Multicultural marketing’s evolution—Jo and Jordan Muse on the state of DE&I efforts

Advertising can certainly be a family affair. Just look at father-and-son ad leaders Jo and Jordan Muse. 

Thanksgiving dinners at the Muse house, unsurprisingly, often center around the ad business. An industry visionary, Jo Muse was at the forefront of multicultural marketing, and his son Jordan is also prioritizing building a culture of inclusion as managing director and head of accounts at The Martin Agency. 

“I tried to, early in my career, somewhat keep it a secret,” Jordan Muse said about his father being Jo Muse. “I didn’t try to tell everyone and was sort of a little bit embarrassed when people found out. As I've gotten older and started to create my own career, you get more comfortable with it, and I started to embrace it more, because it is rare to have a relationship like this in this business and to have a father who is a legend.”  

Jo Muse founded his agency, Muse Cordero Chen, in 1987 as a result of a need for brands to develop marketing strategies that were led by consumer insights and nuances to make them relevant across different cultures. And it was this thinking that led to the total market approach to advertising. 

It’s a concept that continues to be debated in the industry as brands and agencies navigate putting inclusive and diverse marketing at the forefront of their strategies. A decade ago when Jo Muse’s first clients talked about the total market, “they were clear that it was a multicultural approach to general marketing and they made it also clear that in order to do total marketing properly overall they had to have expertise from the African American audience, expertise teaming with the Hispanic and Asian audiences, and that was a good symbol of inclusion,” he said. “I think the problem has been, the knee-jerk reaction from the generalists regarding total marketing is them being able to do it and it is not as easy to propagate, develop and stimulate total behavior and experience at the consumer-product level without a multicultural staff designed to do that work…Total marketing is a good concept, it hasn’t fully been achieved.” 

Jo Muse does applaud the changes that have taken place in the ad industry since he struggled 20 years ago to have “Black and brown creative people be accepted in the halls of general market agencies, particularly the global leaders.” 

Where growth still needs to happen as it pertains to diversity, he said, is in account management. 

It's an area where Jordan Muse, whose clients include DoorDash, Google and Amazon, takes a people-first approach to ensure greater collaboration and understanding. 

Jordan Muse is concerned that DE&I is only a trend and has become more of a “personal promotion” in the industry or a PR-push that doesn’t have much action behind it. To combat this, Jo Muse points to a need for inclusion to be a matter of performance. 

Both Jo and Jordan are being honored this year by the American Advertising Federation. Jo Muse is in the Advertising Hall of Fame, while Jordan is being inducted into the Hall of Achievement, an honor for those under the age of 40.  

Jo and Jordan Muse join Ad Age’s Marketer’s Brief podcast to discuss the evolution of multicultural marketing, state of DE&I initiatives and predictions for Web3 marketing.