Ad Age is marking Black History Month 2024 with our fourth-annual Honoring Creative Excellence package. (Read the introduction here.) Today, guest editor Asmirh Davis, founding partner and chief strategy officer, Majority, writes about launching the Atlanta-based creative agency.

Earth is ghetto, I wanna leave
Can you beam me up
I’m out on the street
By the corner store, you know the one on 15th?
Got a bright shirt on, so I’m easy to see.

I sang those words nearly daily in 2020 from the iconic song by Aliah Sheffield, properly titled “Earth Is Ghetto.” It captured my general disposition and sentiment about the world at the time, while also bringing a much-needed bit of levity. A global pandemic was wreaking havoc on our collective physical and mental health and exposing the cracks of a society riddled with inequities that particularly threatened the lives of people like me.

Meanwhile, I was three years into my role as group planning director at Huge. A role that I said three years prior would be my last in the advertising industry, as I figured I’d do my five years, get the coveted Huge axe and happily leave behind a successful 20-year-plus career in advertising. The hope was to transition to something more meaningful, something where I could feel and see the immediate positive impact I could have on the world. I didn’t know exactly what that was going to be or even how to go about doing it, I just knew at that moment that I wasn’t going to make it five years. 

I spent what little energy I had in 2020 like I had in a lot of my career—carrying the load of being one of the few and oftentimes the only minority in these spaces. My natural inclination is to observe more than act, yet I felt a nagging itch to take every opportunity to point out that to make the system truly inclusive and equitable we had to break it, as the system was working exactly how it was intended: to exclude those like me. The daily grave miscarriages of social injustice, incredible tone-deafness of the industry and incompetence of its leaders to actually do anything of substance had put a new sense of urgency on that itch I’d had for years.

So, when I first met Omid Farhang in the fall of 2020, and he told me he was looking for a partner to start a creative agency based on a diversity-led talent model, it felt like that itch was finally going to get scratched.

I was initially nervous about the idea of starting a business from the ground up; I was an entrepreneur for years, and knew it wasn’t for the faint of heart. Coupled with the fact that I was embarking on that journey with people I had never worked with before—so needless to say, I was also terrified. But at the same time, I was hopeful and excited at the prospect of applying my skills and passion to change the landscape of the industry that had shaped me for the past 20 years. So, I did the obvious thing and resigned from Huge in January 2021.

A lot of those feelings of nervousness and fear subsided as we secured amazing partners in Shaquille O’Neal and Smuggler prior to launching Majority to the world in March 2021. That has since opened space for new feelings of joy and gratitude for our success. Thanks to the bravery of clients such as OshKosh B’gosh, which put the fate of their 100-year-old brand in an agency only three months old. And the boldness of clients such as BLK who not only didn’t balk at our idea of remaking the classic hip hop anthem “Back That Thang Up,” but said, “Yes, and let’s do a video.” Or the faith of the NBA G League, which believed that our agency of four people was the right partner to claim the title of AOR and help transform its brand as it transitions into a new era. 

Despite the fading sense of importance the problem of inequity in our industry is experiencing, our momentum has been constant and is showing no signs of letting up as we start 2024 with the release of our latest spot, “New Guy.”

I am proud of what we have accomplished. Proving what I had been trying to say for years, we need a new system to truly unlock diversity and inclusion. And when you do that, it’s not just good for people like me, it’s good for creativity and brands that harness creativity to transform their business.

Three years later, I am relieved to say I no longer feel that itch. Instead, I feel a greater sense of purpose.