You Need to Pop Someone in the Face with Truth: MOBE's Yvette Moyo on Racism in Advertising (VIDEO)
MOBE Symposium and its founder Yvette Moyo are being inducted into the AdvancingDiversity Hall of Honors during the industry’s Gen-Z Town Hall Meeting this Thursday. The event is part of AdvancingDiversity Week, being live streamed free at MediaVillage.com Monday-Wednesday 11 a.m - 3 p.m ET. All Gen-Z and early stage industry employees are encouraged to register free for Thursday’s Town Hall Zoom meeting. View the Legends & Leaders video conversation with Yvette Moyo here.
Yvette Moyo, founder of MOBE (Marketing Opportunities in Business and Entertainment) and the Real Men Cook Charities platform, acknowledges, as someone who's been at the forefront for 30 years of pushing the marketing community toward greater diversity at the senior executive ranks, that she's frustrated by the lack of budgets available for the educational and development tools required to advance the industry. "every once in a while, you need to pop somebody in the face with truth," she explains as she shares a history of leaders who have overtly stood in the path preventing Black executives to succeed. "It's shameful," she says. "It is absolutely shameful what corporate America does to Black corporate executives who come into their corporations from high level institutions and our historically Black colleges and universities and are at the top of their class no matter where they were educated, only to be 'less than.' 'Less than' from the day they hit the front door."
MOBE has created a series called Buried Alive, which is how Yvette refers to Black corporate executives "who are muzzled and buried. We have had to navigate being Black in America, which is the most creative thing you can do on the planet, I think. James Baldwin said "We have to put on the mask that we are accepted. We're Black people and we're accepted. And then when we take that mask off, the truth is we have been so undervalued, disrespected in the day-to-day marketplace and you can see it in corporate America. Now, there's scrambling to find those executives. People are getting promoted but not necessarily the people who fought the fight to get promoted. So, we always move forward in our platform with a sense of history, purpose and mission.
"You've got to know that history, the purpose has to be to get what we deserve, and the mission is to make sure that we are not undervalued and to own it. Own it!"
In my Legends & Leaders Conversation with Yvette, she lays out solutions and also shares a behind-the-scenes look into the Real Men Cook Charities work she's been doing for decades in Chicago to bring a better Father's Day and better life to Chicago's South Side.
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