Chicago Hope: Thom Burrell
     The story of Thomas J. Burrell starts, literally, in the mailroom. Specifically, that of Chicago’s Wade Advertising in 1960. Inside the now-defunct agency, Burrell spent three years as a copywriter before leaving to join the staff at Leo Burnett Co. in 1964. Interviewed for a special feature in Advertising Age from December 19, 1985, Burrell said of Burnett, "There wasn’t much acknowledgement that there was a black consumer market." (McGeehan 5) Leaving the Windy City for a year to join the London office of Foote, Cone & Belding before returning as a copy supervisor for Needham, Harper, & Steers.

     Thirty-two years old at the time, Burrell left Needham in 1971, sating "strong entreprenurial yearnings" and opening his own agency. The Burrell empire now employing dozens in two major cities began as a humble three-person operation with a strong belief that "blacks are not just dark-skinned white people." Thom Burrell’s agencies have taken his statement to heart in producing advertising that celebrates people as opposed to simply filling a space with warm bodies glorifying a product. "As soon as a black face appears on the screen," Burrell said, "it’s ‘OK. How you gonna be usin’ us now?’" From a $3,000 retainer from McDonald’s—which has stayed with Burrell since he started 27 years ago— the agency has contributed a style of advertising that has not only been lauded by a growing stable of big-name clients (Jack Daniel’s, Crest, Coca-Cola), but have been copied by larger general-market agencies hoping to tap the magic of what Ad Age called "the Burrell Style"—gentle entle yet effective advertising that springs from relationships between people and product.

     Thom Burrell believes that when marketing products to African-Americans, there are things that necessarily differ from the general-market style of advertising. Because so many black families are fatherless, for example, his ads show intact family units in order to capitalize on the appeal of closeness and togetherness, as he did in his Crest ads (McGeehan 5). "Black people are very sensitive to how they are represented in and approached by advertising," Burrell says. This may be due to the stereotypical images they have had to endure as servants, slaves, or other genderless, servile presences. These portrayals create an intricate dilemma for most advertising agencies in marketing to that audience, but Burrell has apparently found—and profited from—a method by which the sensitivity of African-Americans to their representations works for the benefit to the collective self-pride. Burrell’s magic touch in this regard enabled him to spread his gospel to New York through his acquisition of New York’s DFA Communications in 1996 to create the largest African-American advertising endeavor in the nation, while increasing Burrell’s stable of clients to include Citicorp/Citibank, Dow Jones, and the American Association of Retired Persons (Kirby 18).

A Jones For Advertising: Caroline Jones
     While not quite among the elder statespeople of minorities in advertising (she is presently in her mid-50s, while Thom Burrell is approaching 60), it cannot be said that Caroline Jones has not seen and/or done much in her 21 years in the field of advertising. Among the field’s old guard from the days when diversity in advertising meant one minority face in a large crowd, Jones has had to fight her battles on two fronts: as a woman, and as an African-American.

     Jones was not always a solo performer. She began her career around the same time as Burrell and Mingo. After receiving her degree from the University of Michigan, she joined J. Walter Thompson in 1963 as a secretary but was soon accepted into their copywriters’ program. From 1968-77, she spent time shifting between general-market and black agencies. During this span, she helped found one pioneering black agency, Zebra. From this point, she moved on to another, Kenyon & Eckhardt, before settling at BBDO.

     In mid-1977 she joined the late advertising legend Frank Mingo to form Mingo-Jones advertising and, while Thom Burrell was taking a principled approach to his agency in Chicago, Mingo-Jones set one simple objective for themselves: "To make money." (Trager 18) Starting from a client base of Miller High Life beer and Kentucky Fried Chicken, the partnership grew in prestige with the inclusion of Westinghouse Electric in 1982, and other blue-chip clients followed. Obviously, Mingo-Jones had to be doing something right. And they apparently had, increasing their billing to $25million from an initial half-million dollars in ’77. But that they made money says less about Caroline Jones’s savvy as to how it was done. "We try to balance what blacks see," Jones told Ad Age in the same special featuring Burrell. "That’s not to show blacks as doctors and lawyers, but it’s all right to show blacks living in houses...aspirations are what advertising can be about." This statement seemed to be the maxim for Mingo-Jones, and later for Jones herself when she left to form her own agency in 1987. Her career has dallied with controversy at a few points, in the forms of both products and personalities. In 1990, three years into her solo stint at the helm of Caroline Jones Advertising, R.J. Reynolds (now RJR Nabisco) approached her shop with plans to test-market Uptown, a new menthol cigarette specifically targeted at the black community. After waves of outcry from such people as then-Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Louis Sullivan, RJR retracted their plans. Amidst worries that hers and other African-American-owned agencies may experience the double whammy of corporate desertion and government restriction on vice advertising, in stepped Donald Trump. At the time, the developing mogul was mired in near-bankruptcy but hired her shop as the agency of record for Trump City, a Manhattan housing development that faced stiff opposition from residents in its surrounding areas and various New York architects. Also, her stances as a proponent of target marketing (though she worried that "targeting [had] become a euphemism for black," as she told the New York Times in an interview in 1990 (Rothenberg D17)as well as for greater diversity within the world of advertising practitioners along with Mingo and Burrell has helped cement her reputation as a passionate force in the field.

"If I Could Be Frank…": Frank Mingo
     Billy Joel once sang, "Only the good die young." That statement could very well apply to Frank L. Mingo, whom our field lost to heart failure in October 1989 at the age of 49. In the cutthroat world of advertising, it was said of Mingo that he "made clients feel comfortable, and that’s important." (Warren 16) He capitalized on that ability in order to build The Mingo Group (ne’ Mingo-Jones with Caroline Jones) from beginnings similar to Thom Burrell’s – four employees and a little over a half-million dollars in annual billings – to one of the largest black-owned and oriented agencies in the nation with over $60million in billings as of 1990 and a client base that included Greyhound, KFC, Sony, and Philip Morris, among others.

     Along with Jones and Burrell, Mingo was also a great believer in target marketing and diversity in the field of advertising, but he has been distinguished since his death with election to the American Advertising Foundation’s Hall of Fame for his efforts to bring positive images to minority audiences who, as Burrell said, are sensitive about their portrayals in visual media. Mingo also was chosen during the 1988 Presidential campaign season to advise Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis reach out to African-Americna voters nationwide. What is not widely known about Mingo is that his career was not born in 1977. Before he joined Caroline Jones to create the agency that would be a force in minority-oriented marketing, he left his position as management supervisor on Miller Beer’s $100million account with McCann-Erickson, and had been an alumnus of J. Walter Thompson before then.

     While Mingo was happy to receive the laurels and recognition he earned, he was still faced with the one conundrum that still plagues the nation’s major minority-oriented ad agencies today: that while their clients rave over the work they do in the minority arena regionally, their general-market counterparts continue to receive the larger national accounts. This being the case, Mingo decided to make his agency a name to be reckoned with in general-market account reviews for clients. He told the New York Times in a 1982 interview that "We (then Mingo-Jones) haven’t won any [general-market accounts], but we got in the competition." (Dougherty D6)

     Like Burrell and Jones, Mingo never wanted to simply dilute a portrayal of African-Americans simply to get a job done. He endorsed advertising that showed them "on top of the heap. We want to do something inspirational." (Trager 18) The desire to do everything well, in advertising as well as life, made Frank L. Mingo a legend in the field of advertising. While the man is gone, the Mingo Group continues to be successful, and is mentioned with Burrell Communications, Caroline Jones, and others when advertising professionals talk about the agency world’s biggest minority-owned success stories.

     Mingo’s widow, Sheila, perhaps spoke to the core quality possessed by Burrell and Jones as well as her husband when she recalled his "sheer hard work and determination to be a success (Warren 16)." Very few people can expand their annual billing tenfold in the time that Frank Mingo did, and to do so takes exactly what Mrs. Mingo told Black Enterprise her husband had. He was dedicated, as Caroline Jones and Thom Burrell were, to doing what he could to ensure that the reach of the minority audiences he tailored and reinterpreted his clients’ messages to exceeded their grasps.

Like Fingers on a Hand: The interconnection between Mingo, Jones, and Burrell
     The three people profiled in this paper have more than just skin color in common. After all, they are by far neither the only three African-Americans in advertising, nor the only senior-level administrators in the field; UniWorld’s Byron Lewis is in their company as well as Vince Cullers, one of the very first African-Americans to break through on the agency side of the field. Among the ties that bind them is the fact that all three have made names for themselves through ownership or partnership in agencies recognized by major national clients, that they have all won at least one major award (Mingo posthumously), and that they have all made strides through their participation in advertising to accomplish the task of target-marketing to minority audiences responsibly. Caroline Jones was quoted by Ad Age as saying, "We try to protect clients from themselves … if an ad gets ghetto-ized, the consumer will be offended." (Trager 18)

     Burrell, Jones, and Mingo all realized the importance of treating clients and audiences as well as they would their own families. They took care to ensure the triangle of relations between the three was unbroken: the consumer to the advertising, because if a message isn’t picked up it can’t be acted on; the agency to the client, because clients won’t stay with an agency to which they cannot relate; and the client to the consumer, because an offended customer can often damage the ability of a client to reach other consumers in a market. They knew the risks involved in target marketing to a minority audience: the explanations needed for the clients to understand the difference between what would work for the general-market consumer versus what African-American audiences, for example, responded to; the pigeonholing they would invariably be met with from clients who only used them for ethnic advertising, like Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pepsi/Mountain Dew had Mingo-Jones; and the presuppositions that only black audiences could be reached by black agencies. Burrell, Jones, and Mingo took on the weight of every attitude their clients had about them, and proved they could succeed well enough to compete against the agencies with which they often shared client business. They are among the minority leaders in advertising who took the road less traveled by in order to achieve great things, and as far as their impact on the field for practitioners as well as consumers, that has made all the difference.

REFERENCES:

1. Dougherty, Philip H. "Advertising: Minority Marketing." New York Times, June 28, 1982, pg. D6.

2. Foltz, Kim. "Addenda." New York Times, July 10 and October 5, 1990, both pg. D5.

3. Kirby, Joseph. "BE 100s Update: Casting a Wider Net." Black Enterprise, March 1996, pg. 18.

4. McGeehan, Pat. "The Burrell Style: Building a Solid Base on Michigan Avenue." Advertising Age, December 19, 1985, pgs. 4, 5, and 7.

5. Rothenberg, Randall. "Ad Executive Advises Dukakis on Black Issues." New York Times, May 28, 1988, pg. 7.

6. Rothenberg, Randall. "Advertising: The Stresses of Marketing to Minorities." New York Times, March 9, 1990, pg. D17.

7. Trager, Cara S. "Mingo-Jones Builds Long-term Relationships." Advertising Age, December 19, 1985, pgs. 18 and 20.

8. Warren, Renee E. "Mingo’s Legacy." Black Enterprise, January 1990, pg. 16.