I mean, I felt like my family was very supportive heavily into seeing us be comfortable with our education, pursuing our passions. So I never felt like I wasn’t able to explore what an artistic endeavor would look like. I had no idea that it would turn into a career in advertising. I was just a kid that just loved drawing and painting and doing things that felt creative me, right? As I got older, going off to college was about having an opportunity to pursue art as a major in college. My parents weren’t so fond of me going to somewhere like Parsons or Pratt. We went up to those schools, I got in, and they saw one moment in a dorm where the kids were running around and was like co-ed, they were like, “Forget it.” It didn’t seem strict enough or whatever you want to call it. So they didn’t like that as a pursuit for me.

Vida Cornelious:
But I was able to go to Hampton because that’s where my sisters had gone. So there was a little bit of legacy there. So I went to Hampton, but I was still able to pursue art. At Hampton, I got a great background in education in… at the time, it was called commercial art or graphic design. I thought I was going to eventually come back to New York, come back to the East Coast, and go work in New York and design album covers. That was my big plan. But I had a professor who basically told me, “No, you need to pursue advertising. You have ideas like an art director.” I was like, “What is this mystery career?” I’d never even heard of being an art director. I didn’t know what that was. He explained to me, you know, “You make commercials. You make print ads. You take great trips. You go and stay in hotel for weeks at a time while you shoot a commercial.” I was like, “This sounds like a dream job.” I had no idea.

Vida Cornelious:
He was like, “Yeah, you need to go to graduate school, really work on your portfolio because right now your portfolio is strictly design. They need to see you can think about ideas. You need to be able to craft ideas.” So I pursued going to graduate school. At the time, University of Illinois was one of the better schools for an advertising degree. Now, it wasn’t advertising creative like what we now know of, say, schools like The Creative Circus or Portfolio Center or VCU Ad Center, those schools came much later. But at the time, University of Illinois had a very solid program in terms of you getting a master’s in advertising, so that’s what I did.

Vida Cornelious:
I was able to go there on a scholarship, which was great for me. I had a wonderful batch of teachers who I was kind of the guinea pig of the kid who wanted to do creative, but there wasn’t necessarily a specific creative track in the graduate program. So they kind of mashed up a few classes for me in addition to the required classes in order for me to get my master’s but still get a creative portfolio coming out of it, so it was really good. Did some internships while I was there. But I definitely feel like probably the biggest thing I learned at University of Illinois that as a black woman in this industry I would later come to find out was pivotal for me, was my scholarship required that I teach undergraduate students. I taught two days a week, and it was brutal because I had to teach myself the class before I could teach them. I had to teach myself the material and then teach the class.

Vida Cornelious:
But what it forced was me basically presenting a couple of times a week, like getting up in front of a lecture class and talking and presenting. So what later on in my career I would realize is that that the groundwork for me being able to really feel comfortable presenting. And as a creative person, that is one of the things that will make or break your career, is your ability to present your ideas and be confident in presenting your ideas and being a storyteller. I really, really value that experience for that reason more than anything you.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Let’s go back a bit to Hampton, because I know you mentioned you had sisters that went there, so there was some sort of form of legacy for you going there. What was it like going to Hampton during that time? Because I’m imagining this is around the early nineties when there was so much… And maybe I’m just remembering this from back then. I felt like there was a lot of, not hype, that’s not the right word, excitement, I guess, around attending HBCUs. You had the AACA sweatshirts. It felt like there was this really big push on graduate and go to a black college because it’s lit.

Vida Cornelious:
Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, you used to have all the bootleg shirts like, “Hampton, just do it,” with the swoosh. I’m sure that the licensing department at Nike would’ve been very upset to know that there was a whole string of t-shirts that you could buy in a variety of colors with their logo on it, but we had all that stuff going on. You’re absolutely right because at the time that I was at Hampton, A Different World was on television. It was literally like we would all run back to the dorm and watch A Different World, and it was almost as if the writers of that show had been on campus. It was like they were writing about our lives literally, and we were looking at it in real time.

Vida Cornelious:
We had a munchy shop where everybody went and hung out, a little campus grill. We had the step shows, we had the Greek life. I don’t want to call it a golden time, but it was definitely a fun, vibrant time to be at a HBCU. For me personally, I did pledge Delta Sigma Theta-

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Vida Cornelious:
… and very proud of that. And so that also gave another layer of texture to my college experience because, of course, pledging a Greek letter organization on a HBCU campus is probably as HBCU as it gets. That is like the quintessential experience. But yeah, having sisters there, my mother went to Hampton, it was definitely a school that I was very familiar with. So I felt like I was in very familiar territory in going to school there. The school itself in terms of how it was run, everything you’ve probably heard about HBCUs is fairly true. There was curfew. You weren’t able to be out if you were a freshman after a certain time at night. There were all kinds of superstitions and things like if you walk across Ogden Circle you won’t graduate. Those are all parts of the culture and just the narrative of what made the school so great.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I went to Morehouse. I mean, I was a teenager during that time sort of watching… Well, I was a kid becoming a teenager during the time when A Different World was on. And then there certainly was this big push to go to a black college because, one, at the time, my mom worked at a black college, she taught biology at a black college, and she graduated from black college, she went to Talladega University. So there was no really other choice. I applied to other places, but the huge implication was that, “You’re going to a black college.”

Vida Cornelious:
Right. Right.

Maurice Cherry:
End of story. So I know what you mean about you get on campus and you learn all these mythologies and superstitions and things like that, but I mean, it’s such a magical place. And then the fact that you were studying design there, back when we had a blog on Revision Path, I remember we did a whole thing about Hampton’s Design department and how many people they’ve graduated that went on to do great things in the industry. So Hampton has a really rich legacy of generating black designers and artists and folks like you. Really, that’s amazing.

Vida Cornelious:
Yeah. I mean, I’m very proud of the fact that we got some exposure to some amazing artists at Hampton. I mean, John Biggers painted the mural in the library and all of us that were students at the time got to assist him because he was the artist in residence. And Hampton’s museum has some of the most… They have an amazing collection of black artists that’s been curated. I feel like the art program, the arts has always been something that Hampton respected. I just remember it was like people would look at the art students because we all walked around with our little plastic cases, our little art bin cases. Our classes were over in Armstrong Hall, which was sort of out of the cut, but it was where the… What do you call it? The pottery studio was, and that’s where the architecture students were. And that’s where all the open loft live drawing classes were. So it was such a mystery to all the rest of the student body because we were like the kids that were in there creating. It was a good time though. It was definitely a good time to be at a school like that.

Vida Cornelious:
I feel you 100% because I went to a summer program at Princeton, they pursued me coming there, but I don’t know, there was just something… I mean, it was Ivy League, I probably should have differently about that, but I really felt like Hampton was home in some way, so that’s where I ended up.

Maurice Cherry:
Going back to University of Illinois, you graduated in ’94, you left grad school, what was the next step? What were those early post grad years like for you?

Vida Cornelious:
When I was in grad school, I ended up having an internship at Uniworld in New York, which was a great experience, worked with some amazing people there, learned from some wonderful people. Valerie Graves, who is a legend in advertising was my boss at the time when I was an intern, so I learned a ton from her. They offered me a job after school, but I really wanted to go somewhere else because I felt like I would be forever the intern, just that psychology. I ended up getting an offer from their competitor at the time, which was Burrell Communications Group.

Vida Cornelious:
So I got very fortunate in that coming right out of graduate school I was able to land a job pretty easily. I had it in my mind that I was going to be like Angela from Who’s The Boss? I had a suit, I had the big portfolio case. I had no idea what the ad world actually looked like. My whole impression of the ad world was what I had seen on television for wearing suits and being frazzled all the time. I was offered the job at Burrell. I went to Chicago to pursue that. It was a great training ground. I worked with amazing people there. At the time, Burrell was on the top of their game. They had all the major accounts, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Sears, BellSouth, which was pretty much like the Verizon of that time. What other clients did we have? We didn’t do too much. I mean, Tom Burrell had a pretty strong feeling about things like cigarettes and malt liquor advertising to black people, so he didn’t really accept too much work like that. But it was a great experience being able to cut my teeth, if you will, at Burrell. I was able to do some pretty big commercials that still are cult classics for some people in the hip hop community.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, you did the Obey Your Thirst campaign, that’s right.

Vida Cornelious:
Yeah, some Sprite work. That’s funny to see young people that are playing it on YouTube and consider it as a classic, and that’s your first piece of creative out of college. But there were so many fun things about just learning back then. You just felt like you were a sponge, you’re just learning so much. So that was a great experience. I was at Burrell for a good… I want to say I was at Burrell almost 10… no, maybe five or six years, I can’t remember. I think I left there in ’99 and then went to DDB.

Vida Cornelious:
DDB Chicago was a general market agency. At the time, it’s like you start in multicultural, but the bigger pond to be in was general market. Everybody wanted to get to a big general market agency. That was the stamp of approval that you were a real creative if you were able to get to a general market agency. So getting into DDB Chicago was a big stepping stone to be able to work on national accounts, accounts that were not meant to be just for the black audience but the general market audience, bigger budgets, things like that. But what came with that was a sense of loneliness and isolation. Being one of 120 or so creatives and you’re the only black, maybe one of three, is hard.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow.

Vida Cornelious:
Incredibly hard when you’re not even 30 years old and you’re trying to figure out, okay, how do you navigate this? How do you know if you have people who are really in your corner or people who want to sabotage you? And even though DDB’s culture wasn’t like some other agencies at that time, it was definitely a norm to know that creative departments were incredibly competitive. People would steal each other’s work. People would shred their work at night because they didn’t want their work stolen, things like that. All of those myths were somewhat true in some places. Fortunately, I didn’t run across much of that, but I did still feel like I had to be really, really good in terms of my talent and feeling very secure in my talent in order to survive that.

Maurice Cherry:
People were shredding their at work at night?

Vida Cornelious:
Uh-huh (affirmative). Not at DDB, but other agencies. There were some other agencies where that was notorious. That was well known that the culture was very competitive in that way.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow, that’s cutthroat.

Vida Cornelious:
Very much.

Maurice Cherry:
Goodness. So you were at DDB for almost a decade. Aside from the cutthroatness of it, what do you remember the most from that time?

Vida Cornelious:
I mean, DDB, it taught me a ton, besides for the fact that I worked with some good people there. I worked with some people who really were interested in seeing me develop, and they were really interested in seeing my career take off. There was one real defining moment that I can always play in my brain because it was one of those type of things where someone is mentoring you and they’re kind of preparing you for a moment, but you don’t even really know it at the time.

Vida Cornelious:
I had a boss that I was like the sidekick, right? Whenever he needed somebody to prepare the bag for the presentation or get the work together, it was always like, “Vida, I need you to do that.” Right? Initially, I felt like, “Am I being asked to do this because I’m the lackey, because I’m the only girl on the team, because I’m the responsible one?” I had no idea, but ultimately what it allowed me to do was be able to always see all of the work. I had an opportunity to see all of the work, and he would ask my opinion of the work once I had put the bag together, made sure all the scripts were there, made sure all the boards were there, made sure there was no typos. It was almost like I knew the work better than he did because I was spending more time with it.

Vida Cornelious:
I would prepare the bag. I would go with him to the meeting. I would sit in the back of the room because he was doing the presenting, and I got to see firsthand how he presented, how the client responded to his presentation, how the work went over, what ideas landed, what ideas fell flat. I didn’t know it was a training at the time, but it was a training. I was getting to see it firsthand. My colleagues weren’t. My peers weren’t. So that was the trade-off for me being the person that always had to stay the latest to make sure the bag was ready for the meeting and all that kind of thing.

Vida Cornelious:
One day, that training kicked in because I was going to a meeting at McDonald’s. He happened to have the bag, but I always kept copies. I always made sure I had Xerox copies of everything that was in the bag so we had a way of making sure nothing got left behind. And so, I had my copies with me, like I always did, and we got a call that he had been in a car accident, so he wasn’t going to make it to the meeting. The whole old team, obviously, was panicking, meaning myself, the account people. I was just a sidekick. He basically was like, “Well, Vida’s there, so she can do it. She knows the work, she can present it.” I was like, “OMG. What?” I think at that point the account people were losing it too because I wasn’t seen as someone who was a stand-in for the boss. You know what I mean? But it was my shot. That was my shot, right? As they say in Hamilton, “I’m not going to lose my shot.” That was it. I didn’t know it.

Vida Cornelious:
But I went in, I had my little Xeroxes. We quickly rallied and got the Xeroxes distributed, like printed more copies and got them distributed. Yeah, I did what I saw him do, and we ended up selling the campaign. The client was very happy, told my boss that I was amazing and all that. The account team thought I was amazing. And shortly thereafter I got promoted. And it became upward trajectory from there. So those kind of moments, I think, were defining for me at DDB. It definitely changed the trajectory of my career. Being a person of color, being a black woman or a black young person in an environment like that, you’re not given that many people who want to really groom you per se. So you have to either absorb it on your own or figure out ways to just be in the right place at the right time. There’s a lot you have to do to rely on yourself. I got pretty comfortable with the idea that I may never have anyone who is going to choose me, right? So I need to just make sure that whenever I am chosen, I’m ready. I think that’s the philosophy I took on from there.

Vida Cornelious:
Then I got paired with a really, really great partner. We worked together for a long time, a young guy named Skip Tramontana. The two of us did a gazillion TV spots together and slept on the floor of our office and banged out ideas and had the quintessential young creative experience at DDB. But the two of us kind of rose up in the ranks together because we were a good team. We understood our clients. We understood how to sell work. And that was a really fun experience. And then we went our separate ways because he took a different job and I ended up getting promoted again and started managing more people and having more responsibility, and my career just went forward from there.

Vida Cornelious:
Most of my time spent at DDB towards the end of my time there, I was doing a lot of new business, a lot of big new business pitches, working across the agency as a whole. Probably one of the things I was most proud of there was working on a project for Budweiser because it was so outside of the norm of what they were trying to do. They were trying to reach young adults, multicultural, millennial adults. So it gave us an opportunity to really do something very different for them, which turned out to be highly successful. Working on beer was nothing that I was aspiring to do, but at the time at DDB, the beer accounts were like the Holy Grail. So being able to work on something there, pitch it, win it, successfully launch it was a big feather in the cap for this little black girl from the 35th floor.

Maurice Cherry:
By the time you left DDB, you got 15 years in the game working at two well-known agencies doing a lot of really big accounts. And then from there you worked at several other agencies and companies. You did a stint at GlobalHue. You did a stint at Walton Isaacson. You were at the Walt Disney Company even for a while. And of course, now you’re at the New York Times. When you look back at those past experiences after leaving DDB, what would you say are the most valuable things that you learned about yourself?

Vida Cornelious:
Yeah, I think each of those positions or moves, if you will, taught me something different. I mean, for sure when I went to GlobalHue, it was right after the Obama election, and I was hellbent on like, “Black agencies are going to take the world by storm, and I want to lead the charge.” I was fired up. I was fired up to do something to really prove that black agencies were not subpar, and going to GlobalHue was almost like a perfect storm of events that allowed us to win the Jeep account while I was there. That was the first time a black agency was helming a massive general market account and one that was a truly beloved brand, American brand, Jeep. We really, really dug our heels in and flip turned it around. I had some incredible wins on that business, helped grow that business.

Vida Cornelious:
But I learned there that you don’t always get the credit that you’re due, no matter how hard you work on something. That was the hard lesson there. Even though I made some incredible friends not just in the agency itself, but in the client space and vendor space, there were so many people that were rallying around us to just see us win because we were trying to do great things and great work, but in the end sometimes the world at large, the industry at large doesn’t give you the credit that you deserve. When I moved over to Walton Isaacson, it was, again, an opportunity to try and build something, to try and bring a point of view. But again, you have to learn that sometimes if your name is not on the door, it’s not your dream to really try and bring to reality. You have to sometimes understand that your aims or your ambitions as a creative person and what you see is not necessarily in line with the person whose name is on the door, so you have to be okay with that and find a way to be diplomatic about how you do exercise your leadership and authority.

Vida Cornelious:
And then in going to places like Disney, that was an opportunity for me to learn about a brand from the inside out. That was an opportunity to pivot away from agency life where you’re in a more service role, in service to your clients that is, to be in on the brand side of the table where you’re literally setting the aims and mission that you need brought to life by your agency partner, right? Being on that side of the table gave me a more deep purview into what makes for sustainable creative ideas, what makes for building loyalty amongst an audience, and also building loyalty amongst the people that work in an environment with you. If there’s one thing I’ll say about the culture of Disney is that I love the fact that it is one where they’re very loyal to their employees in terms of people love the brand. People who work there love the brand, and they’re loyal to it. That was something that really helped me see the value of how much more passionate people are when they believe in what you’re doing. It made me see that you can’t fake the funk sometimes, right? You have to believe in what you’re doing too, and if you don’t, move on. And also being at Disney, it gave me an opportunity to really see the value of storytelling because Disney as an entity is really about storytelling.

Vida Cornelious:
Coming to New York Times is telling a different type of story, right? Is getting to see the stories of truth, of life, of journalistic integrity, and being able to bring that philosophy to the work that we do with brands. But for myself, it’s always about learning. It’s always about expanding my own capability and getting back to that notion of mastery, being able to master something. Your voice, your creative process, your ability to ideate, all those things are, in my opinion, very important being a creative person and how you formulate your own way of working.

Maurice Cherry:
What is the advertising industry like for you at this stage of your career? It sounds like you’ve done it all, pretty much, except run your own agency.

Vida Cornelious:
Oh my gosh.

Maurice Cherry:
You’ve managed to start as an intern, and you’ve worked your way up to being Vice President of Creative at the New York Times. When you look out at the landscape of the ad industry now, what do you see?

Vida Cornelious:
I’ll be honest, what I miss is, and it’ll sound old school, I’m sure, to anyone that’s listening, but there was a certain kind of beauty and real magic in finding an idea that a client would want to stay with for a while and replicate and build their brand around. Now we live in a space where it’s a lot more immediate. We’re living in a space that’s social, it’s faster, it’s a much quicker connection that that needs to be made because of people’s attention span or just what we’ve become accustomed to, how much time we really spend absorbing something. To that end, it feels a little bit at times like advertising is chasing the horse, is chasing something, whether it’s a new platform or how to capture an audience with a very short attention span or battling for our attention on a variety of devices.

Vida Cornelious:
Sometimes I miss the notion that you can build a brand through an idea, you can build an idea over time. Because a lot of times, time is not something that people are willing to give you anymore. But what I do look at in terms of how advertising is different in this landscape is I love fact that video and connecting through video and photography and storytelling formats that are visually-driven are something that is very appealing to me personally. I love film. I always have loved film and video, so anytime we can create things in that kind of format, whether it’s short form, whether it’s documentary style, I still find that probably to be the most appealing and satisfying for myself personally.

Maurice Cherry:
What are you excited about at the moment?

Vida Cornelious:
I’m excited about seeing more diverse voices actually be brought to the forefront. I mean, even though it’s not directly related to advertising, I love the fact that there’s so many more black storytellers writing shows, TV shows, episodic, television, film, that more voices are coming to the forefront. Because it does have a trickle-down effect. That representative storytelling is real. When we can see that there are audiences that are craving more than just the narratives that have been previously being fed to them, it gives us an opportunity on the advertising space to really find legitimate connections to audiences and bring new ways of telling stories to brands. I think that’s really important. So I’m loving seeing all the different types of creators that are out there whether it’s people on TikTok who are making a name for themselves on TikTok in some way, shape, or form, all the way up to creators like Rolonda Watts and Issa Rae’s and now James Samuel. I love the new movie that has just come out, the spaghetti western, and seeing people of color in a variety of types of storytelling formats, and those voices coming forward.

Maurice Cherry:
I still need to see that movie. You’re talking about The Harder They Fall, right? It just came out fairly recently.

Vida Cornelious:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
I need to see that. So funny you mentioned TikTok. I don’t want to say obsessed with TikTok, because that sounds a bit too much, but I am really enjoying TikTok. I’ve actually even found some guests for the show on TikTok, just I’m randomly going through my For You page, and I’m like, “Oh, who is this? Oh, it’s a black person that painted the world’s largest mural. Let me talk to them and get them on the show,” or something like that. But it’s been really interesting seeing how people have come up on these new mediums. I mean, before TikTok, it was what? It was YouTube. It was podcasting. It was blogging. That part kind of blows my mind a little bit. A lot of people now who maybe are thought leaders or really progressive journalists now, I remember when they started out on BlogSpot. And they worked their way up now to book deals and television shows and podcasts and all this sort of stuff. It’s amazing to see.

Vida Cornelious:
Yeah, and they have these… I mean, I know it’s not a new thing anymore, but the influencer houses where they’re influencers coming together, living together, creating their own collective.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Vida Cornelious:
[crosstalk 00:52:48] create content. I know there’s one in Atlanta that is all young black creators. I’m missing the name right now, but-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, the Collab Crib.

Vida Cornelious:
The Collab Crib, yes. Yes. I mean, I think that kind of stuff is really inventive for young people finding a way to basically monetize what they know about culture and the stories that they want to tell. So it is fascinating to see how these platforms have enabled so many young people to kind of find themselves, find their way, find their audiences.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Speaking of Collab Crib, New York Times plug, for folks that are listening, go to Hulu. The New York Times presented a whole documentary on the Collab Crib called Who Gets to Be an Influencer. Definitely go check it out.

Vida Cornelious:
Correct. They sure did.

Maurice Cherry:
If there’s someone that’s out there listening, they are hearing the Vida Cornelious story and they want to follow in your footsteps, what advice would you give them?

Vida Cornelious:
Oh, wow. I mean, it’s like, let’s see, what things should they do? No. Real talk, I would say some of the things I wish I had known then that I know now is that the ability to really listen and not get so deep into what you think something should be that you can’t or another point of view or a critique or a criticism is something I wish I had learned very, very early on. It took me banging my head against the wall a few times in the very early stages of my career before I fully understood that and the value of that. So I would definitely say that’s important.

Vida Cornelious:
The other thing that I would also say is important is your integrity, your character is all you have. Don’t ever let anyone force you to sacrifice that or put you in a position where you feel like you need to sacrifice that. Because at some point in your career and life, it will come back to haunt. I’ve seen it happen to other people. It hasn’t happened to me, but I have seen it happen to other people where they literally have to eat those words. They’ve treated someone a certain way, and then they find out later on in life that that person is in a position to either hire them or they’re the client now or whatever. And I’ve literally seen that. So always know that being kind, being gracious is important, that that’s more powerful than being someone who wants to lead by fear or bring fear into an equation, that never works.

Vida Cornelious:
I would definitely say to someone, “Try and understand and appreciate your worth early on. What makes you different? What makes you someone that has something to say, that has a voice?” I mean, at one point when I was Chief Creative Officer GlobalHue, I would interview people, maybe this isn’t appropriate to ask now, but I would interview people by saying, “When you come to the interview, wear at least one piece of clothing or an item that has some meaning to you. I’d love to know the story of it.” One of the reasons I asked people that was because I wanted to, number one, get a sense of who they were outside of the work that they do, the things that were in their portfolio. But I also wanted to know what had meaning to them.

Vida Cornelious:
I’ll never forget, a guy came in the middle of winter wearing a white linen suit. I said, “Wow.” I said, “Well, why did you choose to wear that?” And he said, “Well, this is the suit that I got married in. Besides for the fact that my wife was my best friend, I mean, this suit reminds me so much of how happy and how joyous I felt on that day, and how complete I felt on that day. And whenever I need that feeling, I remember this suit. I remember this day.” And so that just told me a lot about him and who he was. So I really liked doing that because it gave me a way of having a better understanding of people’s unique value and what’s important to them and the things that are never going to show up in their resume but can become very value as part of their experience in the work environment and in the place of work.

Vida Cornelious:
So I guess a short story for someone listening to this would be, be true to yourself. Be kind, be generous. Know that the people that you’re working alongside right now could be people that you need to reach up to or reach back for in the future. And those are probably the things that I think have sustained me.

Maurice Cherry:
Who are some of the people that have influenced you? I know you mentioned a couple of coworkers, you mentioned this professor at Hampton. Were there other people that have really influenced and mentored you throughout your career?

Vida Cornelious:
I would say I never had any direct mentors, anything that was a formal, per se, mentor relationship, but I definitely had people who I felt like invested a lot in me or poured in me. Rather it was family friends, personal friends, people who had nothing to do with advertising at all. Probably one person that I can definitely speak to or speak about is someone named Bob Sayles. He was a very, very good friend at Burrell, and he was our Head of Print Production. But besides for him just being an amazing person at work, I mean, he was just the most generous, gracious person. He had the most full life. He could make a friend anywhere he went. He was just that person. I mean, he had that hearty, big laugh that you can hear ringing in your ears well after he’s left the room.

Vida Cornelious:
I just learned so much from him about people and about what makes people feel important to you, how to connect with people, not just when you work with them but in just understanding them and really being able to look inside and see the truth that people have and what value they can bring to a situation. To me, he taught me more about human nature, I think, because of his personality and the way he was and the type of person that he was and the amount of time that we spent together as friends, and that became something that I actually use as part of my creative process. When I’m not fully clear on who is this audience I’m speaking to, or who is this person I’m trying to write this ad for or connect with, in some way, shape, or form, I have to figure out what is the truth that connects that person to whatever it is I’m trying to promote to them, right? I have to figure out what is the truth that they would believe.

Vida Cornelious:
So I kind of lean back on my time with him as a way of doing my research and digging around to better understand what motivates people, what makes them tick, and how that makes them feel seen. He was excellent at making people feel seen.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you think your life would’ve gone if you didn’t go into advertising?

Vida Cornelious:
Oh, if I hadn’t gone into advertising, probably when I was at that summer program at Princeton, I would’ve solidly moved into being some type of lawyer. Because I was definitely interested in writing. I was definitely interested in… not necessarily justice like criminal justice or anything like that, but just the pursuit of fairness in some way, shape, or form. I was always intrigued by that. So I probably would’ve ended up being a lawyer. Many, many years, now we’re going to fast forward 30-something years, I mean now, I picked up a love of flowers and floral arranging when I lived in Chicago and had a little side hustle business of doing flowers, which ended up, long story short, landing me doing flowers for Obama for one of his presidential election dinners like [inaudible 01:00:24] dinners. That bug right there, I never shook it.

Vida Cornelious:
I mean now in hindsight, plan B… I mean, if I fast forward, my plan B going forward after advertising, I would love to just own an amazing flower shop somewhere when it’s not about earning money but it’s just about being able to get up and go somewhere every day that you just really, really love. But yeah, if I hadn’t found advertising, I’d probably be a lawyer. Now that I’ve found advertising, been there, and I could say I’ve done that, I would love to probably pursue something a lot gentler on the soul like being a florist.

Maurice Cherry:
I could see it. Oh God, what was the show? I was watching Project Runway, and they just had a designer on there, this guy, Lewis Miller, that does these huge gorilla flower installations in New York City. Have you heard of this?

Vida Cornelious:
Oh yeah, yeah, uh-huh (affirmative).

Maurice Cherry:
He’ll take a phone booth or something and just into this explosion of flowers and stuff. That could be pretty cool. What do you want your legacy to be? Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What kind of work do you want to be doing?

Vida Cornelious:
Ooh, in the next five years… Honestly, I really would love to do more… Hopefully, I will continue to be with the Times. I’m going to say that, put that in the universe. But I would love to continue pursuing how can we do more film. I’d love to get into things like documentaries, more episodic film franchises, really expanding on the notion of how a brand can show up and be relevant in culture and be of service to culture. So finding innovative ways to do that. But I also think that it’s really important from a legacy standpoint to just continue to pave away for young people, particularly young black people, and making them feel like they deserve to be in these spaces, that when they come in these spaces that they’re prepared, they know how they want to show up as their best self, their whole self, not feeling like they have to be something that they’re not in order to fit into these environments, but know that their voices need to be here and need to be heard. But also how to be effective in doing that.

Vida Cornelious:
So if I’m able to leave a legacy of being able to help another young person be the next Vida or be the next other ad person who’s climbed up in the ranks here and there, then I’m happy to do that. I feel like it’s important for me to teach at this point and pave the way for others. I’m very proud of a mentee that I had at the New York Times who, although he chose not to stay at the Times, is doing very, very well in his new role. It makes me super proud to know that all the conversations that we had, all the plans that we laid, he put it in motion and it worked. So my goal is to just leave a legacy of the literal each one, teach one, if I can.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you and about your work and everything online?

Vida Cornelious:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I’m always available on LinkedIn. That’s the fastest and easiest method. I do have a website, vidacornelious.com. I can’t say it’s updated at the moment. I hate to say that, but I’ve been doing so much work as of late, I haven’t had a chance to update it in a little while, but I will. But those are, yeah, for sure, two spaces that you can find me. If you just want to peek in on my dog, my French bulldog, which I love a lot, his name is Leo, you’re more than welcome to find me on Instagram as well. But I don’t do too much work talk on there.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. What’s the dog Instagram?

Vida Cornelious:
He’s just on my page, vida.c. But my dog’s name is Leo. Yeah, he’s very cute, and he’s going to be featured in one of our upcoming articles on departures, which is one of the big projects I do with our special projects team.

Maurice Cherry:
All right.

Vida Cornelious:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
Vida Cornelious, thank you so much for coming on the show. One, just for sharing the rich career that you’ve had in the advertising industry. I think certainly for people that are listening to this, I always try to get people that are at all stages of their career, whether they’re just starting out or whether they’re captains of industry like you are. So it was great to just hear about your journey as a black woman in this industry, but also to hear about how you’re really about making sure that you pave the way for the next generation. I mean, it’s one of those things where certainly we walk the road to make sure that the next gen has a much easier path. So I certainly think that with the work that you’ve done and that you’re continuing to do that you’re helping to make that happen. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Vida Cornelious:
Thank you. Thank you for having me. I love what you’re doing, I think it’s so important, so I’m happy to be an installment in what I would say is your legacy, observing all of our stories.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit is a strategy and design firm committed to designing a more inclusive and equitable world.

We accomplish this through graphic design, presentations and workshops around I-D-E-A: inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility.

If you’re curious to learn how to combine a passion for I-D-E-A with design, check us out at brevityandwit.com.

Brevity & Wit — creative excellence without the grind.

Keni Thacker

If you’ve been keeping up with the advertising world over the past couple of years, then this week’s guest hardly needs an introduction. Meet chief diversity creative Keni Thacker, founder and chief creative officer of 100 Roses from Concrete. Keni uses his decades of experience in the industry to challenge norms while also advocating for diversity and inclusion for the current and next generation of creatives.

Keni and I spoke about 100 Roses from Concrete, including how the agency began and its current group of fellows that have come through the G.R.O.W.T.H. Initiative. Keni also talked about growing up in the DMV area, and how his family and environment help shaped him into the force for change that he is today.

Catch Keni next during Adobe MAX, October 26-28!

Transcript

Full Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Tell us who you are and what you do.

Keni Thacker:
Hey. I’m Keni Thacker, Chief Diversity Creative at Keni Thacker, and also the founder of 100 Roses From Concrete, the premier network for people of color in advertising, marketing media and public relations. What I do during the day, and I can’t say during the night, but during the day, and during the day, I work with advertising agencies, big and small to help them build out their diversity and inclusion platforms and partnerships and programs, and just overall policies and practices as well.

Keni Thacker:
I feel like that’s super, super important. That’s where my passion has been for like the last 10 years, I would say being in advertising, even though I’ve been in advertising for 15 years. Then on the 100 Roses side, as the founder and chief creative officer, I’ve run an organization of about 100, maybe 130 people plus from around the country and it’s basically a professional development kind of network for people of color and women throughout those industries.

Keni Thacker:
We stand on the principles of connect, collaborating and growing together because that’s something that I’ve learned throughout my journeys, is something that’s so very, very important to have as talented creative people, whether it’s strategy people, project management, people, whatever the role is within advertising. I think it’s so very, very important to have a community where you can do those three things, connect, collaborate, and grow.

Keni Thacker:
As André 3000 would say, “Creating a community for opportunity.” That’s what I’ve been doing with 100 Roses From Concrete. That’s what I do.

Maurice Cherry:
How has this year been going for you so far?

Keni Thacker:
Man, this year has been a whirlwind. I would say the last two years have been a whirlwind, but like the whirlwind just continues to happen. Despite our country and society kind of being on a fire, whether it’s from the police stuff, or the government stuff, or the health stuff, I’ve been kind of been like the Phoenix that’s been rising, or better yet, like the roads that grew from concrete. So it’s been good needless to say, there’s been a lot of opportunity, a lot of meeting a lot of great people, a lot of partnering with great people and things of that nature.

Keni Thacker:
I look at the world outside of my window kind of being on flames, inside, we’ve been lucky, my family and I have been lucky to be extremely safe and not gotten sick and anything like that. So I’m doing okay, they’re doing okay. But as career-wise, it’s definitely been one for the history books, needless to say, as someone who… Oh, and I’ll probably talk about this a little later, but as someone who was always in the room where it happened, but never had a seat at the table, I’ve definitely gained my seat at the table by creating my own opportunities over the last, going on two years.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I certainly know what that feels like, being able to make year away from something that you’ve created. How have things changed for you since the start of last year?

Keni Thacker:
How they’ve changed is I guess by creating my own… Well, I guess I’ve always had a brand, but by having the opportunity to really let my brand just do what it’s going to do without any restriction or without having my hand slapped, needless to say has been absolutely great. It has been absolutely great because I get to choose who I want to work with and who I don’t want to work with, and basically dictate my own path. It’s something that I may have thought of maybe when I first got out of school, like “Yeah, one day I’m going to start my own company.”

Keni Thacker:
But as of last year I was even more thrown into the wild and I was like, “Yeah, it’s just time to pull that plug and really just start my own thing.” So I have to say that I’ve been extremely blessed that a lot of the people that I work with are people that I used to work with, but at a different place. But being able to see them in positions of power and then seeing me doing the work that I’m doing, and then them supporting me and the work that I’m doing to also make their agencies better. It’s been an absolute blessing.

Keni Thacker:
There’s too many names to shout out, because it would take more than the hour and a half of this podcast. But yeah, just shout out to all my people, y’all know who y’all are. They definitely been able to look out. Because in full transparency, when COVID hit, I got let go from where I was working. Because I was a consultant and I got let go, and for about a week or so, I was like, “What am I going to do? I’m used to like always ever since like high school, like always used to having a job, so I had never really been let go before.

Keni Thacker:
When that happened, it really hit me in a different way psychologically, but then it was like, “Maybe this is the boost that I need to really just say, “Keni, start your own thing.” That’s exactly what I did and I remember it even after I got out of my funk, I remember tweeting and even, I think maybe in my Instagram stories, I just put like free agent. And after that happened, my inbox started blowing up.

Keni Thacker:
That’s when I knew I was like, “Yep, it’s time to really… All these great ideas that I had and things that I wanted to do within the space of D&I, I was like, “This is the time to do it and things of that nature,” just due to the fact that the industry had renewed its interest in it, even though I’ve been doing this stuff for like 10 years. But being able to do it on my own rather than under the auspices of a huge company just makes it easier because I’m able to get things done in three months that I couldn’t get done in like 10 years or eight years.

Keni Thacker:
Being able to have these like very direct honest conversations with these CEOs and different leadership people within the companies that I work with is great because before, I would have to wait weeks to get on somebody’s calendar. Now, when it’s like, “Oh, Keni needs to talk to the CEO.” It’s not even a matter of me going through an assistant, it’s just me hitting up whoever my friend is, who’s the CEO or the head of talent like, “Hey, I got to talk to you about this. We should do this.” And they’re like, “Of course.”

Keni Thacker:
So it’s just so much better and so much fun, but also impactful in a way that I want things to stay. I want to keep the heat on in regards to this conversation, because so many times it’ll get hot and then it’ll go cold. My job is to keep the heat on as much as I possibly can with the companies that I work with, but also just in the work with the roses well as making sure that our talent knows what they’re getting into by walking into this industry where a lot of other faces don’t really look like theirs.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, you have to keep that momentum going, especially, I think last year when as you alluded to, so many companies and organizations and stuff really started to look at what they were doing around showcasing black voices and black talent. Unfortunately this happened in the shadow of the murder of George Floyd, but companies started to come to and say, “Oh, well, there’s more that we need to do for our black workforces in particular.” But yeah, you have to keep that momentum going because I think as probably most working black professionals know, whenever these kinds of things spark up, they can very easily fade away.

Maurice Cherry:
For lack of a better term, you have to keep your foot on their neck to make sure that things will still happen, to make sure that the [crosstalk 00:11:14] pledges that they have put forth will actually bear fruit and not just be a good PR opportunity.

Keni Thacker:
And to borrow a word from you. I just don’t want them to be pledges, I want this to be practice, I want this to be policy. Because anybody can pledge $5,000 to the NAACP or to whatever, but that’s a one time thing and you’re not really being held to the fire. Because it’s like, oh, well we did that and we can say, “Oh, in 2021, we gave $5,000 to the NAACP or United Negro College Fund,” or whatever you want to call it. But what about in the next year? Just because you donated a certain dollar amount doesn’t make the problem go away.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. A lot of these bigger companies will do that, they’ll just write a check and think that-

Keni Thacker:
Oh yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… will solve everything.

Keni Thacker:
Last year, probably last July, so just a little bit over a year ago, so last July I wrote an article for The Drum or an op-ed, better yet for The Drum, and I said, “advertising, you’re late.” Because the way I was seeing different brands and huge agencies respond to the George Floyd murder, let’s call it what it is, I was just like, “You’re late, bro. Police have been killing black people for 100s of years.” And not even the one time that it’s caught on television, but the one time that it blew everything up, then, Ooh, we care so much about black lives.”

Keni Thacker:
But no one was really saying that when our babies were being murdered, When Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, no one was raising arms saying, “Oh my God, this is horrible.” It took for a guy that’s literally, I think George Floyd, if he was still alive would be a few years older than me for them to care. But when our babies were getting murdered, nobody gave… Excuse my language, but nobody gave a you know what.

Keni Thacker:
So to me during that period and seeing all these really big chest-beating moments for different agencies, I was like, “Wow. So now you care and now you going to allocate millions of dollars towards diversity.” But in my days coming up, I had to beg for money for my budget to do the projects that I was doing. Literally, and I’m talking about, not millions, I’m talking about like little bit of thousands of dollars for my projects. Beg literally like, “Please I need this.”

Keni Thacker:
Walking up to leadership’s face and be like, “Hey, why was my budget cut and why didn’t nobody tell me?” Those were the things that I had to do back when I was doing it on the agency side. But after the murder of someone that looks like me, it could have been my cousin, my brother, my neighbor, whatever, all of a sudden we’ve got millions. We’ve got millions also in the middle of a pandemic.

Keni Thacker:
I’m sorry, I don’t understand that math because I don’t understand that… Those agencies had millions of dollars in the middle of the pandemic while also laying off people at the same time. That’s why when a lot of interviews I was in last year, people like, “How do you think this is going to go and everything like that?” I was like, “Talk to me in five years, because by next year, ain’t nothing going to be different. Ain’t nothing going to be different.”

Keni Thacker:
Yes, has the great, I call it the black gold kind of situation right now where brothers and sisters are finally getting the opportunities that they deserve? Yeah, it’s great right now, or as another friend of mine calls it, the great black mining or the great resignation of talent of color, because now they’re actually going to places that are giving them a proper bag. Yeah, that’s what we’re in right now, but do I believe that this is going to be something that’s going to last long? I just don’t know. I just don’t know.

Keni Thacker:
Because what happens after everyone gets these jobs and things of that nature, but then like as we said earlier, the foot comes off the gas because these agencies are like, “Oh, well, we’ve gotten close to our goals and now we do have a brother or sister or two in leadership, but it’s still not like 50% BIPOC, 50 that white people in leadership.” That’s not going to happen until I’m dead in the grave to be totally honest with you.

Keni Thacker:
So it’s just like, when people ask me like, “Do you think like this is going to change something?” I was like, “I hope it changes something.” But from talking to OGs like Tom Barrell, he says, “This happens every 10 to 20 years, something happens and then everyone cares. And then after a while, it just dies down.” And I would say, even now, as we’re having this conversation, the wind behind the diversity and inclusion’s backs the way it was like last summer, it’s a softer wind right now. It’s not as hard as it was like pushing our boats in whatever it is up the stream.

Keni Thacker:
No, no, no. The wind is a whole lot lighter now. It’s a whole lot lighter now because they build some of these roles and things of that nature, and now every time I hear about a big agency doing something, it’s like, “Oh, well, we’re planning this and we’re planning that,” but I never really see anything come to fruition. They’re like, “Oh wow, I’m impressed,” because all I ever hear is dollar amounts.

Keni Thacker:
I don’t hear about practices, policies, partnerships, and programs that are actually going to really shift the needle. I don’t see that, I just hear talking. Like I said, you put a quarter in me, bruh, you got to wait till the song goes out.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, speaking of these programs and opportunities and such, 100 Roses From Concrete grew out of this environment last year, is that right? You founded it last year and one of the things that you have going on in the program is something that’s called the G.R.O.W.T.H. Initiative. Can you talk about that?

Keni Thacker:
Yeah. 100 Roses I actually found it in 2019.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Keni Thacker:
Back when diversity wasn’t cool, that’s when I founded it. I founded it in 2019, but we didn’t have our big bang until COVID hit. It was crazy. At the beginning, March last year, Adweek, shout out to ad week, I’ll shout out to Adweek all day. Adweek wrote an article about 100 Roses from Concrete and immediately like our membership tripled in like two weeks. But then by the second week of March, here comes the lockdown. Here comes the lockdown, the organization was only running for probably about six months or so, and then everything is locked down, nobody can go nowhere, et cetera, et cetera.

Keni Thacker:
But one of the many thoughts that I had in regards to going onto a virtual platform, 100 Roses, because we used to actually meet in-person was that I have been working with young people, trying to get into the industry for the last 10 years, black and brown, white, whatever, it doesn’t matter what you are. As long as you want to be in this industry, I would mentor you, talk to you, things of that nature. So immediately I thought about young people’s internships for the summer of 2020.

Keni Thacker:
And how I was hearing right before I got let go from the agency where I was you that, “Oh, we’re killing the summer internships, layoffs are coming,” et cetera, et cetera. And I was like, “Well, damn.” I was like, “Well, that’s not fair,” because when you think about the summer internship, that’s that experience in your career, especially if you’re still in college, that’s that experience that either makes or breaks you. You either know that, oh, this is for me or no, it’s not.

Keni Thacker:
Thinking about how many young people were going to lose that opportunity last summer, immediately, I was like, “No, no, no, no, no, no. I’m not going to let this happen. I’m not going to let this happen.” So immediately I brought together my team from 100 Roses and I was like, “Look,” I was like, “This is happening, this is about to start happening any day now.” And it did. And I was like, “I want to create a program that’s going to be virtual and it’s going to be for multicultural college kids from around the country, but it’s going to have them actually doing real work in real time virtually.”

Keni Thacker:
And I was like, ‘Look, I know it’s a tall ask. Y’all don’t want to do it, cool, but I’m going to do it.” Because I was already doing programs like this back at two agencies before I got let go, so I already knew how to do this, but I used to do it in-person. So I was like, “Look, this is what I want to do.” And I was like, I want to call it G.R.O.W.T.H.? And they were like, “Cool.” I was like, “I want to call it The G.R.O.W.T.H. Initiative obviously because I’m a Marvel fan.”

Keni Thacker:
And then I had given the word G.R.O.W.T.H. to my creative team at 100 Roses From Concrete. I was like, “Somebody come up with a acronym,” and everything they sent me back was… It wasn’t trash, I just didn’t like it. And they were having a hard time with it and I was like, “Okay.” I was like, “Give me about an hour.” And then I came back to them, I was like, “Look, this is what I want it to be, Giving Real Opportunity With Talent and Heart.” And that’s what G.R.O.W.T.H. stands for.

Keni Thacker:
That’s literally like, it should be the name of my autobiography because that’s all I’ve been trying to do my entire career, is Give Real Opportunity With Talent and Heart. I’m not trying to build advertising or creative robot here. No, I’m not trying to do that. We give out awards, especially this year in particularly we gave out four financial awards. Actually we gave out eight financial awards at the end of this summer and we call them The Life After G.R.O.W.T.H. Awards.

Keni Thacker:
For each award, we give out two of them, so each award starts with a H. We give award for hustle, we give award for being human, we give award for being humble, and we also give an award for being human. That’s what we’re looking for when we’re working with these young people and we see it come out of them throughout the program as they work for nonprofit clients across the country. Hell bruh, like this year, The G.R.O.W.T.H. Initiative was international and this is only our second year.

Keni Thacker:
So by keeping our foot on the gas and giving real opportunity with talent and heart, we’re able to actually see the change happen in real time. And then also work with agency partners that understand the value that this type of talent brings to the table at the end of the day. Shout out to R\West, shout out to Dego, shout out to Adobe, shout out to Samuels for being really, really great partners and realizing their value. And 21GRAMS/Real Chemistry, shout out to them too for really pulling up and saying, “We believe in what you’re doing and we definitely want to bring these young people in to make our agencies better at the end of the day.”

Keni Thacker:
And that’s just this year, last year we had absolutely no partners. The only partner we had was Advertising Club of New York who we’re still partnering with, but Advertising Club of New York helped get us more students to be in the program. So it’s not like they were giving us internships or full-time jobs or whatever the case may be. But shout out to Advertising Club of New York because they saw what we were doing and they approached us and we were like, “Hey, the more the merrier, let’s do it.”

Keni Thacker:
Also shout out to Save The Internships NY from last year that partnered with us as well. Because they saw what we were doing, they saw that we were grassroots. We’re not about trying to… I don’t even know what we were trying to do last year, but somehow we were like literally building the plane when we were flying it. But it worked out, because most of the fellows from last year, majority of them, especially that were career-ready already have jobs within the industry.

Keni Thacker:
And now even as I speak to you today, six of my fellows that just graduated back in the middle of August already have job opportunities. They’re not full-time job opportunities, they’re internships for the fall already.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice.

Keni Thacker:
When I tell you that I’m keeping my foot on the gas, I’m keeping my foot on the gas and I’m going fast as possible.

Maurice Cherry:
And now one of the other opportunities that has arose and it’s also part of why you’re on the show right now is that you’re going to be speaking at Adobe Max this year. Can you give a little sneak peek about what your talk’s going to be about?

Keni Thacker:
Yeah, man. Adobe Max is like the cherry on the cake this year in regard… You asked me how my year was going and I was like, “Yo, it’s been super wild and everything like that.” When I got the email to participate in Adobe Max, I was like, “What?” I was like, “You sure you got the right person?” Because Adobe has been extremely generous to 100 Roses From Concrete and I’m beyond appreciative for everyone at Adobe that were able to hook us up with the technology resources for the young people in the G.R.O.W.T.H. Initiative.

Keni Thacker:
Shout out to Harvey, shout out to Meg, shout out to everybody at Adobe that was doing it. But my talk at the Adobe Max Conference will be actually me and I’ll be hosted by my friend, Meg, who’s just awesome. We were like instant friends. Meg and I are basically going to be talking about how to level the playing field in the creative industries. How do you do that? Throughout our conversation, we don’t have as much time as you and I do on this podcast. Meg and I are going to be talking about the four things that I feel are most important to leveling this playing field.

Keni Thacker:
So we’re going to get into access, we’re going to get into opportunity, we’re going to get into experience and exposure. Because those four things right there are what talent of color needs, just talent, period, needs in order to really figure out ways to really level this playing field and making it fair for everyone. But I’m not only going to talk about the first part, but it all starts, Maurice with access. It all starts with access. If you want to understand why there’s such a disparity between of people of color and our white brothers and sisters, it all starts with access.

Keni Thacker:
It’s the allocation of resources. So when you think about the huge gap between financial resources, educational resources, housing resources, all those things, it starts with access. So I’m going to talk about that, and then I’m going to go down this like ski slope of talking about the three other things as well and how they’re all actually interconnected, and how if we view our diversity problems through that lens, we can actually get to…

Keni Thacker:
I’m not going to say there’s a definitive answer because the answer is going to be different for everybody, but at least to a solution, and to a solution that we can continue to grow and build and evolve over time. That’s where that access, opportunity, experience and exposure all are very, very important.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I’ve done Revision Path for what? Eight and a half? Oh my God, eight and a half years now, and I’ve had a number of conversations just around diversity in advertising, diversity in design, diversity in tech, et cetera. These conversations, aside from them running in tandem with each others for years, these have also been perennial conversations. If I were even to just pinpoint it for design, this is a conversation that has been going on at least since the ’80s, for example.

Maurice Cherry:
So you got these different industries, but they have the same goals as it relates to diversity and inclusion, diversifying the workforce, opportunities, things of that nature. A lot of what you’re mentioning to me sounds very similar to what I’ve heard from AIGA and what that they’ve tried to accomplish through their working groups and symposiums in the ’90s and stuff like that.

Maurice Cherry:
From your perspective, what do you think it would look like if these different initiatives work together? Say, what you’re doing with 100 Roses works with, I don’t know, I’m just pulling stuff out of my head, like say, diversity and design or design to divest or other types of things. What do you think it would look like if [crosstalk 00:26:52] these groups from different industries, yeah, if they work together?

Keni Thacker:
If they work together, that’s how the foot stays on the gas, because then it doesn’t become, oh, we only talk about this during this time of year. 200 Roses, I have this thing called, that I just created not too long ago, but I guess it’s always been in the back of my mind when I think about me mentoring and counseling. I have this thing called a cadence of care, and when you create a cadence of care, that’s how you know that there’s certain times when you have to discuss this, and then the conversation does not go stale and it doesn’t grow old.

Keni Thacker:
Because we find new ways to keep it relevant at all times. So if we were to bring all these different resources and movements and things like that together into some type of Voltron-ish type of being, then every single part, whether it’s the legs, whether it’s the arms, whether it’s the legs, whether it’s the chest, we would know that we have to keep moving. Because Voltron don’t do jack if it’s just standing still, so it has to keep moving. So by bringing…

Keni Thacker:
Because I know people that run their own entities, good friends of mine that run their own different entities, I got the one school, we got Marcus Graham Project, we got The One Club, all these other different things. But we all run separately, but we’re actually all going in the same direction, is that we’re just all in different lane. So it’s a matter of that, knowing we all have the same destination, but I don’t even look at it as a destination because I feel like we need to keep just going, it needs to keep going.

Keni Thacker:
But that’s the way I would probably have to answer that question, is that if we were to build something like that, we will all know that we have to hold each other responsible order to keep that blood flowing and keep our foot on the gas to keep it going at all times.

Keni Thacker:
Because the moment we stall is the moment things will go back to the way they used to be. You said this conversation and design is going back to the ’80s, the conversation about diversity and advertising goes back to the ’60s, goes back to ’60s. An individual that I have to always shout out during all my interviews is, goes back to the late great Bill Sharp. He was the first group copy supervisor at JWT where I used to work like two years ago.

Keni Thacker:
And he passed away sadly in 2013, but he’s technically considered the godfather of diversity in advertising, because he was talking about it back in like the ’60s, back in the ’60s, he was talking about it. Once I learned about Bill’s work and what bill did with the basic advertising course, which is similar to like the Marcus Graham Project or the G.R.O.W.T.H. Initiative or the OneSchool. Once I found out about his work, I was like, “There’s no way I can work at the same agency as this great black man used to work,” not the same office, but the same agency where I used to work, “and me not give two damns about this topic and not put my days and nights, and weekends, whatever into this work.”

Keni Thacker:
Once I was properly informed about Bill, and Bill’s not taught about in ad school. A lot of times you bring up the word, Bill Sharp, people are like, “Who?” But he even wrote a book back in the ’60s that I assign to my G.R.O.W.T.H. Initiative fellows called How To Get A Job in the Advertising Business and Be Black Anyway. I may have got a word or two wrong, but it’s an amazing book, and it’s only like 19 pages. But even if you read that book today, it sounds like bill is talking to you right now. That’s how important it’s.

Keni Thacker:
Yeah man. Bill keeps me inspired and last year I was honored enough to receive his award for the future of advertising and I keep it right here above my desk lit up all the time. But yeah, Bill is the man and I’m very close to his family and everything like that. I keep them informed of everything that I’m doing and they always be like, “Yo, Bill would be proud if he was still around.”

Keni Thacker:
Having that co-sign from the Sharp family is something that keeps me going, but also if there’s opportunities to pull, whether it’s agencies or small movements like myself with me, that’s what I’m going to do. But that’s what it’s going to take. The Voltron cannot stand still, because if it does, we’re going to lose time and we’re going to lose space to gain that leverage within the industry.

Maurice Cherry:
And I have to say, I’m pretty sure, in terms of those conversations that you mentioned taking place since the ’60s, that’s where I think the genesis of it for design has also come from too. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that. I feel like Cheryl Miller and many other luminaries of this issue will probably get at beyond that. But certainly I think these conversations have originated from a similar place because of course advertising really well known back then.

Maurice Cherry:
Even if you think about design as we look at it now, it grew out of that creative field, so that makes sense there.

Maurice Cherry:
Switching gears because I know we spent a lot of time talking about what you’re doing now with 100 Roses, your Adobe Max talk. I see from looking at your Instagram that you’re a huge Marvel fan. I want to get [crosstalk 00:32:03] the Keni Thacker origin story. Talk to me about where you grew up.

Keni Thacker:
Yeah man. I grew up in Washington, D.C. in Maryland, like the DMV area. DMV was Maryland, D.C., Virginia. That’s where I grew up. That’s where before moving to New York, senior year of high school, even though I still finished my senior year of high school, my mother-in-law moved to New York. I finished high school and then when college came, when Lincoln University came into the play, I was already living in New York. I’ve been living in New York literally now more than half of my life to be totally honest with you.

Keni Thacker:
That’s where I grew up, so days and nights in the DMV, and then early adult years, just been here in New York ever since. That’s like my origin story. In regards to just like getting into the industry, I always say my origin story is nothing fabulous. I don’t have like these great stories to be like, “Oh, well, I was in Marple or I was in Marcus Graham Project or I was in the G.R.O.W.T.H. Initiative or whatever the case may be.” That’s not how I got into advertising.

Keni Thacker:
I would say, my first couple years after college, I worked in, I guess, the hospitality industry, so like conference centers, and hotels and things that nature, doing a lot of technology work and things that nature. Like sound systems, projectors, lighting, audio, things of that nature. Eight audio visual, event technology, whatever you want to call it, but that’s actually what landed me into advertising.

Keni Thacker:
As a freelancer, doing that work, I landed into Ogilvy and the first day I was in Ogilvy, I didn’t even know what Ogilvy really was until I was looking at the walls of the old Ogilvy office and seeing these different ads like the Superman, American Express ads and things of that nature and I was like, “Do they make commercials here?” And sure enough, they did. And spent a little bit of time at Ogilvy, but then while I was at Ogilvy, I got a call from, at least the agency formally known JWT at the time. Asked me if I was interested in a job and I was like, “I don’t even know what JWT is.”

Keni Thacker:
So I asked one of the people at Ogilvy. I was like, “Hey, this place called JWT.” They’re like, “Oh, it’s just like here, except they’re a little bit older.” I was like, “Oh, cool.” Went to JWT on like a lunch break or whatever, knocked out that interview, went for another interview and I had the job. And I spent 13 years at JWT and I would say, 2011 is when I actually started the D&I work that I’ve been doing, and then I left there on a high note doing the D&I work, but still doing the technical work as well.

Keni Thacker:
The technical work was always like the stuff that paid the bills, but the D&I work was something that I just did because I was passionate about it. Luckily, I had a few resources that let me do the D&I work. And even when I was at JWT in particular, I created a program called The Young Commodores, which is very similar to the G.R.O.W.T.H. Initiative, except it was in-person. It was definitely not over 50 young people from around the country.

Keni Thacker:
It was actually the first high school, college mashed up of multicultural students that learned about the business and worked on real life clients. I created The Young Commodores and ran that for about three years. And then at the end of those three years is when I decided to leave JWT. And that’s when I left it for PR for a little bit. Then after PR that’s when I created my own company, Keni Thacker, but also before that departure from JWT is when I created 100 Roses From Concrete.

Keni Thacker:
Nothing too fabulous, but more just like falling into opportunities per se, but also making the most out of those opportunities when I had them.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s bring it back because you definitely put the foot on the gas there in regards to the origin story, but let’s bring it back to those DMV years now. I heard that your mom was a copywriter, so your mom was in the ad industry as well. Is that where you got your spark for this kind of work?

Keni Thacker:
Well, my mom was a copywriter very, very, very, very, very, very, very briefly. I didn’t realize that she was a copywriter until I was at JWT. Because I was like, “Is that what mom was doing?” Because I remember like going with her to the studio and someone was reading the words that she wrote. So I didn’t really understand it until I was actually in the advertising industry to understand. But my mom has lived like a million lives of needless to say, and copywriter was like one of those.

Keni Thacker:
She’s been a teacher, she still is a teacher, but as far as like educating people, that’s been like, I would say a really big bulk of her career, but she did do a brief stint as a copywriter. What agency? I have no clue because I was a little kid. I don’t even think she remembers, but she had a brief stint. And then when I was actually in ad school, shout out to the Adhouse, I was like, “I think this is what mom used to do back when I was like,” I could barely remember needless to say, but yeah.

Keni Thacker:
So the creative arts per se has always been in me somewhat. Don’t get it messed up. I can’t draw to save my life, so let’s not even go there. Any artists out there grab GDs as I call them, respect to you all. I can’t draw to save my life, but I can write a line or two, needless to say and I know good copy when I see it. So on the writing side, that’s something that I’ve always done. I’ve always written stories or back in the high school days in the DMV, I used to write a couple raps, did a couple rap showcases, things of that nature.

Keni Thacker:
But unfortunately during those days in the ’90s, there was two great artists that came on the scene that kind of made me feel like, “You know what, you can’t do this?” And one goes by the name of the late great Christopher Wallace and the other Tupac Shakur. I was like, “Oh, okay, these dudes are really good at this. I’m not that great.” So I was like, “Yeah, I’m going to go to college. I’m not going to make it as a rapper.”

Maurice Cherry:
And speaking of college, what made you decide to go to Lincoln? Because you’re in the DMV, there’s Howard, there’s other HBCU. Not saying that going to an HBCU was… I don’t know if that was the goal or not, but what made you decide to go to Lincoln?

Keni Thacker:
What made me go to Lincoln was that my high school was in the burbs of Maryland, so it was in this suburb called Germantown, Maryland. I would say, “Shout out to Germantown,” but I have nobody live there anymore. But my high school was like in the burb, so Germantown was maybe 30 minutes outside of D.C. My high school was pretty diverse, but I would say it was still majority white. It was probably about 30% kids of color, 70% white kids.

Keni Thacker:
During that time in particular in going to high school, it wasn’t like being in D.C. where my elementary school was like all just black and brown kids, pretty much all day, every day. But due to the fact that I spent this time at this very mixed high school per se, I knew that I needed like four years of unadulterated blackness, needless to say. So I only applied to actually HBCUs, I didn’t apply to any PWCs at all, because that’s just what I wanted to do.

Keni Thacker:
But also shout out to one of my high school teachers, actually two of my high school teachers, Ms. Smith and Ms. Wilder was from ninth grade to 10th grade… No, from ninth grade to 12th grade, we always had field trips to historically black colleges. And maybe one [inaudible 00:39:34] there, once in a blue moon, we go to William and Mary, but we always went to Hampton. We were supposed to go to Lincoln once, but we never did, but we did stop by Temple and there was always like different organizations would sponsor these black college tours.

Keni Thacker:
So I was able to visit Morehouse and Morris Brown. Obviously, I couldn’t go to Spelman, but like North Carolina A&T, I think I went there like twice when I was in high school. Those are the only kind of schools that I actually visited when I was in high school and I just knew that this was the kind of atmosphere that I would thrive in. Now, when it came to Lincoln, in particular, two friends of mine from high school actually went to Lincoln and they just raved about. They’re like, “Oh my God, it’s the…” And I was like, “Okay, cool.”

Keni Thacker:
So I applied, actually got in. And when I went there for like an open house, I guess, per se, even though I was already accepted, something about just the campus made me feel… Because Lincoln is not a big school. Lincoln is far from the size of Howard or even Hampton. It’s a really, really small school, but something about like the feel of the yard just made me feel like, by the time I leave here, everybody’s going to know my name. And that’s exactly what I did in four years.

Keni Thacker:
I did not major in business, I did not major in advertising. I majored in education because I thought I wanted to be a teacher, but there was just something about the experience from Lincoln. And I get this question a lot when people ask me about like my historically black college experience and I tell them, “You know what, It was bittersweet.” And I was like, “There was times when it was super sweet because I’m around my folks and everything like that, but also there was times when it was extremely bitter.”

Keni Thacker:
There was times when I didn’t want to go back to be totally honest with you. There was times when I definitely did not want to go back. But my mom, always being in my corner, she was like, “Hey, you’re going back.” She’s like, “When you graduate, we graduate.” And when she said that alone, that touched my heart and I was like, “Wow, this means so much to her that when I graduate, she graduates.” And not that to say that my mother doesn’t have degrees, now she has multiple degrees, but just that alone made me like, “Okay, I’ll go back and finish out.”

Keni Thacker:
I did it in a straight four years. Did two summer schools, but finished it in the exact four years that I was allotted to be there. And I’ve made some of my closest friends there like my roommates and everything like that. I’m still very close to one of my roommates, in particular, but still… Love to my other roommate as well, but still close to my friends there and it’s just something that can never be taken away from me, but even the rough times, I appreciate those rough times.

Keni Thacker:
Because when you think about how we interact with other races, especially the white race in particular, there’s certain things that we expect because it’s just systemic, it’s just systemic. That systemic hate is just something that the system creates. But when some of those bad times that you have with your own people, it almost feels like it’s your family hurting you. When people ask me about my historically black college experience, I’m like, “Well, it was great, but it also…” And this is kind of crazy math, but going to historically black college actually helped me deal with white people better.

Keni Thacker:
Because the rough times that I went through at a historically black college will always surpass my roughest day with a white person. Because with a white person, I know it’s something that it’s systemic and that’s just the world that we live in. Whereas when your own people do you dirty, it’s like… You feel like we’re neighbors, why you slap my mom? So it’s something that even those bad times, I still embrace them because they gave me such a tougher skin.

Keni Thacker:
Because when it’s your own people, it’s not a systemic type of player hating or whatever the case may be. It just hate at the end of the day and that hurts. But when it’s systemic, you kind of know like, “Oh, well this is just the system being the system and there’s not much I can really do to change this, because this was the system that person was also born into and that’s why they look at me this way.”

Keni Thacker:
That’s my whole HBCU thing till I die. Lincoln’s the first historically black college and a lot of the things that I try to do, just whether it’s in life or within my career is always trying to be the first. I went to the first historically black college, JWT was actually the first advertising agency per se. Bill Sharp, first group copy supervisor. I have one child, I’m an only child, my wife is an only child.

Keni Thacker:
There’s a whole lot of ones that follow my origin story and that’s just how I operate. Even when I think about The Young Commodores program, it was the first high school, college mashup program to develop talent of color and white kids as well in the whole advertising business period. So it’s just something that I constantly try to do, I just try to… There’s a lot of ones along my story.

Maurice Cherry:
Interesting. Lincoln is a very well known HBCU. Like you said, it’s the first HBCU, Langston Hughes is an alumni, Thurgood Marshall is an alumni.

Keni Thacker:
Yeah. Albert Einstein visited there.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice. Okay.

Keni Thacker:
There’s a photo of Albert Einstein at Lincoln, like back in the black and white photo days. I don’t know when exactly it was, but even Albert Einstein visited Lincoln University. And the campus hasn’t moved, it’s still exactly where it is, in Southern Chester County, Pennsylvania, right off of route one, it’s an hour away from Philly. It’s still there and it’s even better now, because actually they do have an advertising program at that school now. So that’s always good to hear of the school growing and things of that nature.

Maurice Cherry:
I first heard about Lincoln… When did I first hear about Lincoln? I think it was when I was in college. So I went to Morehouse and-

Keni Thacker:
Okay. My best friend went there.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh nice. The summer before I started, there was like the summer program that I was a part of and our math professor was a math professor from Lincoln, Dr. Shaba. Unfortunately has passed away rest in peace, but that’s where I first heard about Lincoln and he gave us the history of Lincoln. And Dr. Shaba is like one of the most well known black mathematicians in the world. That’s how I first heard about the school and everything.

Maurice Cherry:
As you mentioned, you graduated from Lincoln, you were out there in the world, you were doing this work in tech, you kind of said for ad agencies and stuff like that. And then you started out later at JWT, which is where you spent the bulk of your career. When you look back at that time, what are some of the highlights that you remember from that?

Keni Thacker:
The highlights were-

Maurice Cherry:
Are there highlights? I would imagine so. I’m just.

Keni Thacker:
It’s all a highlight reel. No, some of it’s not. Some of the highlights was being able to executive produce… The first documentary I ever executive produced was for a Black History Month as a part of the diversity platforms that we were creating. But being able to executive produce my first documentary, that was when I was like, “Yeah, this is what I’m going to do.” Needless to say, it was a great experience. That very first one that I executive produced was actually directed by my man, Pete Chapman. He’s moved on and directed a bunch of great stuff for television, for Black-ish, for Grown-ish, for Atypical, Grey’s Anatomy.

Keni Thacker:
He’s just killing it basically right now in the game, but it was a great opportunity to work with him. I won’t say those were his early days, but definitely his day getting into the game and things of that nature. But not only did I executive produce that documentary, but I also made that documentary another four times after that. And then I started directing and producing those documentaries after I couldn’t afford Pete after the first time because he’s too good.

Keni Thacker:
But me getting into the production field and whether it was camera work and directing at the same time, being able to do all of that, then create these programs for young people. I would say two years after starting this kind of work, that’s when the accolades started coming in slowly but surely, but they were definitely coming in and it was all just mind blowing for me at the end of the day. So it’s been like one experience to the other, but I will say, creating Young Commodores, creating 100 Roses From Concrete, creating the G.R.O.W.T.H. Initiative, I would say, those have been like the steady, just like it never gets old, but also like ain’t no stopping now.

Keni Thacker:
But I also feel like I’m only getting started. Even doing this work for 10 years, to be totally honest with you, Maurice, I feel like I’m only getting started.

Maurice Cherry:
Speaking to that, I’m curious, you mentioned all these firsts. You mentioned first for your program, things of that nature, where does that drive come from? Why do you have the ambitions that you have?

Keni Thacker:
I think the ambition comes from my family. One, I’m surrounded by the strongest, smartest women, period. When I think about my wife, when I think about my mom, when I think about my kid, they’re all just way smarter than me. They’re smarter and they’re stronger than me. So by being surrounded… And shout out to all my nieces too, but they’re all so strong and also very focused that it’s like, I have got to pull my weight, dog. To be totally honest with you, I have got to pull my weight.

Keni Thacker:
So when it comes to the things that I want to do, I’m also thinking about the future for my daughter. When I say that I’ve been doing this work for 10 years, she’s only 11 years old, so literally-

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Keni Thacker:
… it was after like a year after her birth that I was like, “You know what?” I just wasn’t feeling like I was being challenged, I wasn’t being fulfilled, and I didn’t even know that I could actually make a difference in this industry. But when she came along, I was like, “If there’s anything I can do to make sure that maybe the job role is just 5% easier for her than the 100% how hard it was for my wife and myself, and Lord knows my mom. She’s been working in industry… She’s still working and she’s about to be 80 years old.

Keni Thacker:
But if there’s any way that I can do to just make it 5% easier for her, then that’s what I’m going to do. And that’s what I have done. Even if you scroll back to some of my older Instagram photos, you’ll see that I brought her on set when she was like three, four years old making spots.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, wow.

Keni Thacker:
With the G.R.O.W.T.H. Initiative this summer, when one of the teams was making a commercial for her spot, I brought her with me so she could see what we were doing as like a ragtag kind of production crew and things of that nature. So I constantly try to bring her along for the journey, as much as I possibly can. Whether she’s super interested or not interested, still try to make her a part of it so she can understand and see how it works. But then also see like, “Oh, so these young people are 20, 22 years old,” or whatever the case may be, “and they’re trying to do this, and my dad is actually helping them.” You know what I mean?

Keni Thacker:
Even when I do… Back when we could do things in-person, any award that I would receive, I would bring her up on stage with me so she could be a part of that experience as well. So she’s seen me win award from award to magazine… Now, she’s just numb to it all, so she [crosstalk 00:51:03]. She’s like, “Oh, dad, oh, you were in Business Insider. Oh, okay. Who cares?” But she’s kind of gotten numb to it all and it’s kind of a running joke around my house, because my wife always makes fun of me because “Oh, you think you’re famous?”

Keni Thacker:
And then my kid said, “Dad, you’re like semi famous,” something like that. And that’s the running joke around the house that I’m not famous, I’m kind of semi famous. But needless to say, the accolades, when they do come through, I’m still blown away by any one of them. And I’m super grateful when they do come, because, one, I don’t do it for the accolades in the first place. You know what I mean? I’m doing it here to literally change the culture and doing it for the people that look like me and definitely, for the ones that are coming behind us at the end of the day.

Keni Thacker:
Because when I think about my early days and just how, as I said, I think in the beginning of our talk is how I always in the room, but I didn’t have a seat at the table. I was in the rooms with our CEOs and our top leaders, going around the country, helping them with their technology as they’re meeting with these multi-billion dollar clients and things of that nature. I was there, but I didn’t have any power.

Keni Thacker:
But now, 15 years later in the advertising business, here I am doing a podcast with Maurice and about to be on the Adobe Max stage. And I can say that Adobe with more money than God is one of the partners for my organization that I started myself. You know what I mean? So it’s all just like… I can’t even call it a dream come true because I didn’t even dream this to be totally honest with you, Maurice. I didn’t even dream this.

Keni Thacker:
It was just more like being on the grind, doing what I do, trying to do it the best way I know how, bringing in the right people, because the Lord knows I can’t do it by myself. But that’s all it’s been bruh, to be 100% honest with you. That’s all it’s been, but I didn’t even dream of an Adobe partnership. But now thinking back to the days when I didn’t have a seat at the table and even though I was in the room. But now I can be like, “Yeah, I partner with Adobe, multi-billion dollar company and I did it from my living room, dog.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Mentioning your daughter, does she want to follow in your footsteps? Since she’s kind of been shadowing you, it sounds like for a very long time.

Keni Thacker:
She’s more into the theatrical arts, so she’s a little actress, needless to say, and she’s done multiple productions with her theater camp. She currently attends Harlem School of the Arts, shout out to Harlem School of the Arts, so she’s killing it there right now. But she more in front of the camera, needless to say. But she’s also a great writer in her own right and she writes about things that are important to her, even stuff that in regards to our country and things of that nature.

Keni Thacker:
So she definitely has her own opinion about things, because it’s sad to say, since 2017, she’s had her front row seat to everything that’s been going wrong. And I was telling a friend of mine from the UK, I was like… And this is back in 2017. I was telling him, I was like, “The worst part about what was then about to happen was that our kids will not be able to unsee this.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. That’s very true.

Keni Thacker:
There’s just no going to what was. We as adults would be forever changed, but our kids even more so. And especially when you even think of just as of last year, being like stuck on the screen all day and that’s their form of school. We didn’t have to go through that when we were in school. Right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Keni Thacker:
But like the resilience, I would say of these young people these days, even all the way down to my daughter’s age, the ones that are handling it well, like yo. I give them all the respect. I’m like, “Y’all are way stronger than us,” because I would’ve probably quit school. I could probably sit street on the street all day. My attention span just wasn’t like that back then. Hell, it’s probably not like that now. But needless to say, the resilience of these young people, and shout out to my guests, the G.R.O.W.T.H. Initiative fellows, to pull together campaigns all virtually over these last two years.

Keni Thacker:
That alone, I tell them, I was like, “Y’all are special. You don’t understand how special you are that you’re able to pull together campaigns for these nonprofit organizations and most of y’all aren’t even in the same state. Hell, same continent.” Shout out to my nephew Sandip in New Delhi and then one of my other fellows in Singapore. They were joining like 5:00 AM their time our sessions.

Keni Thacker:
You know what I mean? 5:00 AM, 12:00 PM their time, literally oceans and oceans away. But they were joining and they got the most out of the experience, and they were doing their thing. It’s crazy.

Maurice Cherry:
Are you where you wanted to be at the stage in your life? When you think back to like the early days of what you were working on, is this where you saw yourself ending up?

Keni Thacker:
No, I didn’t. I thought I’d constantly be working for like a company all my life. Obviously, I’m not a millennial, so I don’t bounce around every two to three years or whatever the case may be. As you see, I spent a long time at JWT. Was I planning on retiring from JWT? No, that I was never in the cards for me. I always wanted a way out and I always wanted to find just a way to still actively be involved in the industry, but maybe just not there.

Keni Thacker:
And I can’t honestly say, this is where I want to be, because then that’s me saying I’m comfortable where I am. And since I’m constantly on the move, it’s just like, yeah, this is good, but I feel like I could always do better at the end of the day. I’m not a sedentary type of person when it comes to my career and what I want to do, and especially, with like shout out Fast & Furious kind of reference, but like with the nitrous boost that my career got, I would say over the last, going on the last two years, actually, I don’t ever want to just say, “I’m happy where I am.”

Keni Thacker:
There’s one piece of advice I give young people all the time is like, don’t chase the checkered flag because there shouldn’t be an end to what you want to do. You should constantly be evolving and growing all the time.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What kind of work do you want to be doing?

Keni Thacker:
Five years, hopefully, the Roses is on more solid footing. Not that we’re not right now, but even on more solid footing, more great partners, things of that nature, bringing, making this a reality, getting these right. Bringing this black BIPOC talent into these industries that don’t really have a lot of them. Keni Thacker LLC definitely, working with agencies on a longer basis, but also being able to really ignite sustainable and perpetual change within these organizations. That’s where I’d like to see myself.

Keni Thacker:
If we’re having this conversation in three to five years, that’s where I want to see myself. Just basically more growth at the end of the day, giving real opportunity with talent and heart on both ends. Whether it’s through the agency side, or through the work that I do with the young people, or the professional development that we do through 100 Roses from Concrete, that’s where I want to be like in five years. But even five years from now, I’m still not going to be comfortable where I’m at because I’m going to be like, “I know I need to do more.”

Maurice Cherry:
And honestly, who knows what this world is going to look like in five years with the way things are going right now.

Keni Thacker:
Oh yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
It kind of feels like the smart thing to still stick with what you’re working on, so it sounds good.

Keni Thacker:
I hope to be alive.

Maurice Cherry:
Look, floods in one part of the country, fires in another part as we’re recording this, I should mention. But yeah, I totally get what you’re saying.

Keni Thacker:
I hope to be alive. But if I am alive, I’m going to tell you this, Maurice, I’m be fucking… Excuse my language, sorry. I’ma be put my foot in people’s behinds and making sure like these things come to fruition, one way or the other. One way or the other, who’s to say, five years from now, maybe I’m working for one of these places, I don’t know. But if I am, it’s not going to be this soft-shoe dancing around the topic of diversity, it’s going to be like, “No.” It’s going to be Timberland boots.

Keni Thacker:
And we’re going to be like in town stomping, making this stuff happen at the end of the day. Because the days of like the soft-shoe tap dancing around has got us nowhere. It has got us absolutely nowhere. It’s got us absolutely nowhere, but it’s also made a lot of people extremely wealthy.

Maurice Cherry:
This is true.

Keni Thacker:
So it’s a matter of thinking about, okay, obviously, there’s a worry from a certain group of people that, “Oh, well, there’s not enough room at the table.” That’s okay, because you know what? You, me, a bunch of other people, we can go to Home Depot to get some plywood, build some chairs, build extensions to that table and make the table bigger. Because it’s not about taking away from anyone, it’s about just making more room at the end of the day.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more about you and about your work and everything online?

Keni Thacker:
Obviously, kenithacker.com, look pretty easy place to find about work with Keni Thacker LLC. But then also, 100 Roses from Concrete, it’s 100rosesfromconcrete.com. On Twitter, we’re 100RFC. Yeah, 100RFC on Twitter, but 100 Roses from Concrete on Instagram. And me, just same way on Instagram and Twitter, just K-E-N-I-T-H-A-C-K-E-R on both. No secret cool handles or whatever the case may be. That’s the easiest way to find out what we’re doing and what I’m doing, and things coming up, and things of that nature.

Keni Thacker:
We’re working on some new stuff for the G.R.O.W.T.H. Initiative that will probably launch in January. It’s to have secrets, so I can’t really talk about it right now. I am going to say that, with the G.R.O.W.T.H. Initiative, we have mastered helping young people, so now it’s a matter of thinking about how do we help other people through the umbrella of growth and 100 Roses from Concrete. So that’s going to be something that people are going to need to look for.

Keni Thacker:
Probably in the next couple months, We’re definitely going to start grinding down that idea that I have for the organization to help more people at the end of the day. Because I always tell people, I was like, “The one thing whenever this COVID stuff is done, a couple things that will still be around is going to be racism, ageism, sexism, xenophobia, ableism, and all those other isms are going to outlive COVID whenever COVID it’s over.”

Keni Thacker:
So it’s really about not taking our foot off the gas about those things that are important to us, but also those things that are going to make our creativity better, make our pockets better equitably, but also make people feel like they belong and feel like they’re a part and they can be successful within these organizations, where lot of faces don’t look like theirs at the end of the day.

Keni Thacker:
So if there’s anything that I can do to teach people how to show up in these challenging spaces where creativity and commerce often meet and humility falls short, that’s what I’m going to do.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good, man. Well, Keni Thacker, I want to thank you so much, so, so much for coming on the show. Thank you for really, putting yourself out there and stepping out on your own and being a voice in the advertising, and creative industries, as it relates to pulling together opportunities for really diverse talent. It’s certainly something that throughout the time I’ve done this show, I’ve been trying to beat that drum to let companies know.

Maurice Cherry:
So it’s good to tell off to somebody out there that’s also really putting his foot on the gas and making sure that this happens so the next generation can really come up and have the opportunities that they need to succeed. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Keni Thacker:
As one of my professors, Dr. T, actually at Lincoln used to say, it’s been a privilege and a pleasure.

Sponsored by Adobe MAX

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Support for Revision Path comes from Adobe MAX.

Adobe MAX is the annual global creativity conference and it’s going online this year — October 26th through the 28th. This is sure to be a creative experience like no other. Plus, it’s all free. Yep – 100% free!

With over 25 hours of keynotes, luminary speakers, breakout sessions, workshops, musical performances and even a few celebrity appearances, it’s going to be one-stop shopping for your inspiration, goals and creative tune-ups.

Did I mention it’s free?

Explore over 300 sessions across 11 tracks, hear from amazing speakers and learn new creative skills…all totally free and online this October.

To register, head to max.adobe.com.

Sponsored by Black in Design 2021 Conference

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On the weekend of October 8-10th, join the Harvard Graduate School of Design virtually for the Black in Design 2021 Conference!

This year’s theme, Black Matter, is a celebration of Black space and creativity from the magical to the mundane. Our speakers, performers, and panelists will bring nuance to the trope of Black excellence and acknowledge the urgent political, spatial, and ecological crises facing Black communities across the diaspora. You don’t want to miss out on this weekend of learning, community, and connection!

Visit them online at blackmatter.tv to learn more and be a part of the event.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit is a strategy and design firm committed to designing a more inclusive and equitable world.

We accomplish this through graphic design, presentations and workshops around I-D-E-A: inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility.

If you’re curious to learn how to combine a passion for I-D-E-A with design, check us out at brevityandwit.com.

Brevity & Wit — creative excellence without the grind.

brandon Viney

If you’ve seen either the the “Black Girl Magic” video or the Black History Month video this year from Google, then you’re already intimately acquainted with the work of Brandon Viney, group creative lead at Google Brand Studio. He heads up the creative agency inside Google that uses data from the search engine to produce powerful ad spots like these (and many more).

Brandon gave a peek behind the curtain on his creative process when starting new projects, and talked about the Google Brand Studios Fellowship Program and shared what Google looks for when bringing on new talent. He also shared growing up in the Blue Ridge Appalachian mountains of Virginia, attending VCU’s world-renowned Brandcenter, and reflected back on his time working in advertising at Wieden + Kennedy. Brandon is definitely one of the most down-to-earth and humble guests I’ve had on the show in some time, and I hope his story inspires you to push the boundaries of your creativity!