Arts & Culture ‘The Man from Essence’ Edward Lewis pens the tail of his involvement in the creation of the Essence brand.
November 27, 2014
By Troy Tieuel
On Saturday, November 22, the Post & Beam Restaurant, located at the Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Plaza, played host to yet another historic gathering in the African-American community with the book signing of Essence Magazine’s founder, Edward Lewis’ latest publication, ‘The Man from Essence.’
Who would have thought that marketing products to black women would be profitable? To say that today, in 2014, it seems a no brainer, almost silly, that a company would not consider the African-American female in their marketing strategies. Prior to Essence Magazine, there was little to no advertising to the African-American female market. The terms “universal appeal” and “multicultural marketing” were just dream concepts spoken about at the bar after work, by those who would never consider spending hard earned marketing budgets on advertising to the African-American female, even if their products were heavily consumed by them.
In 1968, Edward Lewis, along with three other African-American businessmen, decided to take on Madison Avenues biased stance on marketing. Their intention was to convince them that the African-American female had buying power that, according to Lewis, was “a force to be recognized, reckoned with, and valued.”
That hard-fought battle paved the way for what has come to be known as Essence Magazine. Out of that illustrious and legendary group of men only Lewis remained in 2005 as “The Last Man Standing”, as he put it, at the table brokering the deal with Time warner, the nation’s largest publisher, to sell arguably the most successful African-American women’s magazine. The publication and its subsidiaries sold for the unbelievable sum of $80 million for the controlling half of the business that Time Inc. already had 49 percent ownership of.
When asked about what he went through to start the magazine, Lewis said, “We [the founding partners of Essence Magazine] didn’t know each other. We were four partners and we came at a time where, in 1968, King had been killed, Kennedy had been killed, and we wanted to get into our own business to make a difference, and starting a magazine for black women, because the other magazines were not displaying black women in their images. So, we felt that this was a very important opportunity to celebrate, and make sure that black women had their own voice by having a magazine to call their own.”
In early 2001, Lewis solidified a partnership with Time Inc., but insisted on retaining the controlling shares of the business. The Essence brand, at that time, contained several magazines, a book publishing company and a very successful music festival.
The sale had garnered much criticism among the remaining black publishers and journalists. Among the contributors to the wave of comments were, at the positive end, Bob Johnson, former owner of Black Entertainment Television, who sold his network to Viacom for nearly $3 billion in 2000. Johnson stated, "At the end of the day, they will sell to the highest bidder," [who will likely be white.] "It's just a question of when."
Earl Graves, owner of Graves Publications and Black Enterprise Magazine said in an interview on BET’s Nightly News, "It is unfortunate, however, there wasn't an open bidding process in which black entrepreneurs could have made an offer for the company and possibly preserve Essence as a black-owned business and institution.”
Another business executive affected by Lewis and his visionary leadership was Leila Winick, Executive Vice President of U.S. Multicultural Group, a Los Angeles advertising company. Winick credits her success to working alongside Lewis when he trail blazed the Essence Brand and helped define new markets to underserviced people like Asians, Hispanics and African-Americans.
“I’ve been in multicultural advertising for thirty years,” said Winick, “and when we started, it was so difficult to target African-Americans, Asians, and Hispanics. People thought, ‘Oh those markets will go away’, and then the fortune 500 companies started to notice the effect of the market and the buying power of those three segments were able to garner. So, Mr. Lewis himself went from agency to agency, fortune 500 to fortune 500 company telling them how important it was for them to invest in the African-American market. In those days, 30 years ago, nobody did. Everybody thought that the multicultural group would go away, but it never did.”
According to proponents such as Winick, thanks to Lewis and others like him, advertisers are now able to take a “total market approach” to advertising their products and services to consumers as opposed to having ‘cultural specialists’ for each segment of the community.
In his book, ‘The Man from Essence,’ Lewis mentions the heavy “black tax” that African-American businesses must pay to remain in the good graces of the African-American community. This tax is “the kind of something that cannot be given if you want to stay in business.”
Despite this undeniable catch-22, Lewis and his partners continued to strive for equal representation for the African-American woman. To sum up his amazing career as a magazine publisher, Lewis wrote ‘The man from Essence,’ an autobiographical look into what it took to establish and run Essence magazine from its start in 1968 until its sale in 2005.
“I wanted to write this book, because I thought it was an important story to be told,” added Lewis, “about how four black men came together, back in 1968, to start a magazine to celebrate the beauty and intelligence of black women. It was a bold and revolutionary idea to try and change the perception of my community.”
Edward Lewis is a Senior Advisor for Solera Capital LLC, a capital investment company and Chairman of Latina Media Ventures LLC.
For more information on ‘The Man from Essence’ by Edward Lewis, go to http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Edward-Lewis