Why A Major Advertising Agency Just Renamed Itself In Order To Combat Hate

Yesterday, the London arm of global advertising agency, Grey, which has a presence in 96 countries, announced that for the next 100 days it will be known as Valenstein & Fatt – in a powerful statement “against intolerance and prejudice.”

Valenstein & Fatt is named after the firm’s original founders, Lawrence Valenstein and Arthur Fatt, who launched the original Grey advertising agency in New York a century ago. Both were Jewish, and feared that with anti-Semitism rampant in America’s early 20th-Century corporate culture, using their own names in the name of their business (as was common in their industry) would doom it to failure; as a result, they chose something safe – the color of their office’s wallpaper – and the now globally-known “Grey” was born.

For more information, or to read the rest of this story, please see my article in Inc., Why A Major Advertising Agency Just Renamed Itself In Order To Combat Hate.