The List launches diversity-focused mentorship program

On Nov. 18, The List—a select group of marketing, advertising and media leaders assembled by Ad Age in partnership with Meta—kicked off the 2022 edition of its mentorship program, Generation Next.

Since its inception in 2019, The List has been working toward addressing underrepresentation and work-life balance in the industry. The 2019 List created the Ask About It campaign to raise awareness of the importance of equitable parental and family leave in the industry, as well as naming the 10 companies with the best family leave policies in the industry. Ricky Ray Butler, CEO of Branded Entertainment Network and member of The List, was so influenced by the group's mission that he updated and improved BEN's leave policies.

More recently, in the midst of the pandemic, the 2020 and 2021 classes of The List banded together to launch Generation Next in partnership with Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT) and the Asian American Advertising Federation (3AF) as a pilot program aimed at mentoring mid-career professionals of diverse backgrounds, including those from the LGBTQ+ and disability communities, to address the retention problem in the industry.  At the kickoff meeting for the 2022 List, the members of the incoming class were charged with scaling up the mentorship program.

The 2022 List met the challenge—and then some.

In addition to doubling the number of mentees and mentors, The List recruited colleagues and allies in the industry to join as Generation Next mentors. To help expand the reach of potential mentees as well as the impact that the mentorship program could have on the industry at large, The List increased the number of diversity organization partners fivefold: Joining the 3AF and MLT this year are the Hispanic Marketing Council (HMC), Color Vision, Asians in Advertising, the Commercial Directors Diversity Program (CDDP), the Marcus Graham Project (MGP), P.O.C.C., Do the WeRQ and Future Now Media Foundation (see below for news about the group’s #GivingTuesday fundraising initiative).

GENERATION NEXT 2022

Mentees were connected with their mentors in the days leading up to the virtual kickoff (see below). During the Nov. 18 meeting, the mentees got to meet and interact with the entire mentor group en masse. Ad Age President and Editor-in-Chief Dan Peres led off the proceedings by relating his own personal story about mentorship.

"I was fortunate enough to have a mentor in my life for most of my career," Peres said. "Sadly, he passed away a few years ago. But it was one of the most important relationships of my professional life and, to some degree of my life broadly speaking. What I learned from him about mentorship is that it takes work.”

Peres continued, “There are two points in the Generation Next mentorship handbook that struck me: Mentorship is not a job interview, and mentorship is not therapy. Mentorship is a massive and incredibly important commitment on the mentor and the mentee side. In my experience, in order for it to be most effective, you have to commit to it. It doesn't work without work."

In addition to regular one-on-ones with their mentors, the Generation Next mentees are given access to a six-week training and development curriculum compiled and curated by The List. The curriculum is composed of pillars that include Business Fundamentals, Work Environment and Culture, Networking and Presenting, and Management and Leadership. There also are individual lessons on subtopics such as "What Value Means in Business," "The Power of Personality Types," "The Art of the Internal Pitch" and "Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace."

Another change to the program this year will be the participation of partner organizations in helping to amplify the curriculum lessons, as well as achieving the core complementary missions of the mentorship programs: increasing and improving DE&I in the ad industry via live/virtual events, exclusive webinars and social media activations with The List's Studio 30 content team.

THE VALUE OF WORK-LIFE BALANCE

The List's primary mission of constructing a path to true diversity, equity and inclusion includes acknowledging how the adverse effects of such phenomena as “impostor syndrome” on professionals from underrepresented backgrounds can prevent businesses from creating a work environment that allows everyone to be their true selves.

"Mentorship is the process of looking at the authentic self,” said Isaac Mizrahi, CEO of Alma and member of The List during an Advertising Week New York panel in The Female Quotient's Equality Lounge.

"We try to project an external image of who we are,” Mizrahi said. “But in most moments, that's not who we really are. It's the LinkedIn self, the selling self, the 'amazing' self. But the true self is the person your bosses want to come to work every day. Mentors help you to find your true self.”

Expressing that true self includes recognizing the importance of work-life balance, especially during the pandemic era when the concept of "an office job" is in such flux. In the early days of COVID, The List itself wrestled with the same issues, and without the steadfast commitment of the members themselves as well as the Meta and Ad Age teams, Generation Next might never have gotten off the ground.

"The truth is, life is really hard right now," said The List member Jeron Smith, co-founder of Heir, said in April 2020 at The List’s first virtual meeting during the pandemic. "We have a platform to expand what we think about as unconscious bias, how that is affecting people in the workplace, and shine a light on what people are going through.”

An exercise during the kickoff meeting—asking the Generation Next mentors what they would do if they were given two extra hours a day—helped emphasize the importance of the "life" part of the work-life equation. Because the mentors are such an accomplished group of leaders with responsibilities at some of the biggest brands and agencies in the industry, it's no surprise that among the personal aspects of their lives they value the most include family, leisure time and rest.

A number of folks remarked on the importance of family, including Coltrane Curtis, founder and managing partner at Team Epiphany; Will Esparza, founder and CEO of Hyphenated; Ahmad Islam, founder and CEO of Ten35; Shannon Jones, co-founder of Verb; and Jonathan Vu, head of global brand media and sponsorships at ServiceNow.

Zooming in from his home office, Curtis said his 11-year-old son—who speaks fluent Mandarin, Spanish and English—works for him tracking packages and seeding kits, and emailing tracking numbers to the agency's accounts person.

In addition to spending more time with his teenagers, Islam added that he would "think about ideas that didn't come from a client brief. A lot of times in this industry, even as creators, we lose the opportunity to think freely."

Vu, who has his hands full with two kids under 5, said he'd use the extra time reaching out to friends and connections to strengthen those relationships.

Commending Coltrane Curtis for having such a cool name, Seth Freeman, VP of marketing and communications at BlueLinx, admitted, "I'm a big jazzhead, so if I had a couple of more hours I'd listen to some jazz." Keeping up the music theme, Sylvia Atsaves, chief of staff at Revolt, said she'd go to an outdoor concert. (She added that her boss, Detavio Samuels, CEO of Revolt and also a member of The List, would probably go swimming, which he does two hours a day anyway, or do a photo shoot.)

Karan Dang, head of creative at Walmart, is a sneakerhead, and would use the extra two hours working on his own line of sneakers. Randy Romero, social media director at GSD&M—and fresh off the Taylor Swift Capital One ticket presale frenzy—would take the old Land Rover Discovery he has been renovating for a long drive. (Mo Said, founder and creative director at Mojo Supermarket, had to leave the meeting early, but said he'd "hop in Randy's Discovery and go kick it with Sylvia at that outdoor concert.”)

Aaron Walton, co-founder and CEO of Walton Isaacson—and newly minted 2023 Advertising Hall of Fame inductee—said he'd spend the first 30 minutes perfecting a "slightly dirty martini and then the next 90 minutes reading a non-industry related novel or a book that took me away from the craziness of work all the time.”

Brandi Pitts, global head of partnerships, digital marketing, at Meta, said she'd "take that pottery class I've been looking at forever. And I'd also move off text and connect with my friends live.”

Jackie Gagne, senior VP of multicultural marketing at Warner Bros. Discovery, said she'd "go for a nice long walk, and when I got back, I'd probably start watching a movie, because I love movies and I don't always get the opportunity to do that."

Recent medical research has shown that self-care includes getting adequate rest and sleep, and although a bunch of Generation Next mentors agreed with the sentiment, the nature of their jobs sometimes makes that goal hard to achieve. In the midst of a move, Kwame Taylor-Hayford, co-founder at Kin, said he'd probably have to use the extra two hours "packing boxes. It's been a nightmare to try to navigate getting that done while running a company."

Charlyn Okigbo, business lead of emerging ad products at Uber, also recently moved and said she'd spend some time "making her place look a little more livable. Not to sound boring," she added, "but if I had two extra hours in the day, I'd probably take a nap."

"If I'm gonna get real with you," said Soyoung Kang, chief marketing officer of Eos, "if I had two more hours in the day, I would probably spend about an hour and a half of it trying to figure out what to do, and then I'd fall asleep for the last 30 minutes. Truth." Titania Tran, copywriter at Wieden + Kennedy Portland, concurred. "I would lay in bed deciding what to do for an hour, then I would spend an hour reading, and then I would sleep," Tran said. (Peres noted that earlier this year Tran's acceptance speech for winning Ad Age Creative of the Year on the power of "broken English" went viral on TikTok.)

Kelly Smith Killian, chief content officer at Wright Creative, said, "I would just do everything slower. I feel like I rush through my whole day and I don't really feel present in the moment sometimes."

Esi Eggleston Bracey, executive VP and chief operating officer of personal care at Unilever North America, and Catherine Davis, CMO, North America, at Tastytrade, both extolled the virtues of the massage. With any leftover time, Davis would add a cocktail, and Bracey would either cook or go out in nature for a walk. Bonnie Wan, head of brand strategy at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, also said she "would steal those two hours to be in nature and do what I just learned is called 'hammocking'—go find two trees somewhere beautiful, hang my hammock and nap."

Joining The List and Generation Next isn't the extent of the philanthropic efforts for the membership, obviously, and some, such as Ryan Detert, CEO of Influential, who is also a board member of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, said they'd use the extra two hours devoting more time to their other causes. (Earlier this year, Influential partnered with Group Black, a Black-owned media collective, and Essence Ventures, publisher of Essence magazine and proprietor of the music festivals Essence Fest and Afropunk, to connect Black creators with brands as companies look to uphold promises to diversify media spend.)

Lauren Franklin, founder and CEO of Summerjax, said that she would spend more time working with the youth in juvenile prisons. Marie Dagenais-Lewis, operations manager at Diversability, said she "would spend more time in the Diversability community itself to find more opportunities to engage and mentor in our community. We just launched our Diversability leadership collective last year, and we've already helped raise $27,000."

Even The List members' side hustles have a sense of giving back. When Bonnie Wan isn't hammocking or overseeing brand strategy at GS&P, her side hustle is a project called The Life Brief, which helps everyday people live with greater clarity, creativity and courage by teaching them how to write briefs for their lives. The Life Brief has evolved from an agency talk into a workbook and workshops at Apple, SXSW, Accenture, Change.org, Goop and Jane Goodall’s Activating Hope Summit. Wan has signed a major book deal with Simon & Schuster to publish "The Life Brief" book in 2024.

Kai D. Wright, a former global consulting partner at Ogilvy—who made his side hustle as an author and Columbia University lecturer his "main hustle”—said he would probably spend his extra two hours writing. Wright revealed that he is currently working on a second book on personal brand building and the creator economy. That is in addition to his new side hustle, hosting the Ad Age DE&I video series "System Overload." The first episode debuted on Nov. 9 and featured Kristen Cavallo, global CEO of MullenLowe Group and CEO of The Martin Agency, and Rita McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School who is regarded as one of the most influential voices in business by Harvard Business Review and Thinkers50.

Said Wright: The 30-minute show "interviews business leaders such as CEOs and CMOs and pairs them with thought leaders such as professors at top schools to focus on how to bring about change within the industry, breaking down the mechanics of where change comes from—the policies, the processes—to demystify how we're going to accomplish DE&I goals and ambitions that so many have set forth."

To echo what Ad Age's Peres said to kick off the meeting, achieving The List's objectives of accomplishing the DE&I goals and ambitions that Wright referenced is going to take work. But that work is certainly worth all the effort of everyone involved with Generation Next.

As Erik Wade, North America brand director, MLB, at Nike, declared at the conclusion of the meeting, "Let's change the world."

FUTURE NOW GIVING TUESDAY

Future Now Media Foundation, a partner of The List and Generation Next, launched a fundraiser on #GivingTuesday, Nov. 29, to give 25 students the opportunity to attend the 2023 Future Now Media & Entertainment Conference in-person in New York, May 31-June 2. The fundraising goal is $25,000, and contributions will help cover the conference registration fee and travel stipend for 25 students who might not otherwise have the resources to attend. For more details about Future Now's #GivingTuesday fundraiser and the organization's partnership with The List, see the above video, featuring Melanie Washington, List member, MediaLink senior VP and Future Now board member, and Jessica Masters, Roku U.S. head of verticals (financial services, insurance and energy) and Future Now board member.

"Future Now has been building future leaders in media since 2017," said Washington. "We have helped thousands of students build and launch their careers through our annual Media & Entertainment Conference and year-round programs and events, which include leadership talks, workshops, meet-the-recruiters info sessions, mentoring events, a formal mentoring program and more. Diversity, equity, inclusion and mentorship are in the DNA of everything we do."

To make a tax-deductible donation, visit the #GivingTuesday page on Future Now's website. Any excess donations will support program expansion and operations for 2023.

Learn more about The List at adagethelist.com, and follow The List and track the progress of Generation Next on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.