Sharecropping on Madison Avenue

Sharecropping is a system where the landlord-planter allows a tenant (usually a poor, Black family) to farm the land in exchange for a share of the crops they harvest. This encouraged poor tenants to work hard to produce the biggest harvest they could, and it ensured they would remain tied to the land and unlikely leave for other opportunities. In many cases, the landlords would lease equipment to the tenants, and offer seed, fertilizer, food, and other items on credit until the harvest season. At that time, the tenant and landlord would settle up, figuring out who owed whom and how much.

High interest rates, unpredictable harvests, and unscrupulous landlords kept tenant families severely indebted, requiring the debt to be carried over until the next year or the year after that. Laws favoring landowners made it difficult, or even illegal, for sharecroppers to sell their crops to others besides their landlord. Or they prevented sharecroppers from moving if they were indebted to their landlord.

In rural America, not just in the old South, sharecropping replaced the antebellum plantation system. It was a new form of bondage and stolen labor.

But sharecropping exists on Madison Avenue as well. It looks very different, but feels very much the same.

The majority of accounts held by multicultural agencies are with clients they share with a mainstream agency. The multicultural agency works on a particular ethnic segment, while the mainstream agency works on the general market. (Terms like “mainstream” and “general market” are used here because they are the common vernacular of our business, not because they are technically accurate.) It isn’t necessarily a bad arrangement. Often, it works fairly well, especially when the clients are smart, and they care about the success of their marketing programs. When it is done right and done well, interagency collaboration is a thing of beauty and a marvel to behold. Sometimes, however, a client will insist that the multicultural agency follow the creative and strategic lead of the mainstream agency, even when it makes absolutely no marketing sense to do so. The client is focused entirely on ensuring that nothing detracts from the mainstream campaign and directs their multicultural agency to carry out an “ethnic version” of the mainstream campaign.

Why bother hiring a multicultural agency when all you really want is an ethnic casting director? At multicultural agencies, we call this “man-tanning.”

These are clients who hired their minority agencies strictly because their management told them to, strictly for political cover, and to keep the activists and picket signs out of their parking lot. They hired their minority agency because it’s good optics. Multicultural agencies accept these “stay-in-the-kitchen” relationships, even at the cost to their self-respect, because it is still better than not having the business at all. Sometimes, being Black on Madison Avenue means that pride is expendable. Sometimes survival is the only rule in the game.

But this is not what I mean by sharecropping on Madison Avenue. This is not the bad stuff. This is just the everyday reality. This stuff is so commonplace, no one loses any sleep over it.

Every agency wants to win the really big accounts, accounts with the ability to actually change the size of the agency, accounts that enable agencies to weather the really tough days in agency life, accounts that offer the opportunity to deliver your very best work, work you can show off for years afterward. These are the whales that we all go after. And just like Captain Ahab, sometimes we hunt that whale to our own peril. 

When a whale goes up for review, it takes a team of agencies to catch it. Ad agencies today have become so highly specialized in their positioning and their offering that no single agency possesses the portfolio of capabilities and resources to meet the comprehensive marketing needs of a whale client. Not even a team of two or three agencies is enough. Typically, answering the RFP [request for proposal] of a whale requires assembling a team of at least 5 agencies, and sometimes (especially on big government contracts) as many as 10 agencies. This gaggle of agencies (“team” seems too generous a label) is led by the big alpha agency in the bunch, the agency that declares itself to be the “prime” agency for the engagement. All of the other agencies are “sub” or “subcontractor” agencies. Ninety percent of the time, all of these sub agencies are owned by the same parent company as the prime agency. They are all family. They operate separately, but they play like family.

That is, of course, except for the multicultural agencies. More often than not, multicultural agencies are not part of the family. Instead, they are whichever multicultural agency happens to be available when the prime agency is ready to pitch. It is likely that the minority agency pitched with the prime agency previously, but their only actual connection is familiarity.

Why not work with a multicultural agency that is part of your parent company family? After all, every advertising holding company owns one. Good question. The answer is basic math. Advertising holding companies like Omnicom or WPP or Interpublic all have 50 to 100 agencies in their network, including at least a half-dozen or more that would present as prime agencies. But they will only have one African American agency, one Hispanic agency, and one Asian agency in their entire network. Those three little agencies can’t possibly be available for every new business opportunity in their network. So, the prime agencies have to shop outside their own networks. That means doing business with somebody who is “not family.” If that conjures up images of the extremely insular operations of The Godfather, you are not entirely wrong.

But there is also another dynamic, and I would be remiss not to mention it. More often than you might guess, the prime agency simply does not like working with the multicultural agency that is part of its parent company network. No one ever offers an official explanation, but they just refuse to work with them. One explanation is that as soon as one of the giant financial-holding companies buys up a small, entrepreneurial, independent-minded multicultural shop, the small agency starts to suck. Badly. These holding companies try to run something that they don’t really understand, and everything about the collaboration quickly goes off course. The giant holding company assumes that they are the best thing that ever happened to this insignificant little multicultural agency; but in reality, they probably have accidentally smothered it to death.

And now these prime agencies look outside the family for minority-owned agencies they can team with.

To be part of the “team” that will work on one of these great big accounts, the minority agency must sign a contract with the prime agency, not with the client. Legally, the minority agency signs away the right to have any relationship with the client. The minority agency must deal only with the prime agency. And that contract comes with a handful of serious restrictions.

• The minority agency agrees not to place its agency name on any of its work product, but must instead refer to itself and its work as coming from “Team _____.”
• The minority agency is not permitted to have any contact or communication with the client unless the prime agency is present. This includes telephone conversations and email communications.
• The minority agency is not permitted to disparage the prime agency in any way. This includes any statements that are critical of the prime agency, its operations, its personnel, its work, or recommendations. Not in internal communications, interagency (within the team) communications, or communications with the client.
• The minority agency is not permitted to speak to the press about its work on the account, unless cleared to do so by the prime agency.
• The marketing budget for the minority agency will be set at the discretion of the prime agency.
• The agency retainer fee for the minority agency will be set at the discretion of the prime agency.
• Roles and responsibilities will be set at the discretion of the prime agency.

If the minority agency doesn’t like it, the agency can take its complaints to the prime agency.

This incredibly oppressive and discriminatory system is responsible for the majority of income at many minority agencies. Their economic survival depends upon a system that oppresses and abuses them. And yet, I doubt you will find any minority agency willing to speak out against these practices. They can’t take the risk of being blackballed and shut out from future team agreements. You don’t dare bite the hand that feeds you, even when the food is stale crumbs.

Clients love the convenience of having to enter into only one contract with one agency and managing one relationship. It’s a very cost-efficient way of doing business. Managing multiple agency relationships can be a full-time job, and a lot like herding kittens. But that convenience and efficiency come at a very high cost. There is no way that the sub agencies (whether “family members” or not) can consistently deliver their best work under these operating conditions. There is no way that the best work survives getting processed through the filter of whatever makes the prime agency look good. So, the best work never reaches the client. And if the client is not getting the best work, why bother with any of this?

Where has any of this gotten us? Where has any of this gotten our clients? There has to be a better way.

The truth is that the “better way” is not all that complicated. It is not that difficult to achieve, if that is our choice. Agencies say that they want to do their best work. We are happiest and most prosperous when we do our best work. Clients say they want our best work. They hope that is what their money is buying. They would be pretty unhappy if it were not.

And we say that we want the system to be fair and equitable for everyone, and that diversity plays an important role in making it fair and equitable. Our clients say they expect this. They even go so far as to make it a mandatory provision of the RFP. A requirement.

And yet, does anyone really think that any of the mainstream agencies would bother including minority or multicultural agencies in their pitch team if it were not a requirement of the RFP? Does anyone really think they would give it five minutes of thought? Any agency that tells you they would is lying.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a group of agencies “teaming up” to pitch a large piece of business together. In fact, it is a demonstration—and a promise—for collaboration and synergy if they are fortunate enough to win the business. And it is possible to work well together as equals. But the “prime agency” paradigm is an inherently unequal, discriminatory practice that inevitably leads to inside-the-box thinking and handcuffed creativity, at best. And millions in stolen and cheated money at worst.

The time is long overdue to abolish the prime-agency system completely.

And all we have to do to change would be for clients—most especially the large, government clients—to agree to contract with each of their agencies separately and individually, so that each agency has the same rights and the same rules of engagement, so that one ad agency does not control the fortunes of another. A little extra paperwork and a little extra project management is an insignificant price to pay for the tremendous dividends it would yield. And it would—at last—live up to the diversity, equity, and inclusion objectives that so many of these clients have set.

Think of the PR bonanza that awaits the first major client to announce this. Think of the PR bonanza, the industry goodwill, and the regulatory and political support that the 4A’s (American Association of Advertising Agencies) and the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) would receive by publicly supporting this practice. Think of the economic impact on small, independent, and minority-owned agencies. That’s a lot to think about. 

An end to sharecropping on Madison Avenue.

Mark S. Robinson has worked for such clients as Clairol, Lipton Tea, Pillsbury, Coors Light, Kraft Foods, Johnson & Johnson, HBO, Harrah’s Entertainment, Diageo, and the U.S. Army, among others in his 40-plus-year career in advertising. He cofounded Spike/DDB with Spike Lee, and he brought the agency holding company concept to multicultural marketing with S/R Communications Alliance. You can buy Black on Madison Avenue here. This excerpt reprinted with permission © 2023 Mark S. Robinson.