The O.G. of Black Advertising

Byron Lewis founded UniWorld, an ad agency that broke barriers

By Craigh Barboza

Early in his career, Byron Lewis had tried to get a number of Black media ventures going in Harlem, where he was part of a thriving civic and cultural scene. The idea behind The Urbanite, which he co-founded in 1961, was to make a sophisticated literary magazine. It would cover fashion, food, travel and the arts. James Baldwin was its theater critic, but it folded within months. No one advertised and it taught him a lesson. “What I found was major corporations, and most white people, had never thought of Blacks as consumers,” Lewis told me recently. “That’s really the foundation for my business.”

UniWorld Group Inc., which he established in 1969, was one of a handful of Black-run agencies to emerge in the post-Civil Rights era with the goal of marketing products to demographics that had long been ignored or misunderstood by Madison Avenue. (The first ad featuring a Black model didn’t appear in a mainstream publication until May 1963.) Lewis had to learn about the advertising industry quickly, but he said he did “know about Black folks,” and so he became not just a salesman but also a teacher. He courted and created ads for companies like AT&T, Colgate-Palmolive, Disney, Eastman Kodak, Gatorade, Home Depot, RJ Reynolds, Smirnoff, United Healthcare, the U.S. Marine Corp and many more, that were some of the first aimed at the African American community. His groundbreaking campaigns included the Wyclef Jean remix of “The Joy of Pepsi” and the Burger King “We may not be the world’s No.1. fast-food place; it just tastes that way” TV spots.

His ads also helped normalize the image of Blackness. To sell the nougat chocolate centered-candy bars 3 Musketeers, Lewis proposed making one of the swashbuckling heroes in their commercials and magazine ads a brother. He told the owner of Mars that Alexandre Dumas, who wrote the 1844 French novel for which he’d named his candy bar, was, after all, Black. Forrest Mars, Jr. said if Lewis could prove it, the Mars Inc. account was his. Lewis produced a bio of the French author and UWG took over the confectionery giant’s general-market account, aimed at all consumers, in 1995. It was the largest account ever awarded to a so-called ethnic agency, and as a gift, Mr. Mars sent Lewis a pair of antique swords. UWG’s resulting campaign carried the amusing theme “Big on chocolate, not on fat!”

Lewis still remembers when his industry emphasized broadcast and print advertising, word-of-mouth, interpersonal people skills, relationships and fresh concepts. “The ad business is about storytelling and having great ideas,” said Lewis, who served as chief executive of UWG until he retired in 2012. “That’s why I love creative people.”

As a result, Lewis has trained an entire generation of advertisers, more than a thousand artists, creatives and contractors. Many went on to start their own agencies. “Byron believed and trusted in folks,” said Gwen Singletary, who was the primary client liaison on the Pepsi and Burger King accounts before launching Urbanforce, her own full-service marketing agency. “I know too many people Byron has helped send their kids to school and given downpayments for houses, everything. He helped a lot of people.” (Singletary also helped start a FaceBook group called UWG Old School Playas.)

Lewis said he recently signed a gift deed with a major cultural organization that will be collecting his personal possessions. (An announcement is coming soon.) Now 90, he is still charming and upbeat, not to mention an astonishingly good storyteller, but he has to rely on a rolling walker to navigate the Tribeca duplex penthouse he shares with his wife, Sylvia Wong Lewis, a former journalist. “Byron’s generation lived and worked during racial segregation, but saw the beauty and value of being a Black community,” Sylvia said. “Byron knew zip codes all over the country where our people lived in concentrated numbers. Before the era of computers, he always had to prove the population numbers.”

The couple met in the 1990s at a media sponsors dinner for the West Indian Day Parade. Sylvia was being blocked from the food line and Lewis let her in, saying, “Young lady, please step in front of me!” They discussed the problems minority-owned newspapers had in drawing major advertisers and struck up a longterm friendship. They were married in 2011 at a small event in Harlem officiated by Mayor David Dinkins, a good friend. Lewis serenaded his new bride with “It Had to Be You.”

A few months ago, I sat down with Lewis for a wide-ranging discussion on his notable career. This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.

What was it like when you started out?

When I was working in the advertising department of Tuesday Magazine, a short-lived Black publication in the 1960s, we had a guy named Little Willie. He was a numbers man that would give us cash-money loans based on the advertising contracts we got at the magazine. Back then, we could not take our contracts to banks and get a loan to operate, like normal white businesses. Black business owners had to work with the numbers man. The ad scene for Black magazines was always tight for budgets. I remember John Johnson, of Ebony, wanted to hire me away from Tuesday because he knew I “could deliver.” John mentored me about the business.

You went from soliciting ads to creating ads, many of which ran in places like Ebony, Black Enterprise and Essence. Did you have a favorite account?

Every account, big and small, especially the small ones like Bethune-Cookman University [part of his branding work with HBCUs to attract donors and students], or the myriad of campaigns for civil rights leaders that I’ve worked on, was memorable.

How were you able to secure your first major clients, like AT&T, Smirnoff, Quaker Oats and Avon?

With Avon Products, I had a lead because Ernesta Procope, a friend of mine, was on the board. Ernesta was in insurance and her company, Bowen [which provided insurance for UniWorld in different areas] was the first Black-owned business on Wall Street. Ernesta told me, Byron, you need to talk to Avon.

When I went to talk to Avon they said, Well, Mr. Lewis, you have an interesting background. What is it that we can do for you, or with you? And I said, “I wanna tell you who your best customers are.” They said, who? I said, “Black people.”

The Avon Lady was very popular in the Black community, not just in New York, all over, because she brought in products that Black people used in their whole big line. There was a day when everybody in the neighborhood came to see the Avon Lady. The white man said, I never knew that. I said, “Sir, there are so many things about your line that you don’t know about and how important Avon is to this community. At the time the average Black person could not go shopping in a department store to get the kind of products you have in the line. There was a product you could use to not get stung by mosquitoes in the summertime. My wife was an Avon Lady! [laughs]

Who were you meeting with at these brands?

With most of my early clients, I talked directly to the CEOs. So what I did, after working with Avon for a while, I wanted to expand my business with them. Avon had all kinds of different beauty products and perfumes but they didn’t know our men loved fragrances. So in a meeting, I said, “Well, you’re important to Black men, too. There are Black men and Latinos who use your products. White guys don’t do this.” And they said we are very, very aware of the importance to Black women but that’s going too far. So I got Billy Dee Williams to come to Avon.

I got in touch with him and I asked him, do you use it? Billy Dee said, “Yeah, man, they have all kinds of things for men.” So I said, Well, I’d like you to come to Avon to meet the CEO, but also to show that there is a bigger market for them than just women.

Man, Billy Dee Williams came to Avon and these white women almost tore him apart. [laughs] All them women went crazy and that Billy Dee was so cool.

Avon ended up giving Williams his own product line in 1990.

Now the truth is it was always difficult to get the client to change their minds.

Do you have other stories?

I remember meeting with Ford about the Lincoln Navigator. This was in the ’90s and they were planning a new line of vehicles. First, they wanted to give us this little jive car. They said this is the car we want for the Black community and this Lincoln Navigator, a new sport utility vehicle, is what we want for the Latino community. In Ford’s mind, Latinos and Mexicans were rural laborers and workers who could use trucks. Their community wasn’t as urban as it is today.

Now, I ended up creating a Latino division at UniWorld. But I didn’t have it back then, and that meant that I was going to lose business with Ford. So I said, Oh no, you don’t understand. Our middle class can use that SUV. We have families.

Now, the other thing is, they did not believe Black people had families. They really didn’t believe that. So I told the head of the Ford division, we can use that car, but we’d use it differently. I said we are generally interested in change. We’re trendsetters in the culture. So I said, I will come back with a concept to show how the Black community would use their new Navigator and I did an ad about diapers. My client called it “The Diapers” commercial. I had to present to about 1,500 people.

What did the ad show?

This was a period of time when the cities were really beaten up so I showed a young Black family in the heart of the city and I showed all the different hazards in the street. I showed a Black family coming out of a major food store with groceries and diapers. I conceptualized it and my staff designed the ad.

I showed the buyers a little in-house commercial we did and they clapped. I said this is your biggest market. That was the first time a major car company had advertised to Black middle-class people in urban areas.

UniWorld was a full-service shop. How was it structured?

It was like any other advertising agency. We had writers. There was a business side, we called them “account people,” that could deal with clients on a day-to-day basis. We had a very strong financial department because we couldn’t afford to make mistakes.

Most of my staff, very few of them had worked inside of a major corporation, or an advertising agency. So it was a training as we went along. We had different departments and offices in Detroit and Miami. The one in Washington, D.C. was run out of the Mansion on O Street. Rosa Parks was a guest there in the 1990s.

Most of the employees were African American. At one point, I wanted to have the Latino community — that’s why I called it UniWorld, and the idea was that we ought to be able to talk to everybody. I called it UniWorld because I used to be a social worker downtown in New York, and I saw different communities coming in — the Latin community, the Asian community. I had been a social worker for about five years, and I said, this is the future.

Can you talk about how you grew up? Who were your parents?

My father was an orphan from New London County, Conn. His name was Thomas Eugene Lewis. He was African American of Cape Verdean descent and had his own business painting houses. He hired his sons and other people in the community. He also worked on Long Island, picking vegetables, and on truck farms in New Jersey.

My mother was Myrtle Evelyn Allen. She was from Galveston, TX. At a young age, she went to live with her aunt in upstate New York who was a live-in maid. It was like The Help. My mother also worked in a school cafeteria and as an election worker in Queens, for decades.

I was the oldest of six children: four brothers and one sister. My brothers Stanley and George passed away. Raymond, 88, who lived in Mexico, also just died. My brother Clyde, 75, is in Atlantic City and my sister, June, 84, is in San Diego.

I was mostly raised in Jamaica, Queens but started in Newark and then Far Rockaway. I remember living among the Black and white immigrants. I went to [grade school at] P.S. 39 and I had a teacher who gave me my first presentation. It was Mrs. Messer. She hung my poems and drawings in the halls and asked me to speak at the PTA meeting. When I finished my presentation the parents and teachers clapped and, suddenly, I said, you know, I like this. [laughs] It was true!

What else do you remember about your childhood?

We attended Brooks Memorial UMC Church in Jamaica and Rev. Carrington was my first mentor. He noticed my potential for leadership and performance and he got me involved in theater, the choir, Boy Scouts, I did community activities. [Lewis later funded the church sound system in memory of his mother.]

I went to John Adams High School and graduated early. [Lewis was the Class Artist. He appeared in two yearbooks, 1948 and 1949, which also featured his writing and artwork.] Then I worked as a busboy at Gertz, the department store, to make money for college.

You eventually went to Long Island University, to study journalism, and after you graduated (early, again) you enlisted in the Army in 1953.

That’s when the Army was beginning to integrate, after the Second World War. I did my training in Fort Dix, N.J. From there I went to Fort Knox, where the money is, and that’s where we had another level of training. And then they said, okay, we’re gonna put you in the communications arm, and that’s when I was sent down to Fort Benning, near Atlanta.

The military was the first time I was exposed to southern racism. The truth is, I didn’t even experience it at first in the military until I went down to Kentucky and Georgia. But my main post was in Alaska. There were a few Blacks up there. I was on ski patrol.

You have an unusual background and, under your helm, UniWorld did some pretty unusual things for an ad agency. What was it known for?

We were known for pioneering events marketing and finding creative ways to involve our corporate clients. AT&T was one of my first and longest clients. I remember they were very concerned about my office on West 46th Street. It was in the height of Times Square when it was really dangerous. When AT&T finally came to my office the executive said, “Mr. Lewis we would like to work with you but would you do us two favors?” I said, What? He said, “Would you move? [laughs] And two, would you get rid of that tacky telephone you have over there?” [laughs]

They also told me something else, as I got to know them. AT&T was a monopoly and the government was threatening to break them up. My client said, Byron, it looks like we’re not getting any support from corporate America. What is it you can do for us? I said you should create a show about the Black experience and frankly you could use some help. I said, we also need some support from the F.C.C. [Federal Communications Commission]. You should create something that would make Black people feel there’s a reason for any support we could give the company. Because you’ve got Black people that work for AT&T, the company up in New England over there, but the truth is you don’t have a lot of them.”

So, I created a show called This Far By Faith that talked about the importance of the church in the Black community and its communication role. The film’s premiere at the American Film Institute Theater where we had a reception with Black leaders. There were mayor-ministers from all over. The film is now in the archives of AT&T.

Then subsequently I did things to show there were Black employees where AT&T had its offices. I would have annual days in these different cities with the Black employees. I would go and photograph them and they would have local activities. So I would consider myself, based on those things, an idea person.

Did the agency struggle in its early days?

There was a period when businesses were interested in working in the Black community. I just never could, basically, get enough money to sustain the company. By year seven, my investors wanted to pull out. [Lewis eventually repaid the initial investment of $250,000, plus interest.] I had only one payroll left. It was the only time when UniWorld was near the financial edge.

What did you do?

My board told me to go home to think about what you want to do. Then over the weekend I had a dream. I woke up and said, I will do a Black radio soap opera!

How did you come up with the idea?

I grew up with the radio. I listened to aunts, uncles and neighbors talk about their shows. These were soap operas. So I went back to my investors, and I told them I want to have a soap opera. He said, Why’s that? I said the radio is something Black people really listen to. He said, well, you better do it because we can’t help you anymore. So that soap opera is what kept me in business.

I took it to Quaker Oats in Chicago. I told them how their best customers were Black people and, naturally, that shook them again because they never thought so. I told them Quaker Oats, Quaker Grits, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben — and as I rattled them off they started looking at each other — I said, “We know these products. We’ve been in your kitchens.” That led to “Sounds of the City,” a radio show about a Black family in Chicago.

I hired Shauneille Perry (Lorraine Hansberry’s cousin) and gave her a budget to hire a writers team, production crew and actors. Every Black actor around worked on it at one time or another. Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Robert Guillaume were on the show, Lenny Kravitz’s mom [Roxie Roker], too.

You also ventured into commercial television, in 1977, with “America’s Black Forum,” the first nationally syndicated Black news interview program.

I purchased it from Walker Williams [and his partner], and I hired the talent: Julien Bond, Janet Langhart, Juan Williams, James Brown, Armstrong Williams, Charles Ogletree, Debor Mathis and Ed Bradley. My son, Byron Jr., worked on the show as a writer, producer and executive producer.

And film.

I founded the American Black Film Festival, which was later sold to Jeff Friday who re-branded it as Film Life and American Black Film Festival. I also produced the Black Oscars and helped launch the careers of Steve Harvey and Kevin Hart.

But I’m also proud of the work I did in launching the African Burial Ground in New York City. UniWorld had a contract with National Parks and New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center to promote the Burial Ground. Our team raised $500,000.

I’m also proud of the work we did for Ebony’s 40th anniversary. It was a $1 million advertising campaign. We designed full-page ads for Ebony that ran in newspapers in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles, and lots of trade publications. The theme line was, “Nothing sells black consumers better.” There were also television spots.

I want to talk about Shaft, the 1971 hit movie directed by Gordon Parks. It was one of your first big jobs. What was your marketing strategy?

You have to know your audience. What we did was create radio and television spots. We also created the movie’s poster [designed by Bill Allen, who was our first creative and art director] and ran them in every major Black market. I proposed that the key was to talk to the Black community as if you cared. But not only that, I got Gordon Parks and Isaac Hayes [whose theme for Shaft won the Academy Award] on the radio to promote Shaft, but in the Black colloquial space. One ad was this guy saying, “Man, that Shaft/ he’s a bad mother” — and then we hear a woman in the commercial, “Shut your mouth!” — Then he finishes the line, “Well I’m talking about Shaft!”

I put the whole campaign in major markets talking to Black consumers. It was about word of mouth, and where does the word of mouth come from on this project? The barbershops, hair salons and on the streets. We told them in their vernacular, “This is what’s happening. This is coming.”

They got a chance to see the movie then we’d invite them somewhere — a big, fancy hotel in the city — to meet Isaac and a lot of Stax people, because they are your communication source. I spent months on the road promoting Shaft.

How did you get involved with Shaft?

Al Bell, a man I met at the Apollo Theater when I was just starting out, was really the person responsible for Shaft. He was the president of Stax Music and told me he had decided to do a movie. He said, we’ve got some white people — Ernest Tidyman, who had written the book — and the thing is, that I think it would be good for Stax.

Now he was based in Memphis and he had this huge roster of talent: Otis Redding, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, the Staple Singers. Al said I need a broader venue for them. So he went with Gordon Parks, who he knew, and Clarence Avant — to MGM, where I believe Al had a contract with the studio.

MGM wasn’t doing very well and so he told them why they needed to talk to the Black audience, which was starving for films. Melvin Van Peebles had started it with his film [the independent hit Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which was made and distributed completely outside of the film industry] a year before but, in Hollywood, there was not a feeling that there was a commercial audience for Black films. So Al Bell and Gordon sold this movie idea based on this paperback detective story, which was Shaft and lo-and-behold, they hired me to promote it.

So what happened once the film took off?

MGM was like, you know what, we’ve got something here, and then I found out about crossover. I saw it happen. That’s the secret to Shaft’s success. It’s credited with saving MGM. The core audience was Black but we also got young white moviegoers and then the studio gave us access to their networks. We ran commercials on Black radio stations and white radio stations, and in Black newspapers and white newspapers. Then we began to get money to support the film because everybody had something to gain. What I learned is, that’s the key to this business. You’ve got to know what everybody has to gain.

Craigh Barboza writes about entertainment, race and culture. His brothers, photographer Anthony Barboza and talent agent Ken Barboza, have a long history with UniWorld. Craigh directed the family documentary It’s the Fuller Brush Man and edited the film book “John Singleton: Interviews,” a study of the Oscar-nominated director’s work, which is part of the acclaimed series Conversations with Filmmakers (University Press of Mississippi). He teaches film journalism at New York University.