Paralympians Break The Ad Barrier was the title of a BusinessWeek article published in 2008. Just in the recent past, only three years ago, disabled athletes were granted a small advertising foothold of endorsements and sponsorships mostly dominated by gold medal Olympians. Major marketers including Visa and McDonalds, both longtime supporters of disability advocacy and awareness, wove compelling stories of disabled athletes into their general marketing campaigns centered around the 2008 Olympic games. Antonio Lucio, Visa’s chief marketing officer said, “The person we decided to feature, Cheri Blauwet, is not just a Paralympic athlete but an incredible female role model.” Continue reading
Monthly Archives: August 2011
Silent Segregation
“Madison Avenue is full of blue-bloods.” This was the blanket description of the industry’s leaders that a friend provided when I shared that I was going into advertising. Within venerable, established Madison Avenue agencies, an Ivy League diploma, New England upbringing and WASP background helped… and being a minority didn’t. Although never directly discriminated against, it was obvious to see (even for someone more than half blind) that hiring challenges permeated the industry. For the disabled minority, it seemed that ad industry culture fostered a silent segregation in which few advertisers embraced inclusion and fewer agencies integrated diversity. Continue reading
Advertising & Disability Go Hand In Hand
Have you seen the Benz branded bionics? Disability and advertising made it into the headlines of Adweek, one of the industry’s leading news publications, when Matthew James, a 14-year-old British amputee, wrote to Mercedes Benz asking the automaker to help fund a new one. Continue reading
What’s On Your Label?
This post is my small way to commemorate what would have been the 100th birthday of advertising creative revolutionary Bill Bernbach. From the beginning of his career, personal labels caused him to be an outsider. Because he was a Jew, Bernbach was segmented from the traditionally blue-blood, Ivy League world of Madison Avenue of the 1940’s. Bernbach saw an opportunity for creating more than just advertising – he used his differences to start what has been defined as the creative revolution. Eventually the outsider label shifted from being a negative to the ultimate positive goal for most advertising professionals and where they aspire creative to live. Continue reading