This ad creative steers brands through difficult conversations about race and social justice.
(According to Fast Company - I’m also really good at running at 400+ person company, reducing attrition, boosting creative craft, winning awards, pushing clients and 3,450 other things but hey, I’m good at culture too!)
Shannon Washington has become a go-to creative mind for corporate brands that want to weave no-nonsense, inclusive messaging into their campaigns. Washington, who was promoted last year to lead creative in the New York office of the digitally savvy ad agency R/GA, has since won awards for a Sephora campaign that declares “Black Beauty is Beauty,” and her work on Uber’s “Vaccinate the Block,” a Spike Lee-directed ad that offered free rides to vaccine sites for people in underserved neighborhoods. (R/GA reportedly generated $400 million in revenue in 2021.)
Underlying all of Washington’s work is her desire to distill complicated conversations about race and gender and commerce into tangible, memorable insights. For Sephora, for example, she and her team homed in on the revelation that when users search on Google for the phrase “Black beauty,” the top result is frequently a picture of a horse—a fact that never failed to provoke a reaction once she called it to anyone’s attention.
Doing this kind of work is difficult, says Washington, who joined R/GA in 2020 after stints at Deutsch and Droga5. “Uber came to us wanting to do one thing, and we just had to push them in a different direction,” she notes. “Same thing with Sephora.”