HAATBP | Jose Roberto Flores Fresan

Last October 30th, 2019 I attended the 9th edition of the One Club’s Here Are All The Black People conference and recruiting event. The event consisted of a series of panels, talking about inclusivity in the advertising and marketing industry, a recruitment area were agencies and companies presented their job opportunities to attendants and a series of portfolio review with professionals from all fields around the industry. The event was held at the New World Stages in Midtown Manhattan, and it ran for the whole day from 9am to 6pm.

The first talk of the day was Tariq Trotter, better known as Black Thought, he talked about how his interconnected career has to lead him into creating new creative spaces for minorities, and the importance of becoming a flagship for the creative minorities.

After Tariq’s keynote, the panels started, the first one I attended was Challenging the Rules of Marketing presented by R/GA. There Carl Desir, Brandon Lee Heard, Marcela Madera and Kayla Watson discussed how R/GA has worked to create new ways for inclusive work around the agency. They talked about how the work culture at R/GA is defined by interdepartmental collaboration and teamwork. How the culture of collaboration permeates all the aspect of the agency and also the relationships with the client. Workshops and group sessions allow them to work closely with the client and have them involved in most stages of the process to assure the best work possible. R/GA inspires people to question everything about the work they’re doing, starting from the brief. Thinking about the client’s business in new ways is essential for new and innovating work. For example, when most people would think of Google as a search company, the truth is their core business is AI, and Amazon is not all about e-commerce, in reality, it is more about data collection.

The most interesting panel was I’m the only______ at work. In it, Chris Bergeron, Blake Desormeaux, Kai Deveraux and James Kenney discussed what does it mean to be a minority at work, and how have they’ve dealt with being different from their coworkers. These leaders in their fields talked about the struggles they have faced trying to build a successful career and navigating through the industry being different than the rest. Business is intensely personal mentioned on of the panelists when talking about how people sometimes say that personal life should be left outside of work, however, work is part of our personal life and vice versa. They also mentioned that

diversity is more than race, gender, religion, it’s about behavior. 

The panel also discussed the different approaches agencies and companies are having towards diversity, minorities sometimes are used as symbols of the values that the agencies represent, however sometimes people are used as tokens for the agencies to claim diversity however they do not stand with what diversity really means.

The closing panel was Creating A Seat at The Table. In it Nicole Godreau, Love Malone, Monique Nelson, Brandon Rochon, Robert Wong, talked about how they navigated the creative industries to success while being minorities. Their successful professional careers had lead them into being game changing leaders that are now working hard to create opportunities for minorities. One of the most important insights that I got from the panel was that Advertising and Marketing is already diverse, since our target audiences are really diverse, so agencies need to catch up to make their teams as diverse as their audiences if they are expecting to get to them as effectively as possible.

Overall the event was really interesting and fun, seeing all these different people from different backgrounds come together and share their experiences in order to work better together, was really satisfying, and it made me realize the importance of these events.