By Josh Loebner
What drew you to a career in advertising? My path to advertising was winding to say the least. Quite literally, what guided me into a career as a brand strategist was a lack of focus: my visual disability. I’m blind in one eye and visually impaired in the other. Early on, I was on track to become a forest ranger, and had some great misadventures, including getting lost deep in the forests of New Zealand and living in a cabin high in the Rockies. But because of my poor vision I didn’t drive, and that limited my forestry career options.
I needed to be working at a desk job in a large city with good public transportation. In between careers, I visited New York and had one of my life’s great a-ha moments, discussing my options over dinner with a family friend who, at the time, was general manager at Cohn and Wolfe. She enlightened me to how my potential and passion would be better suited to brand planning. While my disability guided me, my adaptability, curiosity, love for conversation and uncanny ability to recall details—the headlines and visual style of decades-old and up-to-the-minute campaigns—continue to draw me into this amazing and ever-evolving industry.
Where do advertisers miss the mark when it comes to representing disability (when they do feature it, at all)? Unless it’s a key part of a brand or campaign concept, skin color, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference or disability usually doesn’t (and shouldn’t) play a feature role. My recommendation is to be inclusive from a real-world situation, leaving the focus off the disability itself to move the messaging and creative towards that person’s typical interaction with the brand.
Many advertisers have started crafting societal commentary and immersive stories that allow customers to interact, share and be a part of larger cultural movements. Comcast’s Oscar spot for its talking TV guide featured a blind girl, and it invited viewers to consider a different perspective on everyone embracing entertainment, no matter one’s ability.
How have you seen the effects of your advocacy for the inclusion of people with disabilities and recognition as a minority? We’re still at the early stages of the conversation. Advocacy is a relatively new topic for the ad industry. For example, just this past November, the Association of National Advertisers introduced a new award category to honor outstanding work in the disability sector. The Multicultural Excellence Award in the People with Disabilities category is the first of its kind in the industry.
My blog, advertisinganddisability.com, has hopefully allowed the conversation to grow. I’ve been able to reach out to and connect with creative directors, journalists and key decision-makers in the industry, including president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies Nancy Hill, and 4A’s president Jim Datri. Next up, I’ll be leading a panel discussion on advertising and disability at this fall’s Advertising Week in New York City.
What would you be doing if you weren’t in advertising? I’d be teaching advertising. Communication, art and design is just part of my DNA, and even if I wasn’t directly in advertising, somehow I’d always be close to it. And my lovely wife is an art director, so our conversations always include branding banter.
If you could choose any product to create an ad for, what would it be? Why? I’m a sucker for challenger brands... and a good craft bourbon. Distilleries are popping up everywhere, from the backwoods to Brooklyn, and the distillers’ stories, branding, bottles, label designs and liquors are making inroads against the big conglomerates. I’d love to be a part of the craft distillery and bourbon renaissance. In the meantime, we’ve got what we call bourbon Fridays at Designsensory, where someone brings a new bottle into the office and we raise our glasses to the week’s victories.
What trends in advertising are you most interested in and why? As a brand strategist, one of my greatest strengths is to literally and figuratively see things differently. And while I’m interested in the rise of marketing automation and the greater convergence and integration of public relations and advertising, I’m most excited about the shift taking place with greater inclusion of people with disabilities into advertising.
What skills do young creatives need to succeed in advertising today? Once you go from college to career, your three best assets are to think, create and speak. But speaking well amongst colleagues, clients and the community is, I believe, one of the most important skills for young creatives to master. Being able to defend a critique, whether from your creative director or client, speak in front of an audience or have casual conversations with co-workers and while networking creates opportunities to learn, grow and make some friends along the way.
I needed to be working at a desk job in a large city with good public transportation. In between careers, I visited New York and had one of my life’s great a-ha moments, discussing my options over dinner with a family friend who, at the time, was general manager at Cohn and Wolfe. She enlightened me to how my potential and passion would be better suited to brand planning. While my disability guided me, my adaptability, curiosity, love for conversation and uncanny ability to recall details—the headlines and visual style of decades-old and up-to-the-minute campaigns—continue to draw me into this amazing and ever-evolving industry.
Where do advertisers miss the mark when it comes to representing disability (when they do feature it, at all)? Unless it’s a key part of a brand or campaign concept, skin color, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference or disability usually doesn’t (and shouldn’t) play a feature role. My recommendation is to be inclusive from a real-world situation, leaving the focus off the disability itself to move the messaging and creative towards that person’s typical interaction with the brand.
Many advertisers have started crafting societal commentary and immersive stories that allow customers to interact, share and be a part of larger cultural movements. Comcast’s Oscar spot for its talking TV guide featured a blind girl, and it invited viewers to consider a different perspective on everyone embracing entertainment, no matter one’s ability.
How have you seen the effects of your advocacy for the inclusion of people with disabilities and recognition as a minority? We’re still at the early stages of the conversation. Advocacy is a relatively new topic for the ad industry. For example, just this past November, the Association of National Advertisers introduced a new award category to honor outstanding work in the disability sector. The Multicultural Excellence Award in the People with Disabilities category is the first of its kind in the industry.
My blog, advertisinganddisability.com, has hopefully allowed the conversation to grow. I’ve been able to reach out to and connect with creative directors, journalists and key decision-makers in the industry, including president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies Nancy Hill, and 4A’s president Jim Datri. Next up, I’ll be leading a panel discussion on advertising and disability at this fall’s Advertising Week in New York City.
What would you be doing if you weren’t in advertising? I’d be teaching advertising. Communication, art and design is just part of my DNA, and even if I wasn’t directly in advertising, somehow I’d always be close to it. And my lovely wife is an art director, so our conversations always include branding banter.
If you could choose any product to create an ad for, what would it be? Why? I’m a sucker for challenger brands... and a good craft bourbon. Distilleries are popping up everywhere, from the backwoods to Brooklyn, and the distillers’ stories, branding, bottles, label designs and liquors are making inroads against the big conglomerates. I’d love to be a part of the craft distillery and bourbon renaissance. In the meantime, we’ve got what we call bourbon Fridays at Designsensory, where someone brings a new bottle into the office and we raise our glasses to the week’s victories.
What trends in advertising are you most interested in and why? As a brand strategist, one of my greatest strengths is to literally and figuratively see things differently. And while I’m interested in the rise of marketing automation and the greater convergence and integration of public relations and advertising, I’m most excited about the shift taking place with greater inclusion of people with disabilities into advertising.
What skills do young creatives need to succeed in advertising today? Once you go from college to career, your three best assets are to think, create and speak. But speaking well amongst colleagues, clients and the community is, I believe, one of the most important skills for young creatives to master. Being able to defend a critique, whether from your creative director or client, speak in front of an audience or have casual conversations with co-workers and while networking creates opportunities to learn, grow and make some friends along the way.
Josh Loebner is a brand strategist for the full-service advertising agency Designsensory located in Knoxville, Tennessee. Loebner’s role is to unify core concept ideas, guide creative direction through creative briefs, and connect the dots with integrated marketing plans for clients including the Tennessee Department of Economic & Community Development, Boy Scouts of America, PetSafe, Tennessee Tech University, and the University of Tennessee Medical Center. He is also adjunct faculty at King University, teaching Persuasion and Rhetoric, Visual Rhetoric, Ethics in Communication, and other upper-level courses. Loebner serves as the 2015-2016 Mosaic Initiative Chair for diversity and inclusion for the American Advertising Federation in District 7.
