Award-winning creative collective Saturday Morning has more than doubled the size of its board of directors in pursuit of furthering its goal to raise awareness and shift perceptions around racial bias and social injustice in the advertising industry.
Announced today, Saturday Morning is welcoming five new thought leaders from a range of backgrounds to join its four original members: Keith Cartwright, Geoff Edwards, Jayanta Jenkins and Kwame Taylor-Hayford, who jointly founded the group in 2016.
“We have ambitions to bring new ideas and solutions to impact culture, and having guidance from leaders that extend into other creative business sectors will help us put these ideas into action,” says Saturday Morning co-founder Cartwright, who is also the founder and CEO behind the California-based creative shop that bears his last name.
Unlike the collective’s founders, its five new board members don’t all have a background in advertising.
In alphabetical order, they are: David Banner, a rapper and record producer who owns an eponymous clothing line; Marta Cunningham, an Emmy-nominated director and founder of Sugar Sky Pictures; Gary Grant, president of real estate firm Grant Global Development and founder of the elite Parkway School in Brooklyn; Amber Guild, president of the New York Times’ T Brand; and Talitha Watkins, an activist who’s the president and head of production company ColorCreative Management.
In recent years, purpose-driven Saturday Morning has created no shortage of internationally recognized work, including Emmy-nominated film “The Look” for Procter & Gamble and Peace Briefs underwear with waistbands that carry potentially life-saving messages like “I am not armed” and “Please don’t shoot.”
While Saturday Morning serves an important purpose in adland—especially as agencies and brands have put an increased emphasis on racial equity following the police murder of George Floyd—its founders have asserted that their ultimate goal is for the group to become obsolete.
“The true success of our organization can only be realized when Saturday Morning no longer needs to exist,” they wrote in an open letter published last summer. “We encourage others in this moment to take bold steps and not shy away from the difficult issues of racism and injustice. Now is the time for action.”
