The 4A's has partnered with Howard University’s John H. Johnson School of Communications to establish a comprehensive center to address challenges, eliminate barriers and identify opportunities to achieve a more diverse and inclusive advertising industry workforce at middle to senior management levels.

Mission and Goals

The Center for Excellence in Advertising is charged with the following objectives:

• To provide professional development, leadership training and resources to increase and strengthen the impact of individuals of color in middle and senior level management across all disciplines.
• To provide the advertising industry with research, analysis, strategic and tactical consulting, and policy input to attain diversity goals and objectives.
• To benchmark best practices and solutions to increase the quantity and quality of persons of color in the industry.

As such, it is expected that the Center will:

• Measure bottom-line Impact of Diversity and Inclusion
• Develop cost-efficient and Effective Professional Development
• Provide Centralized Advertising Diversity Resources
• Increase Diversity Pipeline Development through the Network of 105 HBCUs and their Alumni

Professional Development Modules

The Center for Excellence in Advertising core coursework will encompass five separate programming modules.

1. C-Suite Advertising Leaders
Through executive leadership roundtables and retreats with exceptional speakers and examples of diversity success, this module will:

• Engage and support senior executives in making the critical financial and emotional commitment to diversity, ensuring that the business case for diversity is applied appropriately within advertising
• Offer insights and sensitivities that will enable them to make diversity a priority and a success within their organizations
• Provide a platform to share best practices with other C level executives to overcome challenges in meeting diversity goals

2. Moving Up in Advertising
Engage African American Advertising Managers with at least 3 years of experience who are seeking additional management responsibility and reward to:

• Develop career mapping strategies
• Develop strategies to address challenges and perceived roadblocks
• Cultivate a network of diverse candidates and coaches
• Offer corporate leadership exposure to mid-level multicultural talent
• Strengthen supervisory skills
• Participate in post session one-on-one coaching with an executive

3. Building Diverse Management Teams
For current managers and supervisors in all disciplines of the advertising industry this module will:

• Motivate and engage diverse teams to become higher performing units
• Strengthen their supervisory skills
• Incorporate diversity and inclusion goals naturally while helping teams exceed expectations in their primary functions
• Increase inclusion and productivity of corporate teams
• Assist in collaborating with human resource and diversity managers in designing, implementing and assessing diversity programs

4. Making a Lateral Move Into Advertising
Generating New and Diverse Talent

• Identify African American mid-level management candidates with transferable skills
• Position them for success within advertising through intensive training
• Provide rigorous hands-on experience in agency and client communication environments

5. The Next Generation

• To assist academic institutions with a special emphasis on Historically Black Colleges and Universities in addressing the training and recruitment of entry-level African-American candidates.
• To offer academic professionals insight into the private sector world of advertising so they can prepare students for the challenges they will face in the advertising industry.