Some of My Best Friends Are Black (38 page)

Whatever the next big thing is, whether it’s environmental technology or farming hydroponic tomatoes on the moon, right now that thing is just two guys in a garage with an idea. And if you don’t know the guys who know those guys, then you just don’t know them. By the time their idea is big enough for the lawyers to show up and build the diversity pipeline, the real money and the real opportunities will be gone. So if we’re not talking about why black people and white people don’t hang out and play Scrabble together, we’re not talking about the problem.

On September 11, 2001, two planes hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Less than an hour after the second tower fell, Vann Graves walked down to the U.S. Army Recruiting office on 125th Street in Harlem and enlisted in the Army Reserves. You hear about people doing that, but you never actually meet them. Not in advertising, anyway.

“My colleagues at BBDO thought I’d gone mad,” he says. “But I was a creative director at a major advertising agency, a little soft around the middle, living the American Dream, and the only reason I could do that was because someone else fought for
my
rights. At a certain point, you have to give something back.”

Vann deployed to Iraq in 2005 and served as a public affairs officer with the 101st Airborne and the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, escorting embedded reporters into forward combat zones. During his tour, he was promoted to captain, received a Combat Action Badge, and was inducted into the Order of the Spur for outstanding efforts while being actively engaged by anti-U.S. forces. After his Striker ran aground on one of Iraq’s roadside IEDs, he was awarded a Purple Heart. It was a little disorienting to come home and start writing Snickers commercials again. “I went back to work,” he says, “and they had basically sealed off my office.
Everything was right where I’d left it, and nothing had changed. But I had changed. Nothing seemed the same to me anymore.

“I had been at BBDO for fifteen years. When I started, there were three African Americans in the creative department. When I left, there were three African Americans in the creative department. The world was evolving, especially in a time with a black president, clearly moving in a different direction. I wanted my work to be a part of that change that was happening.”

The change that’s happening, of course, is in the fabric of America. All the demographic indicators now point to the year 2042, when America will become a “majority minority” country—all the black, brown, and yellow people will tip over 50 percent of the population, and the white cultural hegemony, we’re told, will be in retreat.

Byron Lewis at UniWorld is especially bullish on the next decade. “You’re really talking about a marketing opportunity that is now very apparent to everyone,” he says. “I’m passionate about it. I believe in the validity of what we represent. Consumers of color represent most of the best known, most visible, and most influential folks in the domestic and global culture, in music, sports, entertainment, and street fashion. Why shouldn’t multicultural agencies be the lead agencies on major accounts? My attitude is that I feel totally capable of competing in a space where I think there’s equal opportunity. I don’t want to work on pieces of accounts. I think the road for us is to follow the trend of the population. It’s not time to divorce it; it’s time to elevate it.”

So in 2008, UniWorld reached out and hired Vann Graves to serve as its new chief creative officer, to bring his corporate agency experience to the multicultural ad space and help make a new paradigm for the shifting population: the ethnic market as the general market, and vice versa. For Byron Lewis it was a chance to move beyond the political limitations of his company’s past. For Vann, it seemed an opportunity to make a stake in something he felt was relevant to the country’s new direction. It was an opportunity to bridge the gap and bring black agencies into the big game. But the missionary zeal of the census watchers and the aspirations of UniWorld—the whole business of racially targeted media, in
fact—has run into one very significant obstacle: the Internet doesn’t care if you’re black.

In 1996, some web-savvy entrepreneurs launched a dot-com start-up named DoubleClick. The company positioned itself as a new kind of media buyer for the web, purchasing ad space on websites for all those banners and pop-ups. Shortly thereafter, a black-owned media company in New York launched the AdHere Network—“the black DoubleClick”—to execute the same media-buying functions across the growing number of black-oriented websites. While my friends and I were working on the Internet, it turns out, the Children of the Dream were off working on what might be called the black Internet.

In 2007, Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in cash. The AdHere Network, along with a large chunk of the black Internet, was already long gone. “The whole thing failed,” says Neal Arthur, managing director for the New York office of Wieden + Kennedy.

Arthur, who is black, started out at W+K as the company’s director of strategic planning, responsible for analyzing cultural demographics to map out where and how ad dollars are most effectively spent. His job is to know what every kid in America is going to eat for breakfast tomorrow, how many hours they spend on Facebook, and how much their parents are going to spend on back-to-school clothes this year. In the early 2000s, Arthur was watching closely to understand how, and why, black Internet companies stumbled so quickly.

“There used to be a top-down pipeline for black culture,” he tells me. “We created BET instead of thinking you could have black content on MTV. Then people tried to do that with the web. They were thinking, ‘Oh, we’ll give black people this pipeline, and that’s all they’ll consume.’ But the Internet is a consumer-driven medium, and they underestimated black people’s interests—
that’s
what’s so fascinating. Black people had underestimated themselves for so long that the web was like a slap in the face. ‘Oh, wait, black people like sushi? I had no idea. I’d been selling them Kentucky Fried Chicken for so long.’ The Internet has made it clear that black people like a lot of shit you didn’t know about. That pipe has blown wide open.”

It has, but black companies are still out there trying to duct tape it together. Rushmore Drive—“the black Google”—launched in 2008, offering to push black content to the front of the line based on users’ searches. That same year saw the launch of Blackbird—“the black browser”—which likewise purported to filter and present the web through the lens of black interests. The list goes on and on: a black MySpace (
OurSpace.com
), a black LinkedIn (
BlackBusinessNetwork.com
), and even a black YouTube (quite original:
TheBlackYouTube.com
). No policy of discrimination exists to keep blacks off the mainstream iterations of those sites. There is no Troost Avenue on the Internet. Yet here black America was building its own. Even as black Americans streamed online in massive numbers—68 percent, and 90 percent of teens, are now online—the black Internet stalled. Rushmore Drive went under in fourteen months. The black browser? You won’t find too many people using it.

The Internet has offered black writers, artists, and journalists more freedom of expression than ever before. But it’s precisely the breadth of that opportunity that has hobbled the primacy of the black-centric business model. Among the most successful black-owned media enterprises on the web is Interactive One, the online subsidiary of urban radio powerhouse Radio One. It includes several properties like The Urban Daily and the social networking site Black Planet. The company bills itself as
the
destination for the online black community, drawing 9 million unique visitors a month. But 28 million black Americans are now online. Nobody can claim anymore that only they can speak to the black consumer—and that scares the hell out of the people who for decades have made their living claiming just that. The door between black and white America has been fiercely guarded by its self-appointed gatekeepers: black politicians, Jesse Jackson, black media owners, and black ad agencies. The reason their legitimacy is on shaky ground is because it’s never been based on the consent of the black masses, but mostly on the ignorance, guilt, and anxiety of white people. “They’re the ones who are violating the system,” Arthur says of the gatekeepers, “because you gotta make that dollar. The easiest thing for me to do is to make you insecure as a white marketer and say, ‘Look, we know how this shit rolls, and you don’t. We know the music, et cetera.’ It just feeds on that white insecurity.”

It’s testimony to just how ignorant and insecure white people are that this game keeps getting played. Corporate America keeps pouring billions into all these propositions that sell the white man on the fact that he needs an intermediary just to talk to black people, even as the demographics of black America call for it less and less. “You used to be able to buy a ‘black’ media plan,” Arthur says. “
Essence
and
Ebony
, BET and ESPN. That was how you reached black people. Now, when you think about your audience, you have to be much more sophisticated. The Internet is democratizing the urban experience. What’s fascinating is how quickly and how broadly the cultural references travel. What black kids are sampling is incredibly wide. Now the question is what
type
of African American are we going after? I do focus groups for Jordan all the time. I was in a group the other night, and there was this black kid from Houston who was like, ‘Yeah, my style is mainly Japanese.’ Really? Okay. It’s become quite cool to push the boundaries of what the African-American experience is.”

Black-owned media grew out as a necessary alternative to America’s white cultural hegemony, but it became a cultural hegemony of its own, monolithic in its orthodoxy and its point of view. Ditto the black advertising that supported it. “You look at black advertising from the seventies,” Arthur says, “it was blaxploitation. All that Billy Dee Williams shit? You talk about perpetuating the problem—we created that. And we still suffer from it. Back then, just having black people in ads was a breakthrough, so much so that it provided disproportionate power to those brands. The beauty of now is that that’s not enough. You have to say more.”

Today, a lot of black advertising has become a watered-down version of a formerly Afrocentric self: bourgie black yuppies gettin’
down
with their Big Macs to an R&B-tinged “I’m Lovin’ It.” Some of it’s difficult to watch. The black political and business establishment protects its interests by insisting that blacks have to be marketed to as blacks through black media. Black consumers, on the other hand, are decidedly split on the matter; some find it pandering. The biggest sea change of the digital age is not that companies can go around the gatekeepers; it’s that black people can go around them, too. The Internet is changing everything because it cares only about what you
want
, how you behave. What are your
“likes”? Google’s search engine is just a mathematical algorithm driven by user choices. The web is just ones and zeros flying through a series of tubes. The tubes don’t care whose are which. If you’re on YouTube watching a JayZ video or a Phil Collins video, the computer serving you an ad isn’t concerned with what color you are. The computer only cares that you like JayZ or Phil Collins (or both), and it will serve you an ad based on something else it thinks you might like. A nice JayZ/Phil Collins mash-up, perhaps. Targeted media has gone light-years past targeting your race; it targets you.