Grey Agency Changes Name To Honor Jewish Heritage

In an industry filled with companies named after their founders (like Ogilvy and Leo Burnett), the founders of Grey Advertising made a different choice 100 years ago. They worried that their Jewish sounding names might scare off potential clients, so they picked something safely anonymous instead.

To show how times have changed, and to promote diversity in an industry that often desperately needs it, the agency is renaming itself Valenstein & Fatt for the next 100 days and launching a host of new diversity programs to prove this is more than a short-lived marketing stunt.

That last part is the part that matters. Reclaiming the names is a good story, and it would have been an easy one to tell and then quietly drop. Attaching real programs to it is what turns a piece of agency history into something more than a nice anniversary press release.