Authorship Is Not Optional

A large professional services firm invited me to pitch a project aimed at Gen Z students at HBCUs (Historically Black College and Universities).

The intent was clear. The budget was significant. The brief was aligned with the business.

The room however, was not aligned at all.

I am not Gen Z.
I am not Black.
I did not attend an HBCU.

Neither did anyone on the client team.

We were a room of professionals designing a narrative for a culture none of us belonged to.

The brief made sense on paper.
But it was not authored from inside the audience.

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The problem was not effort. It was authorship.

Every idea would be a translation of someone else’s reality.
A corporate viewpoint of a clearly distinct demographic.

Any creative chosen by this group would carry too much distance from the audience to be effective.

Research was present.
Intent was present.
Perspective was not.

The work could not be about a community. It had to be created with one.

That difference is structural.

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I chose to change the creative architecture.

I brought in a young Black female director.

She had never done corporate work.
She had little agency experience.
She did not speak the language of decks or stakeholder process.

She did speak the emotional logic of the audience.

I placed her as the creative lead.
I positioned myself as translator between her perspective and the corporate decision system.

She shaped the framing.
She shaped the tone.
She shaped the emotional center.

I shaped the structure that allowed her voice to survive the room.

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The pitch shifted.

It stopped sounding like a brand addressing youth culture.
It started sounding like a conversation inside youth culture.

The work became sharper.
The tone became calmer.
The logic aligned with the audience reality.

It clarified many things for the client team.

They could feel the difference between representation and participation.
They left more educated about that demographic than they had ever been.

As expected, we lost the pitch.

The answer was correct.
The room receiving it was not structurally positioned to recognize why,
or capable of selling it beyond themselves to key stakeholders.

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You cannot author a story about a community you refuse to include in authorship.

Cultural proximity is not a creative preference.

It is a credibility requirement.

The failure was not messaging. It was positioning.

The story was not wrong.

The immediate audience (the gatekeepers) were misaligned.

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If your audience does not exist inside your creative process, your work will always feel translated.

Not offensive. Not broken. Just slightly false.

If the audience isn’t in the authorship, it isn’t in the work.
Not as validation.
As architecture.

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People do not receive your message.

They receive a version filtered through who they believe you are.

And communities can feel when a story is being told about them instead of with them.

As you were, MrMcK.