Myron Jackson leads The Design Group from its offices high above downtown Little Rock in the Regions Center.
When Myron Jackson saw images of white supremacists marching last month in Charlottesville, Virginia, he noticed more than swastikas, Dixie flags and hatred. As much as he dislikes putting it so bluntly, he also spotted opportunity.
As CEO of the Design Group, a multicultural communications firm in Little Rock with more than a dozen employees and $5 million a year in revenue, Jackson is “a 40-something African-American ad guy who makes a living telling stories.” And in his business, racially charged chaos offers an opening, he said.
“When I’m sitting in a boardroom with C-level executives, I’m telling them they’re missing out by not seeking certain markets — and we don’t shy away from it, those are black and brown markets,” said Jackson. “These folks get a dose of reality when they turn on the news and see people who look like them beating people who don’t share the same ideology. It’s a wake-up call, and I don’t tell them that to establish civic engagement or to encourage social responsibility, though that is coupled in my message. I appeal to profit; I want them to make money, and I want to make money, so I appeal to the bottom line.”
He tells executives that they can be good corporate citizens while making a handsome profit. “It’s good business married to goodwill,” Jackson said. “We live to help brands do that every day.
“It’s 2017, and America is becoming browner and browner and browner. We want these executives to look in terms of their legacy. We ask if they want to go down in history for missing this shift in population on their watch.”
As he spoke at the head of a vast table in the Design Group’s gleaming conference room on the 18th floor of the Regions Center, Jackson recalled being raised in hardscrabble east Little Rock by a strict and protective grandmother who once cleaned downtown office spaces just like it. He takes pride in noting the Design Group’s 10 years of success — it just celebrated the anniversary — particularly since the economy was heading into a tailspin when he and partner Telly Noel launched the firm in 2007.
“People said you’ve got to be absolutely nuts,” Jackson remembered. “They said the last thing Arkansas needs is another ad agency. But for us, it was an understanding that when there’s blood on the street, buy property.
“Brands were struggling, and we made the point that when companies were spending 100 percent of their advertising dollars to reach the general market, i.e. white people, in a town like Little Rock, that meant tearing a dollar bill in half and throwing half away. In Little Rock, white consumers make up maybe 50 percent of the marketplace.”
No agency can deliver top results without reaching African-American and Hispanic consumer segments, he said. “We built our firm to truly embrace the idea of looking for opportunity as it exists in multiple cultures.”
And the approach has worked. In 2009, the Little Rock Regional Chamber recognized the company as Minority Business of the Year, and Jackson himself was featured in Arkansas Business’ 40 Under 40 in 2011. Today, the agency is growing and has made several recent hires, including Jo Longley as a marketing account executive and Syd Hayman, an Arkansas native, as a public relations account executive just 10 days ago.
“We came into the market to fill a void,” Jackson says. “Every day you run into people from all walks of life, and no firm can speak to that total market if you don’t have diverse representation around the decision-making table. We’re able to deliver that, because we have an excellent and diverse team.”
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