The press release for the 2012 4A’s Transformation Conference featured the following:
In addition, Ron Berger, former Euro RSCG executive and a founder of Advertising Week, shared news on a separate talent initiative. The High School of Innovation and Media (IAM), which Berger co-founded and is sponsored by the 4A’s, is getting ready to graduate its first senior class. Some of those students presented at the first TEDx Harlem conference on Tuesday. They created an integrated campaign in support of First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” effort to combat childhood obesity.
Four years after launching IAM, the industry is now four more years away from realizing the grand experiment’s potential—provided the senior class members graduate from a 4-year college program. Whatever.
As the Impact Study indicates, ventures like IAM only address half of the real problem. That is, schooling minorities won’t do much good until someone erects an institution of higher learning to educate and reform the industry’s White majority. Unless we confront the fact that the culturally clueless inhabiting corner offices have created minority-unfriendly workplaces, the IAM students would be better served receiving 40 acres and a mule.
