Authenticity and research fuel successful brand partnerships — and Aaron Walton recognized this long before it became the norm.
At AFROTECH™ 2024, Walton, CEO and founder of award-winning ad agency Walton Isaacson, joined Shardé Marchewski, Wayfair‘s Head of Supplier Diversity, for a conversation on how aligning values and culture with the right celebrity can elevate storytelling and impact consumers.
The session offered creatives a behind-the-scenes look at major brand collaborations and practical strategies for securing and executing high-impact campaigns.
Walton’s brand story began after graduating from Babson College in 1983. With a passion for advertising, he joined the Pepsi-Cola Company as a research analyst, learning how to tell stories with data before being promoted into brand marketing, marking the start of a game-changing career.
“The truth is everything that we do now, whether it is an event or some type of communication, starts with looking at what the business opportunity is, which starts with looking at what the data tells us,” Walton said. “And then we use that to inform the strategy, to inform where we want to go, how we want to approach a particular challenge.”
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For professionals seeking to infuse more culture and diversity into their brands and creators looking to secure corporate partnerships, Walton offered a simple yet effective mantra: “Collide, connect, then create,” emphasizing the importance of merging ideas that inspire creativity and curiosity.
“And if you do it the right way when you bring in different types of people with different backgrounds, you get out of this group think, you get out of these stereotypic ideas that don’t happen by just talking to the same people over and over and over again,” Walton said at AFROTECH™ 2024.
Walton referenced the dialectic method from German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel — the concept that every idea has an equal and opposite, and when they collide, something stronger emerges. It’s the same lens he applies to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB): bringing together people of different backgrounds creates collisions that lead to innovative solutions.
At a time when DEI efforts face growing pushback, Walton reminded the audience that it’s a framework with the power to move a business forward.
If a brand wants to reach LGBTQ+ or Asian audiences, for example, it’s essential to have people from those communities in the building, he said.
Walton also emphasized looking internally: “…Why do they want to do it? Are you doing it? Are you just putting out a statement?” he said, pointing to the wave of corporate responses after the fatal shootings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor when many companies made promises to do better before admitting their failure to reflect and respect the communities they served.
“So I would say to some of these folks, if, in fact, this really is meaningful, and then you have to start looking internally at what you’re doing before you can start making statements or before you can start going out and saying, this is what you want to do,” Walton said.
He added that brands must commit adequate resources, including budget and research, to their initiatives. Without sufficient investment, efforts are likely to fail. Full commitment is essential for success.
If a brand collaboration falls short, Walton asserts that mistakes are part of the process. Still, constant evaluation and a commitment to improvement are key, and honesty is the best policy.
“I always say, just be real about it,” Walton said. “If you try to fake it, if you try to make up something, consumers are much smarter than we give them credit for. They can sniff out a fake, [and] they can understand, but we also make mistakes. And so it’s okay to say, you know what? We screwed up. We should have asked this question. … We should have dug a little bit deeper, and we will do better. So I always lean on the side of being upfront [and] learning from it.”
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