Keith Cartwright, Geoff Edwards, Jayanta Jenkins, and Jimmy Smith are all advertising royalty. Each of them holds a treasured hope for the black kid entering the agency space.

All of them are high-profile, successful, and representative, bringing unique talents to the agencies they inhabit. Keith Cartwright is the ECD at Butler, Stern, Shine & Partners. Geoff Edwards co-founded DOJO and is a Creative Exec at Creative Artists Agency. Jayanta Jenkins recently accepted a new role as Global Group Creative Director at Twitter. Jimmy Smith is Chairman, CEO, and COO at Amusement Park. Now, with agencies turning over questions concerning the hiring of minorities and the Black Lives Matter movement, the four have come together to try their combined hand at wrangling the conversation about race.

Enter the ‘Saturday Morning’ intitiative.

Inspired by recent police violence on black bodies and it’s imminent ripple effects. On the stark white background of their website, they call Sunday morning “the most divided day in America,” and choose Saturday because of the hope it represents as a “coalition for peace.”

The initiative came out of a text sent by Cartwright to the others to meet up as a group to have a conversation. They drafted a manifesto after recently getting together to talk their journeys through the agency world as black men. Their narratives intersected everywhere, from encounters with racism to the art of code-switching, prompting the Avengers-like team up.

What’s their goal?

The goal is incredibly optimistic and the crew of iconoclasts knows it. They write, “The brutal deaths of Philando Castile, Alton Sterling and the five police officers murdered in Dallas, Texas, brought us together this Saturday Morning to talk about how we can help change the perception that black lives are not as important as others.”

They pose the question of what they can do as advertising industry creatives to add to the conversation, saying, “The dehumanizing effects are causing African Americans across this country to be brutalized, incarcerated and even killed at an alarming rate. How do we as industry change that, and how do we enlist others around our industry to join the discussion?”

With the conversation swirling, now is an important time in American history. Both athletes and allies are standing up in public to fight for a change in the perception of black lives. It’s a life-or-death conversation. A conversation they’ll be crafting quarterly through their Peace Brief, which will outline their objectives. This could range from raising money to help pass legislation to creating a peace-based technology, all to “make every Saturday Morning better than the last.”

They are inviting creatives all across the industry to join their coalition and to join in on the discussion.

You can view their full letter below:

Saturday Morning is hosting an Advertising Week event on September 29th to announce its first project. You can find out more about that at AdvertisingWeek.

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Geoff Edwards

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