Advertising Revolutionary: The Life and Work of Tom Burrell

by Jason P. Chambers

Overview

The ad exec who revolutionized the image of Black Americans in advertising

Over a forty-year career, Chicagoan Tom Burrell changed the face of advertising and revolutionized the industry’s approach to African Americans as human beings and consumers. Jason P. Chambers offers a biography of the groundbreaking creator and entrepreneur that explores Burrell’s role in building brands like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola within a deeply felt vision of folding positive images of Black people into mainstream American life. While detailing Burrell’s successes, Chambers tells a parallel story of what Burrell tried to do that sheds light on the motivations of advertising creators who viewed their work as being about more than just selling. Chambers also highlights how Burrell used his entrepreneurial gifts to build an agency that opened the door for Black artists, copywriters, directors, and other professionals to earn livings, build careers, and become leaders within the industry.

Compelling and multidimensional, Advertising Revolutionary combines archival research and interviews with Burrell and his colleagues to provide a long overdue portrait of an advertising industry legend and his times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252087646
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	02/06/2024
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jason P. Chambers is an associate professor of advertising at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry and coeditor of Building the Black Metropolis: African American Entrepreneurship in Chicago.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Growing Up in Chicago
2. Into the Advertising Industry
3. Burrell-McBain Advertising
4. Finding Solid Footing
5. The Burrell Agency
6. First in the Nation
7. Overcoming a Crisis
8. The Final Years

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

01/08/2024

This capable biography by Chambers (Madison Avenue and the Color Line), an advertising professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, traces the career of ad man Tom Burrell, a “pioneer” whose “work helped shape perceptions of black middle-class life in America.” Born on Chicago’s South Side in 1939, Burrell’s career began in 1960 when Wade Advertising became the first Chicago agency to hire a Black employee. Starting as a mail room attendant, Burrell quickly worked his way up to the copywriting team. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chambers notes, pushed many agencies to hire their first nonwhite employees and opened opportunities for Burrell, who moved to the more prestigious Leo Burnett agency in 1964. Seven years later, Burrell started his own firm, which specialized in marketing to Black consumers. Chambers credits the naturalistic portrayals of Black people in Burrell’s ads with providing more positive and accurate representation than the stereotypes that had previously dominated. The matter-of-fact accounting of the ins and outs of the advertising industry from the 1960s through Burrell’s retirement in 2004 is somewhat niche, but Chambers’s extensive interviews with his subject illuminate how a corporate trailblazer navigated the changing mores of the post–civil rights era. Business historians and advertising professionals will want to take a look. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Chamber's extensive interviews with his subject illuminate how a corporate trailblazer navigated the changing mores of the post-civil rights era. Business historians and advertising professionals will want to take a look. " —Publishers Weekly

“Jason P. Chambers’ thoughtful and thorough biography of Tom Burrell makes an important contribution to African American business history."—Robert E. Weems, Jr., author of The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago: Anthony Overton and the Building of a Financial Empire

“Jason P. Chambers’s thoughtful and thorough biography of Tom Burrell makes an important contribution to African American business history.”—Robert E. Weems, Jr., author of The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago: Anthony Overton and the Building of a Financial Empire

From the Publisher