Advertising firm succeeds by building a diverse staff

Stephen Rosa never liked the traditional advertising approach, particularly the type he had seen while working on the client side.

“I didn’t like the old way, where it was all about sexy, glamorous ads,” he said. “And I didn’t like the way agencies were treating their clients.”

So in 1989, when he was only 25, he started Providence-based Advertising Ventures Inc. and set out to do things the way he believes they should be done.

Rosa’s company approaches advertising differently – in part, by paying extra attention to creating a diverse staff.

“We believe that diversity breeds great creativity,” he said. “If you hire all the same types of people, with the same backgrounds, who are living the same lives, your focus becomes very narrow, and all of the work and all of the messages start to look the same.”

At Advertising Ventures, the 30 staff members represent 19 ethnicities and cultures. Rosa himself adds to that diversity: he is Portuguese-American, which has earned the company its designation as a state-certified Minority Business Enterprise.

“We speak Spanish, Portuguese, Estonian, Russian, Italian, French and English,” he said. Though Rosa said the firm does not actively promote its MBE designation, in that context, Advertising Ventures has gained acclaim. DiversityBusiness.com, a multicultural business Web site, this year named Advertising Ventures one of the top 100 “diversity-owned businesses.” The site describes the list as including “the nation’s top multicultural earners,” who “challenge the long-held notion that diversity-owned businesses are small or insignificant.”

Rosa said he believes his company has a unique outlook.

“We don’t really promote the fact we are an MBE, because we want to be hired because we’re the best,” he said. “But diversity brings creativity, and the more ways you look at a problem, the more ways you can find to solve a problem.”

He said this is particularly helpful in multicultural marketing, which is headed by Cuban-American Alexis Gorriaran. Unlike many advertising agencies, which create “cookie-cutter” promotions, Rosa said, Advertising Ventures tries to truly understand a company’s target audience.

“With the multicultural approach, we know that no two customers are the same,” he said. A third-generation Cuban-American, for example, may see things very differently from a first-generation Cuban immigrant.

“It’s more than just translating stuff,” he added, “because they may speak the same language but may think very differently. So it’s about getting out there and understanding your world.”

He said his staff does that by working with clients to find out who they are trying to reach, then figuring out the best way to do that.

“A big problem is, people assume their customers are just like them and see the world as they do,” Rosa said. “But we ask them, ‘Who are the customers you need to build a relationship with?’ ”

But although the firm has had success with multicultural marketing, he said, he doesn’t believe it has a particular niche. If Advertising Ventures does have a specialty, it is choosing clients who share the team’s values, Rosa said.

“We never wanted to niche ourselves, because what we learn in one [field] helps inspire great thinking in another,” he said. “But we look for companies that want to be leaders, that want to be the best with what they do. These companies tend to treat their employees and their customers better than others, and that’s what we tend to look for.”