From Encyclopedia.com:

“A major figure in American marketing and advertising, Thomas Burrell heads a leading marketing communications firm that provides advertising, public relations, consumer promotions, and direct marketing services for many top American companies. In 1996 Black Enterprise ranked Burrell Communications as sixteenth on its annual listing of the Top 100 Black Businesses in the United States, and as of 1998 his company was generating an estimated $ 168 million in annual billings and employing 162 people in offices in Chicago, New York, and Atlanta. Among the companies Burrell has provided, marketing campaigns for are Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Proctor & Gamble, Ford, Pillsbury, and many more. During his career he has also helped spark the growth of numerous start-up companies and played leadership roles in organizations such as the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA).”

“Burrell made his name in advertising by creating one of the first agencies to specialize in niche marketing—in his case, the targeting of ads and commercials to black audiences. As Laurence Minsky and Emily Thornton Calvo wrote in How to Succeed in Advertising When All You Have Is Talent, “Burrell was one of the first to bring big agency experience and sophisticated tactics to segmented marketing.” Soon after opening his own shop in 1971, Burrell initiated a virtual revolution in advertising for African Americans by casting them in roles that had previously been off limits to them. “We were accustomed to seeing ourselves in the mass media as either exaggerated, acceptable exceptions to the rule, or as welfare recipients, criminals, and the downtrodden,” said Burrell in How to Succeed.“The mass media was missing the whole group of blacks who lived normal lives and had emotional, poignant kinds of events happening to them.” His ability to reach black audiences has been heralded by many clients over the years. “Tom has an incredible sense of marketing, as well as incredible sensitivity to the African-American culture,”noted David Green, a marketing executive at McDonalds Corporation, in a 1996 issue of Advertising Age.”