Advertising & Society Quarterly
Virtual Colloquium
December 3–4, 2020

Race/Ethnicity/Diversity
in Advertising

Jason P. Chambers

Associate Professor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Jason P. Chambers is an associate professor in the Department of Advertising at the University of Illinois. A graduate of The Ohio State University, his work has been published in books and journals in the United States, Asia, and Europe. His published books include Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry and Building the Black Metropolis: African Entrepreneurship in Chicago. He is currently writing a book length biography of advertising legend Tom Burrell. Dr. Chambers’ opinions have been sought by a variety of media sources including Advertising Age, Adweek, the British Broadcasting Corporation, Forbes, Black Enterprise, The History Channel, the New York Times, National Public Radio, and USA Today.

Judy Foster Davis

Professor of Marketing and Integrated Marketing Communications

Eastern Michigan University

Judy Foster Davis, PhD, is Professor of Marketing and Integrated Marketing Communications at Eastern Michigan University. Her work concerns IMC strategies, ethics, policies and privacy topics, and historical and multicultural marketing. A graduate of Howard University and Michigan State University, she is a member of the RIM (Race in the Marketplace) Research Network and serves on the editorial advisory boards of Advertising & Society Quarterly and the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing. She is a guest editor for a special issue on race in the marketplace in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Marketing Management and received the journal’s Best Paper award for “Selling Whiteness? A Critical Review of Literature on Marketing and Racism” in 2019. Dr. Davis is the author of Pioneering African-American Women in the Advertising Business: Biographies of MAD Black WOMEN (Routledge, 2017).

Tara DeVeaux

Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer

Wild Card

Tara DeVeaux is Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Wild Card and an award-winning brand and entertainment marketer. Her career has spanned advertising, television and tech, giving her the experience and insights to innovate in a continuously evolving marketing landscape. Tara’s leadership on brands such as Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Electronic Arts, Kraft, Starbucks, J&J, HBO, TNT, National Geographic Channel and P&G earned her teams over 200 creative awards.

Tara came to Wild Card in July, 2018 from BBDO New York where she led the marketing team, focusing on business development, partnerships and agency branding. Although Brooklyn, NY is her first love, she now happily calls LA her home.

Kathleen Franz

Chair and Curator, Division of Work & Industry

National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Kathleen Franz is Curator of Business History and Chair of the Division of Work & Industry at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Her publications include Tinkering: Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) and Major Problems in American Popular Culture with Susan Smulyan (Cengage, 2010). Until recently she held the position of Associate Professor of History at American University. She has curated many exhibitions including, “American Enterprise” at the National Museum of American History. Her current projects include collecting initiatives to document Latinx advertising and Spanish-language broadcasting from the 1950s to the present. She is also working on a cultural biography of Helen Woodward Rosen and women in advertising in the interwar period. Franz holds a PhD in American Civilization from Brown University.

Bill Imada

Chief Connectivity Officer

IW Group

Bill Imada is founder, chairman, and chief connectivity officer of IW Group, a minority owned and operated advertising, marketing, and communications agency focusing on the growing multicultural markets. For more than 20 years, Mr. Imada has worked with some of the top companies in the US, including American Airlines, City of Hope, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Godiva Chocolatier, HBO, Lexus, McDonald’s, Southern California Edison, Verizon, Walmart Stores, Walt Disney Imagineering, Warner Bros. Pictures, and many others. His areas of expertise include advertising, branding, multicultural communications, marketing, crisis management, and public relations.

Mr. Imada is active in the community and serves on several boards and advisory councils. His board service includes the Advertising Educational Foundation, California Asian Pacific Chamber of Commerce, Center for Asian American Media and the LAGRANT Foundation. Mr. Imada also co-founded the Asian & Pacific Islander American Scholarship Fund (APIASF) more than a decade ago and established the Asian/Pacific Islander American Chamber of Commerce & Entrepreneurship (ACE), an organization that is based in Washington, DC. His efforts were recognized by The White House and he was invited to meet President Barack Obama with 12 other Asian/Pacific Islander American leaders. Mr. Imada was later appointed to the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders by President Obama. In 2016, Mr. Imada co-founded the National Millennial Community, an organization comprised of NextGen leaders from 27 states and the District of Columbia, whose mission is to break the negative stereotypes that often define millennials in the US.

Mr. Imada is vice chair of the PBS Strategic Planning Advisory Group and serves on the Diversity Advisory Committee, the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee, and on the PBS Foundation Board. He previously was vice chair of the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee.

Paul Kurnit

Clinical Professor of Marketing 

Pace University

Paul Kurnit is an internationally recognized marketing professional with over 25 years in the advertising and entertainment businesses at Benton & Bowles, Ogilvy & Mather, and as President of Griffin Bacal

(a DDB agency) where he managed a number of classic brands for Procter & Gamble, Kraft, American Express, and Hasbro. He was also Executive Vice President of Sunbow Entertainment, a leading producer of quality children’s television programming. For the past fifteen years, as founder of Kurnit Communications, KidShop, and PSInsights, Paul has been delivering customized marketing solutions for numerous companies and pro-social organizations.

Paul is Clinical Professor of Marketing at Pace University, where he teaches courses in marketing and advertising and serves as university advisor for the AAF National Student Advertising Competition (NSAC). He is also an instructor for the ANA (Association of National Advertisers). Paul is a long-standing member of the AEF Board of Directors and runs its annual Symposium.

Louis Maldonado

Partner, Managing Director

d expósito & Partners

Louis is an award-winning marketing strategist and communications professional that specializes in multicultural advertising and marketing. At d expósito & Partners, Louis leads cross-functional teams for several key client accounts, leveraging his deep expertise in branding, insights and strategy, public relations and grassroots outreach to develop breakthrough campaigns that effectively connect with communities of color.

Louis’ work has been recognized with several marketing and advertising awards, including a North American Effie, two David Ogilvy Awards, three Hispanic Account Planning Excelencia Awards and three “Big Apple” Awards from the Public Relations Society of America. His experience spans several categories, including non-profit, packaged goods, quick-service restaurants, healthcare, government and tax preparation services, among others.

Louis holds an MBA from Indiana University, and he has served as guest lecturer at reputable universities, including NYU, Columbia, Fordham, Duke, and others.

Gord McLean

President & CEO

ANA Educational Foundation

Gord McLean is President and CEO of the ANA Educational Foundation. As an AEF Board Member for over 10 years and a past-Chair, he led the AEF’s merger with the Association of National Advertisers and is committed to advancing the AEF’s mission to be the bridge connecting the marketing, advertising, and academic communities. Previously he was Global Managing Partner at the Young & Rubicam Group, one of the world’s leading providers of integrated marketing communications and services. At Y&R Group he worked with clients around the world to help build their businesses across geographies and across all disciplines. He also drove the Group’s cross-company business development initiatives. Gord joined Young & Rubicam Group in 2007 from Y&R Advertising, where in his last assignment he was CEO for North America. Over his 16 years at Y&R, Gord acquired global experience spanning every region and almost every category. After first serving as Managing Partner of Y&R Toronto, he made the move to New York to lead global clients such as Colgate-Palmolive, Ford, Citibank, and Chevron. Gord has also served as Y&R’s President, Chief Operating Officer for Asia-Pacific, and President of Global Client Services. Before Y&R, Gord worked for some of the most respected agencies in Canada including MacLaren-McCann and Doyle Dane Bernbach. He began his career in the Canadian House of Commons as Chief of Staff to a Member of Parliament.

Cynthia Meyers

Professor

College of Mount Saint Vincent

Cynthia B. Meyers is the author of A Word from Our Sponsor: Admen, Advertising, and the Golden Age of Radio, as well as articles in Journal of American History, Cinema Journal, American Journalism, and other publications. She is working on another book tentatively titled Sell-e-vision: Madison Avenue and Television in the 1950s and 1960s. She is Professor of Communication, Fine Art, & Media at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City. She posts old ads on Twitter (@annehummert) and on Tumblr (https://wordfromoursponsor.tumblr.com/).

William M. O’Barr

Professor

Duke University

William M. O’Barr is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University where he has taught since 1969. He has been recognized for his outstanding undergraduate teaching by both the Duke University Alumni Association and Trinity College (Duke University). His course Advertising and Society: Global Perspectives is one of Duke’s most popular undergraduate courses. His seminars include Advertising and Masculinity, Children and Advertising, and The Language of Advertising.

He is author and co-author of ten books, including Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising, Rules versus Relationships, and Just Words: Law, Language, and Power. He has conducted anthropological research in Brazil, China, East Africa, India, Japan, and the US. In addition to his interest in social and cultural aspects of advertising, Professor O’Barr has researched law in a variety of cultural settings.

In 2000, he founded Advertising & Society Review and served as editor from 2000 to 2005. He currently serves as editor of Advertising & Society Quarterly, A&SR’s successor. He is author of more than 25 units on advertising and society available through ADTextOnline.org.

Cynthia Round

Brand Strategy Advisor

AEF Board and Academic Review Board

Cynthia Round is a brand strategist with focus on revitalizing legacy brands and building relevance to new audiences. She led marketing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC’s most visited tourist attraction, and United Way Worldwide, the largest privately-funded nonprofit in the world. Previously she built global brands at P&G and Ogilvy and now advises cultural and nonprofit organizations.

Fath Davis Ruffins

Curator of African American History & Culture

National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Fath Davis Ruffins is Curator of African American History and Culture in the Division of Cultural and Community Life in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. She has been a historian and curator at the Smithsonian Institution since 1981, working in several different divisions over that time. Between 1988 and 2005, she was the head of the Collection of Advertising History at the NMAH Archives Center. She is a specialist in ethnic imagery in popular culture, the history of advertising, the history of African American preservation efforts, and the origins of ethnic museums on the National Mall. Ruffins has curated or consulted on several major history exhibitions, and on many community history projects around the country, including several on African American topics. Between 2011 and 2014, she served as original project director of Many Voices, One Nation, an exhibition that opened at NMAH in 2017. A number of her publications investigate and document how public institutions develop and present history to distinctly different audiences. Her most recent publication, “Building Homes for Black History: Museum Founders, Founding Directors, and Pioneers, 1915–1995” in The Public Historian, won the G. Wesley Johnson Award from the National Council on Public History for the best article in the journal in 2018.

Jennifer Scanlon

Professor of Humanities in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies

Bowdoin College

A historian with a scholarly focus in US women’s history, Jennifer Scanlon has published widely and for a variety of audiences. Her most recent book, Until There is Justice: The Life of Anna Arnold Hedgeman (paperback Oxford UP, 2019), provides the first biography of civil rights stalwart Anna Arnold Hedgeman, a remarkable—and remarkably understudied—civil rights leader. Her previous biography, Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, which explores the working-class roots of Brown’s controversial form of feminism, was named a “Book of the Times” by the New York Times and a business book of the year by American Public Media’s Marketplace. Scanlon’s other publications include Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture.

Paul Chaat Smith

Curator

National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution

Paul Chaat Smith is a Comanche author, essayist, and curator. His books and exhibitions focus on the contemporary landscape of American Indian politics and culture.

Smith joined the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in 2001, where he currently serves as Associate Curator. His projects include the NMAI’s history gallery, performance artist James Luna’s Emendatio at the 2005 Venice Biennial, Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian (2008), and Brian Jungen: Strange Comfort (2009).

With Robert Warrior, he is the author of Like a Hurricane: the Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New Press, 1996), a standard text in Native studies and American history courses. His second book, Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong, was published in 2009 by the University of Minnesota Press, and is now in its second printing.

Appointed Critic in Residence three times in galleries in the US and Canada, Smith’s exhibitions and essays have explored the work of Richard Ray Whitman, Baco Ohama, Faye HeavyShield, Shelley Niro, Erica Lord, and Kent Monkman. He has lectured at the National Gallery of Art, Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Los Angeles. His television appearances include the 1995 Canadian series Markings with Neil Bissondath, and served as creative consultant for the American Experience series We Shall Remain: A Native History of America, broadcast on PBS in April 2009.

Smith lives in Washington, DC. His middle name is pronounced “chot,” has no hyphen, and rhymes with hot. He has no college or university degrees.

Marita Sturken

Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication 

New York University

Marita Sturken is Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she teaches courses in visual culture, cultural memory, and consumerism. She is the author of Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (1997), Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (with Lisa Cartwright, third edition 2018), and Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism From Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (2007).

Edward Timke

Instructor and Associate Editor

Duke University

Edward Timke is an instructor of advertising and society courses in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. He is also Associate Editor of Advertising & Society Quarterly and a contributor to ADText. Timke’s specialties include advertising and media history, international advertising and media, and media theory and research methods. His work focuses on the role of advertising and media in shaping how different cultures understand and imagine each other. Timke received a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for the Circulating American Magazines Project (circulatingamericanmagazines.org). He has also received numerous awards and nominations recognizing his excellence in teaching and mentoring of student research.

Wan-Hsiu Sunny Tsai

Associate Professor

University of Miami

Dr. Wan-Hsiu Sunny Tsai received her PhD in Advertising from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines the influence of advertising as a powerful cultural institution. She has investigated topics such as minority consumers’ response to multicultural advertising, post-feminism and femvertising, glocalization of brand meanings, consumer acculturation, consumer ethnocentrism, and recently, chatbot and augmented reality advertising. Her work has been published in the Journal of Advertising, Journal of Public Relations Research, and Consumption Markets and Culture among others. Her research has received top paper awards at AAA, AEJMC, NCA, PRSA, and IPRRC.

Please visit Advertising & Society Quarterly.

#LearnWithAEF