I'm so excited, nervous, honoured, scared, proud, overwhelmed and happy...
All I can say is:
Dream big. Work hard. Smile a lot.
You can't go wrong.
Below is some of the press leading up to the event. (In the past 2 weeks I've used 59,092 exclamation marks and teared up 2093 times.)
ADWEEK AdColor Feature
Neisha Tweed
Senior Copywriter | Publicis USA
A native of St. Kitts in the Caribbean, Neisha Tweed came to America to help rewrite the book on how to connect with multi cultural audiences.
“We are responsible for the messages we send,” says the senior copywriter for Publicis. “Advertising has the power to change America, and we have to start by changing advertising.”
Her passion for the industry came when Tweed saw what a well-crafted campaign could do. “The ‘milk’ campaign was the first thing that attracted me to advertising,” the 29-year-old says. “As a vegetarian, I’m not a fan of milk, but I am impressed by the power of that campaign…so I thought ‘Maybe I can actually inspire people to do good things.’”
Using her strong writing skills and her infectious personality, she has found mentors that helped further her career. A comment she wrote on R/GA executive creative director George Tannenbaum’s blog helped get her a job. “He didn’t know me, but he liked what I wrote and how I expressed it. He sent my book out to a bunch of contacts and that’s how I wound up at Ogilvy.”
Now Tweed is reaching back into the industry. She runs a blog—Baby Food for Creatives—that offers advice and inspiration for junior creatives and students. She teaches at Miami Ad School and has been on panels about blacks in the ad industry. “Ads should look more like America—colorful,” she says.
As hard as she works to attain that goal, she thinks the industry should work harder to keep pace.
“Agencies need to make a stronger commitment to educate multicultural students, recruit multicultural candidates, maintain a culture of inclusion and make sure they retain and advance multicultural employees—not because they’re multicultural, but because they have valid points of view.”
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ADCOLOR YP Conversations: What is ADCOLOR?
Speakers:
Tiffany Edwards (Rising Star 2010)
Tiffany Hardin
Julius Dunn
Kenji Summers (Rising Star 2011)
Andy Deaza
Haywood Watkins
Neisha Tweed (Rising Star 2012)
