Ethnicity is Authenticity cover art

Ethnicity is Authenticity

Ethnicity is Authenticity

Listen for free

View show details

About this listen

 It is the last day of Black History Month in America. Here at Edelman our theme has been Joy-full: Manifesting Wellness and Unity with programming that has prioritized self-care and community along with personal and financial health. As a bonus episode for this month, Dani Jackson-Smith talks with Dr. Jason Chambers author of Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry about the importance of understanding history. TRANSCRIPT Dani Jackson Smith [00:00:01] It's all you are at work after hours and back at home exploring every layer, finding out what makes you uniquely you and letting that shine back out into the world. It's authentic 365, a podcast that takes a glimpse into how some of the most inspiring people among us express themselves and make magic happen. I'm your host. Danny Jackson Smith, VP at Edelman by day, community enthusiast and lover of the people always. Its the last day of Black History Month in America, and here at Edelman, our theme has been Joy-full: Manifesting Wellness and Unity with programing that has prioritized self-care and community, along with personal and financial health. As a bonus episode for this month, I'll be talking with Dr. Jason Chambers, author of Madison Avenue and the Color Line African-Americans in the Advertising Industry and note, he is also my former professor at the University of Illinois. Dr. Chambers, let's start with this Where are you from? Dr. Jason Chambers [00:01:02] I am originally from Central Ohio, a small town named London, Ohio, which probably most people have never heard of. But it's about 20 minutes outside Columbus, so it's almost right smack dab in the center of the Great State of Ohio. Dani Jackson Smith [00:01:14] When did you first start getting passionate about advertising? Dr. Jason Chambers [00:01:18] You know, I'm one of those weird people who always kind of paid attention to advertising. I can remember watching it, watching commercials on Saturday mornings in-between cartoons, back when kids still did such a thing. So I've always kind of had an interest in advertising. I've always been one who kind of paid attention to advertising. I always I grew up in the last heyday of the jingle, the advertising jingle. So I've always liked advertising in some form, some form or fashion, even from a very young age. Dani Jackson Smith [00:01:48] OK, so at what point did you say or begin to shift this passion for advertising into really digging into the history of advertising? Dr. Jason Chambers [00:01:58] That was something for me that came in graduate school. I'd always had an interest in media. For example, I edited a Black newspaper, Black student newspaper when I was an undergraduate, so I was always going to go either. You know, I was always going to be in some way shape or form connected to media, whether it was going to be journalism, whether it was going to be advertising, whether it was going to be something in the realm of of production. So I'd always had an interest in media. But I went to when I went to graduate school to get an advanced degree, advanced degrees in history. It really was a set of classes that I took that studied consumers and studied the way that people had evolved as consumers. And I combine that with an interest, a growing interest then of studying the history and the story of African-American business enterprises, African-American as business owners and a variety of industries, or African-Americans, as high level employees, executives and a variety of industries, so that the various things media and advertising and business, those interests kind of all came together into a study of African-Americans' participation in the advertising industry. What we have been able to do as business owners, as high level employees, how we had or had not been able to matriculate in the advertising industry. Those are those things all came together at that point. Dani Jackson Smith [00:03:18] And what really stood out for you in the research that was that you were beginning to do at the graduate level? Dr. Jason Chambers [00:03:26] I think the things that stood out for me, perhaps not so not so much in a good way, is the way that our story in advertising had really been obscured or ignored or overlooked. One of the things about history that you learn is that it's not that stories don't exist, it's that stories just haven't been told or stories just haven't been known. And so for much of advertising history, for much of advertising story was really a story of White men. We didn't even really, this is back in the 1990s, early 2000s, I got my Ph.D. in 2001, so I'm in graduate school in the 1990s. Back then, we didn't even really consider the story of women. It was still rare to consider the story of women White, Black or otherwise in advertising. So advertising was very much a story of what what had White men done in concert with other White men. So White men on the advertising agency side of ...
No reviews yet