ADVERTISING’S ALLYSHIP ARMY

How Palette Group is leading the charge in diversity and inclusion initiatives for branding and marketing campaigns

By Jalen Michael

THE ENTIRE MEDIA INDUSTRY WAS SHAKEN UP IN THE WAKE OF

George Floyd’s murder last year. Amidst the wave of protests and activism that took over the news and social media, many companies offered their solidarity through press releases and posts of black squares. Two members of Palette Group, a Brooklyn-based creative agency and production company, felt that this wasn’t good enough; so they decided to do something about it. Nate Nichols, the founder and creative director of Palette Group, and Steffi Behringer, a partner at the agency, co-founded the Allyship and Action summit, which aims to address the role the advertising industry plays in perpetuating systemic racism and create foundations to effectively hold the industry accountable. We recently hopped on a call with Nichols and Behringer to discuss how they are using their platform in commercial branding and advertising to uplift disenfranchised voices, and to establish transparency and accountability within the space. we partnered up with some folks, 2,500 people showed up to the first event. Then we did two more for the rest of the year. And we have brands like Nike and Spotify, agencies like WPP. Just amazing, provoking conversations and workshops. All these people are like, “I want to be an ally!” But how do you define your role as an ally? And so our vision and goal was to develop systems for us to elevate marginalized voices, people, and communities by enabling allies to understand what we need and give them systems to design allyship. SB: And over the course of the year, we gained this community of individuals that really wanted to be productive. They didn’t want to wait for their leader and CEO to finally understand what needs to change. And so we have a Slack channel with over 600 humans who are eager to work on new systems, on new policies. And that’s how we understood that we also can’t wait for the C-suite. We call it the Allyship Army. So [there are] 600 humans and more—whoever wants to jump on the train and just do the work. We are building this groundswell that slowly comes up and erupts like a volcano. That’s how we, hopefully, put enough pressure on the industry and on leaders to then finally make change. We want to change our approach from [the] top down; we now go from the bottom up.

How does Palette Group typically go about casting commercial projects?

NATE NICHOLS: I think it depends on the project. It’s communitybased outreach—elevation of locals in a pocket that we want to represent in a project. Within our network, we go through talent scouts or agents, as well. So we have a network of agents, like the Collective Speakers— they’re a great organization we constantly go to. They represent marginalized communities, from people who are in wheelchairs to, like, Ice-T. And then Backstage— Backstage is something we’ve been using for years.

STEFFI BEHRINGER: Yeah, Backstage has been such a helpful tool—the way all the functions allow you to really be specific but also keep it open. It has all the possibilities, and it’s just so clean and easy to use that you will get amazing talent. Like, we sometimes put up a posting and get 300 submissions within, like, three hours. It’s wild! And there’s amazing talent on it. So we are super grateful that this Backstage tool exists.

How did Allyship and Action come together, and what sort of influence did you see advertising playing in systemic racism as a whole?

NN: When George Floyd was murdered last year, a lot of companies put out these press releases; they said a bunch of things. And we exist in their

Nate Nichols

machines, exist in their culture; we exist in the systems that they have enabled and perpetuated for decades, and we don’t feel safe. You expect us to believe that press release? You expect us to believe that black square? So we wanted to get down to the bottom of what they meant by that black square, what they meant by that press release. You know, there are companies like WPP that have stated, “We’re going to grant $30 million to Black-owned and -operated companies over the next [three] years.” We had a conversation with the CEO of WPP, and we were like, “What does that actually mean?” SB: And not even just, “What [do] you mean,” but, “What do you do?” NN: Right, “What are the actions?” And so that’s really what it was birthed by. We just decided to do it. And a week after

Steffi Behringer