Tom Burrell and Capitalist Activism in Advertising

I first became aware of Dr. Jason Chambers, professor of advertising at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, through his first book, Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry . This magisterial and authoritative work has been widely praised by advertising scholars and provided a critical historical grounding for my own doctoral research into more contemporary race inequalities in the U.S. advertising industry. Dr. Chambers and I have since appeared together on panels for both academic and industry audiences in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. During these engagements, I was often struck by his measured skepticism toward all the corporate pledges to “do better.” As an historian, this wasn’t his first rodeo; he knew all too well that this, too, shall pass.

And pass it has. After a public letter signed by 600 Black advertising professionals helped spark a flurry of agency mea culpas, diverse hires, promotions, and even some public accountability through disclosures of workforce diversity data, the industry soon backslid into business as usual. Even as agencies and clients performed allyship with #BlackLivesMatter on social media, they were consolidating white power behind the scenes. According to the American Association of Advertising Agencies (the 4A’s), between 2022 and 2023, white ownership and C-suite representation in advertising increased from 73% to 90% while the percentage of Black owners and leaders dropped from 5% to less than 1%. And Forbes reported last year that “After Vows Of More Diversity, TV Commercials And Digital Ads Are Getting Whiter.” All of this makes Dr. Chambers’ latest book, Advertising Revolutionary: The Life and Work of Tom Burrell (University of Illinois Press, 2024), both prescient and instructive.

By tracking the course of Burrell’s life from growing up in Chicago through founding and leading an eponymous agency in that same city for thirty years, Advertising Revolutionary lays out an argument for both the perils and importance of Black ownership. Indeed, one of the most intriguing sections explains how defacto segregation through real estate covenants restricted Black mobility to Chicago’s South Side, which would, in turn, develop a culture of “self-help” and “intraracial unity,” foreshadowing Burrell’s employment of hundreds of Black creatives and suppliers. Beyond documenting economic uplift, this book also seeks to re-frame Burrell’s work as culturally, politically, and even artistically significant. His agency’s aesthetic of “positive realism” re-presented images of Black well-being in America as an antidote to the toxic landscape of racist stereotypes or outright erasure long perpetrated by white-owned media institutions.

Of course, going against the grain wasn’t easy. Even when targeting the Black market segment, Burrell was still an ad man, so he always had to find willing patrons. This dependency, at least in the early years, would mean taking on “vice” advertising accounts like cigarettes and alcohol along with fast food while also navigating what Arlene Davila describes in her book Latinos, Inc. as “pre-existing hierarchies of representation” that meet the expectations of both white clients and white consumers. This led to Burrell developing a “Huckleberry Finn” approach to advertisements that portrayed everyday, hardworking, middle class Black families. On the one hand, Burrell argued to potential clients that such “positive realism” was sure to please the target audience by showing them their “authentic or aspirational selves” while, on the other, also avoid alienating even racist whites by pandering to their belief that Black people, as Burrell put it, “needed reforming.”

In another example of selling concepts in white spaces, Chambers chronicles how Burrell and his then partner Emmet McBain recognized that McDonald’s long-running “You deserve a break today” campaign was aimed at white suburban families who only occasionally ate out instead of Black urban consumers who treated their local franchise as a frequent “feeding station.” So, the partners developed the new catchphrase “Get down with something good,” incorporating slang that would be familiar and resonate within Black communities. But when Needham, Harpers, and Steers, McDonald’s (white) agency of record, got wind of the “Get down” idea, they quickly convinced McDonald’s marketing team to kill it because the language was unclear. Undeterred, and with the help of a contact at the Black McDonald’s Operators Association, Burrell and McBain broke corporate protocol and pitched their idea straight to a group of Chicago-area franchise owners. The owners loved the new campaign so much that they banded together and, at considerable risk, wrote a letter to McDonald’s marketing department proposing a four-step strategy for increased growth and profits: 1) hire Burrell and McBain; 2) create a panel of Black franchisee owners to review future campaign materials; 3) let Burrell and McBain report directly to the client; and 4) provide Burrell and McBain with a competitive budget. They made a business case, McDonald’s bought it, and sales went up.

This victory for Burrell matters for several reasons beyond having given his nascent agency a foothold with a blue chip client. First, it demonstrates the kind of courage, solidarity, and “intraracial unity” that was necessary for Burrell and the Black franchise owners to disrupt an established white client/white agency relationship. Second, it provides a vivid example of the kind of capitalist activism whereby self-interested parties can further cultural, political, and artistic goals by seeking to maximize their own economic benefit. And, third, it exemplifies Burrell’s lifelong aversion to charity; he only wanted to do work that increased profits for the client as opposed to getting hired for PR reasons. Indeed, chapter eight recalls how, despite being a lifelong Democrat, Burrell kept his distance from political activists like Jesse Jackson who called out racist ads in order to shame corporate America into redirecting new business to Black agency owners. Though Burrell admitted that his agency often benefitted from public pressure on brands to diversify their supply chains, he knew those benefits would be short-lived. Once the public moved on, the accounts would dry up. Sound familiar?

These are just a few of the poignant complexities and compromises that Chambers recounts as he charts Burrell’s career from inception at the suggestion of a thoughtful teacher to his sale of his agency and retirement. Along the way, the author asks us to consider how an abusive father may have driven Burrell’s tenacious ambition and even his depictions of more idealized paternal figures in his ads and how a supportive and trusting mother may have inspired his entrepreneurial spirit, management style, and development of women leaders within his agency. Most of these biographical connections are drawn from Chambers’ extensive interviews with Burrell and, as self-reported, should be taken with a grain of salt. That said, I think their inclusion is important, since Burrell’s own life bears witness to the suffering of the consumers he has spent so much of his life observing and trying to re-present as fully as he could—whether by asking “what’s Black about it?” or by trying, and failing, to expand his agency into the general (white) market. In valuing not just what Burrell did, but also what he tried to do and why, Advertising Revolutionary adds a welcome dose of soul to the business biography.