Ad Legend Tom Burrell Shares Five Tips for Doing Business Well While Doing Social Good 1. Success is Often About Timing. Success “very often it’s a case of timing,” says Burrell. “It’s being born at the right time, or coming of age at just the right time with other social phenomenon going on at the same time.” For Burrell, the time was the 1960s, the age of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Burrell’s awareness of the social atmosphere uniquely enabled him to tell meaningful and positive stories to the African American community. He emphasizes the importance of recognizing your specific cultural moment, giving your times a square look, and understanding the world you’re born into as you consider what course to pursue with your life and work. 2. Share Your Goals “If you decide that you want to do something, let people know – because you become the marketer of what you want to do,” he said. Burrell got his first advertising job with Wade Advertising in Chicago because he wasn’t afraid to tell people that he wanted to be in the business — even though few (if any) African Americans worked in advertising in his home city of Chicago. But that didn’t make any difference. “One of the senior vice presidents decided that they wanted to hire a negro to work in the mail room. And this guy, Don Brown, remembered that Tom Burrell said he wanted to be in the advertising business,” Burrell recalls. “So I went down and I applied for the job, and I was the only African American who applied for that job. And I got the job.” Within six months Burrell was an advertising copyrighter at Wade. 3. Look For Talent Not Status. “Find talented people,” Burrell said. Since advertising to the African American community was just taking off, sometimes finding skilled workers who understood the nuanced culture was difficult. “In a couple of cases, we got people off the street,” Burrell says. “We made our own advertising people.” He shares the story of how their Chief Creative Officer was initially hired as a part time bookkeeper, but one day she wrote a killer commercial on the spot, and moved up from bookkeeper to writer, to senior writer, to CCO. Look for talent, not for impressive credentials. 4. Know Who You’re Talking To. “There’s no such thing as a general market,” Burrell said. “If you’re not targeting, you’re not marketing.” Know your people — who are they and why are they who they are? A good advertiser should also be a good cultural anthropologist. Advertising is about telling a story, and the kind of story you tell really depends on who you’re telling it to. 5. Embrace Positive Realism Beyond being incredibly successful, BCG aims to create a social good — that is, a celebratory and unique vision of the African American community, what he calls positive realism. Burrell cites an example of this in a campaign he did for Coca Cola. “We did a spot for Coca Cola called “Street Song.” … we were depicting a bunch of kids on the stoop harmonizing a cappella, the way that we grew up doing, with the harmonies that we used to do that. …the most important thing was that the African American consumer just glommed onto it, because they had not seen themselves portrayed in that kind of intimate, knowing, familiar way before. --- Tom Burrell c. 2014, The BHFG
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 22:16:21 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015