Blackboard: Just for awards

It’s 2021 and the ad industry still lacks racial diversity. Most leading agency networks don’t have a black CCO, let alone black ECDs. On top of that, awards juries don’t have much black representation either. Blackboard’s objective is to help change that. Our insight is that the people who have the power to make a difference are awards judges, because they’re the creative leaders who can inspire, hire and groom the next generation of diverse talent for their respective agencies. So we decided to run an ad purely just to enter it into awards. Which allowed us to talk directly to our audience. And for the first time, we genuinely don’t care if the ad never wins. We hope diversity will.