Page 27 - ABILITY Magazine - Best Practices Employment

During the recent Super Bowl, millions of viewers caught a Pepsi commercial, one that some say represents an historic first. The unusual ad fea- tured a silent, 60-second joke: Two guys drive to their friend Bob’s house to watch the big game. Once they get to his street, neither remembers his address. So they sit in the car arguing in sign language until one of them gets a clever idea and lays on the horn. One by one, the houses light up-except for Bob’s.
Clay Broussard, who plays Bob, also developed the commercial and has worked for PepsiCo in Dallas for 27 years. Though he is not deaf, the two actors who play his friends, Brian Dowling and Darren Therriault, are. They’re also Broussard’s coworkers and members of PepsiCo’s EnAble, an employee network for associates with different abilities and for caregivers. The three- year-old organization was founded to influence and pro- vide guidance to the company, which also owns Frito Lay, Gatorade, Tropicana and Quaker, so that people with different abilities were included at all levels. Now more than 300 PepsiCo associates strong, EnAble has chapters in New York, California, Ohio, Washington, Arizona, Florida and Texas.
Chet Cooper: How did you get involved with EnAble?
Clay Broussard: I have some familiarity with deaf cul- ture, so EnAble interested me; I joined to see what I could contribute. We have a real culture of diversity and inclusion among our various employee networks at Pepsi.
Cooper: How did you get familiar with the deaf culture?
Broussard: My wife and I attended a church where everything was entirely in sign language for seven or eight years. There was no voicing of anything at all. So that was a real immersion.
Cooper: How did you choose that particular church?
Broussard: In the congregation that we were part of at the time, there were a couple of deaf people and there was some interpreting. The deaf people became our friends and taught some of us sign language. As that group grew, there was enough people to form a new congregation where sermons could be held completely in sign language, and where the topics would be addressed directly in the native language rather than interpreted. Sign language interpreting is not a direct way of communicating with deaf people.
Cooper: In the new congregation, what was the percent- age of people who were deaf, and what was the percent- age of people, such as yourself and your wife?
Broussard: We talked about keeping track, but con- sciously decided not to because we figured we’re not counting how many black people or white people are
here, so why would we count the number of deaf vs. hearing? I’m one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and we sup- port all kinds of languages. So it was an outgrowth of our work in that community in terms of education, and I would say there’s probably now a hundred or so congre- gations across the U.S. that are conducted entirely in sign language.
Cooper: You say “now.” Do you think you were one of the first?
Broussard: I think we were among the first 40.
Cooper: So did that experience draw you into what was going on within your work?
Broussard: What happened was a local chapter of EnAble formed here in Dallas, and I thought: This sounds pretty cool. As I have some experience with this aspect of diversity, why don’t I see what I can con- tribute? I joined and started listening to the goals and missions that EnAble had locally. You may not have heard this, but EnAble wants PepsiCo to be the brand of choice and the employer of choice among people with different abilities. And so we talked about objectives, such as accommodation and acceptability, which foster the conditions for being an employer of choice.
Becoming the brand of choice is more esoteric for peo- ple. How do you get to that? You can do it through tra- ditional means, such as participating in Multiple Sclero- sis walks and activities such as that, but I thought: How can we bring it into marketing and advertising and real- ly demonstrate to the outside world what our culture is all about at PepsiCo? Because I’m familiar with the deaf culture, I thought: Let’s borrow a joke from it and tell it the PepsiCo way, featuring our products and our people and do it in a language that the rest of the world can get and find humorous.
Cooper: Did you run into any bottlenecks within the company? (Sorry)
Broussard: (laughs) As a soft drink company, we try to avoid bottlenecks. Fortunately, everybody from the top to the bottom of this organization who heard about the con- cept was intrigued by it. For some, it was a little esoteric, so we had to make a demo version. But once we got the demo finished, people could see it, and they got excited.
Cooper: It became tangible. So how did you make the demo?
Broussard: First I hired an artist to do a storyboard of the ad concept. We then took the storyboard and floated it past deaf employees inside PepsiCo to say, “What do you think of this? Is it right? Does it match the culture? How would it be received by both the deaf community and the hearing community?” This group remained on the project throughout as consultants.