The Hippest Trip in America by Nelson George Page B

Train ’s move to LA proving to be one of the most visible events. In that same year, Thomas Burrell and his partner Emmett McBain opened Burrell McBain advertising in Chicago. Burrell, who is now viewed as something of the patron saint of black advertising, was born in Chicago and took a high school aptitude test that suggested he had the right temperament for influencing people.
    In 1961, right out of college, he got a job in the mail room of a local ad agency. Within two years, he was writing ad copy. For the rest of the 1960s, Burrell moved in search of opportunity, working for an agency in London for two years, then moving to New York before heading back to Chicago to form his own agency. His guiding philosophy was “Black people are not dark-skinned white people,” meaning that you can’t just use the same techniques to reach black consumers as white. Burrell would sell this difference to clients and build an enduring business.
    One of Burrell McBain’s first clients was Johnson Products. George Johnson gave Burrell’s new company a shot, and it would be this agency that created so many of the beloved Afro Sheen commercials that are as much a part of the 1970s Soul Train as Don’s voice. Between 1971 and 1974 Burrell would win accounts from McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, accounts that would then turn into ad buys and commercials on Soul Train . In 1974 McBain left the company, but the renamed Burrell Advertising has continued to roll with mainstream clients to this day. Michelle Garner, a former Burrell executive, said, “These were marketers who had become savvy, and they knew the importance of the African American market, and so they initiated efforts, similar to the music business, where they had black divisions to help market to that particular consumer segment.”
    Soul Train was both a catalyst and beneficiary of this new respect for black consumers. It’s certainly an idea Byron Lewis, founder of the UniWorld Group in 1969, agrees with.
    â€œIt changed my advertising landscape,” Lewis said of the show. “It’s very difficult for ethnic agencies, particularly African American advertising agencies, because we just don’t have the critical mass; we are basically working on a niche and the idea of credibility, the ability to attract talent, the ability to grow, was really enhanced by Soul Train, because as much as we depended upon black magazines and newspapers . . . the television media reached the most people, and Soul Train gave us an exciting venue to place our commercials and to, frankly, get clients to give us more work to do, which really enhanced our growth.”
    With Soul Train as a platform, UniWorld was able to place ads on the show from AT&T, Eastman Kodak, Burger King, Pepsi-Cola, and Colgate. But getting those ad buys approved wasn’t always easy. Lewis recalled that most of these clients initially balked at buying time on Soul Train “because it was difficult for them to conceive of a need to talk to African American consumers on a direct basis. But as the show became more popular, the advertisers were anxious to be on Soul Train . . . Anything you do well in the African American community broadens the reach into the general community, so that the advertisers always felt that doing a very good job in the black community paid double benefits.”
    As an architect of commercials that appeared on the show, Lewis strongly believes that they were crucial in reshaping the image of blacks in the American mind.
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    Lewis: Positive views of black life and experience were almost never seen in the mass media. A great deal of harm had been done to people of color, and the advertising industry had to be forced to bring people into the communication industry . . . The idea of the visual representation of blacks in a positive way was very necessary to move forward in this country. I was bred within the print medium; television