Objectives

We’re sustaining the racial conversations and development beyond, “Black tile Tuesday,” to ensure we’re creating systems of language, standards, and accountability for freelancers, employees, and employers in the advertising industry. We can no longer allow virtue signaling and performative press pieces to lead our perception of how the leaders and organizations reverse systemic racism and elevating marginalized communities in Corporate America. 

Our objective is to continue calling the industry in to be transparent and accountable to thoughts, strategy, and plan on diversifying their workforce and fighting systemic racism. We designed a virtual summit series to achieve this end, alongside a certification tool to track progress in workforce diversity performance. 

Being an ally doesn't abslove you from being apart of the problem, it enables you to identify your proactive role in reversing system racism and discrimination. 

Strategy and Execution

Our strategy for driving industry transparency and accountability is broken down into THREE parts:

1. Summit Series: With everyone at home and fired up in early June, we activated our virtual summit platform and strategic partners: One Club, Working Not Working, We Are Rosie, and Picter to help us promote the event. The brand itself has a pronounced and unfiltered positioning, we took that same brand positioning to design our programming. 
   1. Programming: We built the content around topics that were clear and necessary, for example, "How tf will White leaders be allies," including C-suite level agency leaders and brand-side executives. Or, "Wtf does change look like from the Black Experience?" featuring and All Black female panel of DE&I executives, creatives and strategists. 
      1. Other speakers include: Gary Vaynerchuck, CEO of Vaynermedia, Laura Maness, CEO, Havas NYC, Jayanta Jenkins, Co-founder of Saturday Morning, Rob Schwartz, CEO @ TBWA, Kathryn Guess, Storyteller in Chief @ Microsoft Gaming, David Angelo, David and Goliath, Chaucer Barnes, CMO of Translation, Kai D. Lawson, Director of Community Engagement, Global Culture, WPP, Krys Burnette, Director, Digital transformation, Adidas, Yorlene Goff, Global HR/Talent Leader, Jim Moriarty, Co-Managing Director, Brand Citizens, Benish Shah, Chief Growth Officer, Loop & Tie, 
2. Community: We speak directly to the lone wolves at organizations big and small, brand side, and agency side. From C-suite to every level of management. The platform is inclusive and designed to invite everyone into this very uncomfortable conversation and space for personal and professional growth. We design the experience from registration to post-event to be community orientated. Questions submitted at registration are used during the panels, and after the event, you can join a slack channel to design open-source solutions for organizational challenges. 
3. Certification technology: We understand that talking about the challenges and solutions are not enough, we need new systems and standards for true accountability and change in our industry. We're developing a company race, gender, ethnic, and income surveying tool to capture data and publicly visualize Company's workforce diversity data on allyshipandaction.com. Additionally, organizations will have a minimum number of projects to staff 50% diversely and upload them to the platform for surveying, publishing to their company page to remain certified.  At the end of the year, we'll publish an annual report on how Corporate is recruiting, retaining, and promoting marginalized communities across sectors, industries, and company sizes. We'll recognize the top projects with awards and editorial from the projects uploaded to maintain certification. 

Results

Our first Allyship & Action Summit on June 18th, was activated on June 11th, and in a single week we had 2,500 people register for the event, we had 2,000 people stay for the live stream. Organizations that registered and had a presence include: Disney, Twitter, YouTube, Target, NY Times, Visa, Bombas, Amazon, Away Travel, Lyft, Oracle, AutoDesk, LiveNation, TripAdvisor, IBM, Calm, NBC and many more.

Agencies that registered and had a presence: Havas, Vaynermedia, Ogilvy, Giant Spoon, W+K, Publicis, David&Goliath, Anomaly, DDB, R/GA, TBWA/CHIAT/DAY, SS+K, Accenture, McCann, Stink Studios, SYPartners and many more. 

We have 350 brands and agencies pledged to the Allyship & Action Certification.  

Earned Media:

Adweek

• How Will Advertising’s New Equality Advocacy Groups Grow While Staying Grassroots?
• 5 Takeaways From Allyship & Action
• Adweek Young Influencers 2020 Class: Nate Nichols

Media