Just a year-and-a-half ago, when Rajoielle Register walked into a room of senior Ford Motor Co. managers and explained the direction of the company's efforts to move beyond general-market communications, the response often was, "I don't get that."
At the time, Ford divided its diversity-focused advertising into two programs: African-American and Hispanic. Register, as Multicultural Manager, ran the first group "from soup to nuts," with responsibilities seeping from legacy media to social, from high concepts through to production.
But, as she told delegates at the Association of National Advertisers' (ANA) 2017 Multicultural Marketing & Diversity Conference, the first step to...