Ed Boyd, ad man who fought black stereotypes, dies

I just came across this article, although it is a week old I thought it's worth noting... as rare as this kind of person is, in advertising these days.


Ed Boyd, Pepsi ad man who fought black stereotypes, dies in LA
May 6, 2007 8:26 AM

LOS ANGELES (Map, News) - Edward F. Boyd, a former Pepsi ad man who broke color barriers with one of the first corporate marketing campaigns to portray blacks in a positive light, has died. He was 92.

Boyd died April 30 at Century City Doctors Hospital in Los Angeles from complications of a stroke he suffered in March, the Los Angeles Times reported.

He was working at the National Urban League in New York City in 1947 when Pepsi hired him and a team of educated black salesmen to help the company drives sales among blacks.

As an assistant sales manager who led the group, Boyd created a marketing campaign that showed blacks as respectable, middle-class consumers.

One store display, for example, pictured a smiling mother holding a six-pack of Pepsi-Cola as her handsome, young son reached for a bottle. There also were series that profiled 20 black achievers and featured top students at black universities drinking Pepsi.

The promotions differed sharply from the insulting images of mammies and pickaninnies in many ads at the time.

"We'd been caricatured and stereotyped," Boyd said. "The advertisement represented us as normal Americans."

Boyd and his team visited black colleges, churches and markets throughout the country to promote Pepsi, enduring the daily injustices of racism along the way.

The group rode on segregated trains and was refused service at white-owned hotels. Insults from some colleagues at Pepsi weren't uncommon.

"Jackie Robinson may have made more headlines, but what Ed did - integrating the managerial ranks of corporate America - was equally groundbreaking," Donald M. Kendall, retired chairman and chief executive of PepsiCo, said in a statement.

Born in 1914 in Riverside, Boyd graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles. A trained singer and dancer, he had minor movie roles after college. He worked for the Screen Actors Guild, then government housing programs before joining the National Urban League in New York.

After Pepsi CEO Walter S. Mack left in 1950, company support for Boyd's unit waned. Boyd went on to private and public jobs, including work for an international aid agency, and later raised alpacas in New York.

Looking back, he marveled that the CEO of PepsiCo was now Indra Nooyi, a woman born in India, according to an interview with a Wall Street Journal editor who wrote "The Real Pepsi Challenge: The Inspirational Story of Breaking the Color Barrier in American Business."

"When I think of how the odds were against us, I never would have thought a woman could take Mack's place," Boyd said, "and even less that a person of color could."

Boyd is survived by his wife, three sons and daughter.

 

May he rest in peace !!!

 

Thanks for the obit. He had made Pepsi a fave bottler to Blacks for more than 60 years,twenty years earlier than Coke.