Ava DuVernay might be the most generous director of her generation. She’s impossibly busy. Currently, she’s shooting, writing and editing her television series, Queen Sugar, which just had its Season 3 premiere late last month on OWN. Plus, she’s in preproduction for her Netflix mini-series, Central Park Five. And, oh yeah, she’s got another documentary in the works (though she’s not ready to talk about that one yet). Plus, she’s got a few other TV shows cooking—a pilot, Red Line, at CBS, and a comedy reportedly based on Colin Kaepernick’s high school years. There’s also an HBO movie, Battle of Versailles. And then, of course, she’ll helm DC Comics’ New Gods. Did we mention she’s just finished her first stint as a jury member for the Cannes Film Festival? It’s the kind of busy that would overwhelm most people, but even with her chaotic schedule DuVernay always seems to make time to prop up other creators, to inspire young minds, to say thank you and to give someone a kind word even if they haven’t been as kind to her.

It’s a Saturday in early May, and DuVernay is in New York, location scouting for Central Park Five. She’s just finished seeing a play (Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero) and that evening she’ll accept a Glaad Excellence in Media Award for intersectional advocacy. Walking back to her hotel room, as we chat on the phone, she is stopped by fans multiple times. She greets each one not with annoyance or arrogance, which could be understood given her schedule and acclaim, but with kindness. Even though she’s pulled the phone away from her face, so that she can take a moment to really listen to people’s stories, her voice carries and a “Thank you, sir” and an “Appreciate it” make it through.

Once back, she says: “What a privilege to hear people talk about your work—and that happens to me every day.”

Her generosity of spirit might come from her impeccable sense of place and time. She understands that her work—whether it’s commercials or a documentary film or even a sci-fi fantasy—has meaning beyond entertainment, whether representational or historical. While she’s scored many firsts—recently, with A Wrinkle in Time, DuVernay became the first black woman to direct a film with a $100 million budget; with her upcoming film for DC, New Gods, she’ll become the first black woman to direct a big-budget superhero film—DuVernay is more interested in the doors those firsts could open for others and the change they could bring about in the industry.

“I’m a black girl from Compton. I picked up a camera for the first time when I was 32 years old. I didn’t go to film school. I’d been a publicist for all of my 20s, I’d been working to amplify other people’s films,” says DuVernay. “In no world could I imagine doing what I’m doing now.”

Adweek caught up with DuVernay, Adweek’s Creative 100 cover star for 2018, to find out about her creative process, how her history as a publicist has informed her filmmaking and what she wants to tackle next.

Adweek: You’re currently working on a mini-series for Netflix, Central Park Five, about the five teenagers who were wrongfully accused and convicted of raping a woman in 1989. What are you trying to accomplish with that narrative?
Ava DuVernay: At the time, in 1989 when the events were occurring, the story was very one-sided. They never really had a voice, whether it be in the press or the court of law. Their voices were coerced and contorted. The goal with this is to give those boys and their families a voice as it relates to this 30-year tragic story of justice ripped apart and obscured. This story is so much about humanity against systems, little black and brown boys against the halls of power and how they lost 25 years [of their lives].

At the time, Donald Trump paid for full-page newspaper ads calling for the return of the death penalty. Will you deal with this in the mini-series?
They’ll be referenced. They are a part of the story. I don’t think they are a big part of the story. The story that I’m telling is about the effect of this whole process on the boys, but he was certainly a part of that process, so they will be dealt with, those ads.

Can you tell us a bit about your creative process in general? Does it differ between formats?
I enjoy a certain privilege of the time I work in to be able to zig-zag and move across formats. As little as even 10 years ago, you were either a film director or a television director, you were either a commercial director or a documentary director or a narrative director. It’s all storytelling. At the end of the day, we’re trying to tell the story and make it as compelling, vibrant and heart-expanding as possible.

Tell us about directing that Apple Music commercial where Mary J. Blige, Taraji P. Henson and Kerry Washington talk playlists and mixtapes? Do you want to do any more commercial directing work?
I was personally invited by Jimmy Iovine and Bozoma Saint John to collaborate on a trio of commercials with a trio of incredible black women. We shot it in a day and had an absolute ball. I continue to do commercial work when I can. Particularly long-form or special projects like this one. I really enjoy it.

Do you have a specific creative routine? A place you have to be? A drink you have to have?
No, I like to feel comfortable, so it’s important to me to curate the people who are around me. … A big, big part of the creative process is who you’re being creative with. Beyond that, I like candles. With a good candle and some good people, you can brew up some magic.

Is there any message or anything you like to say when you’re starting to bring that group together for the first day on set?
Usually, I talk about the audience and the people that we’re making this for. That film is forever. These films are living, breathing things. Our names are on them. I expect that we will all take that seriously and keep in mind the story that we’re telling, the people we’re telling it for and the reason why we’re telling it as we go.

How do you deal with a creative block?
I’m a big procrastinator. I’ve embraced that as being part of my process instead of resisting it and being down on myself about it. Sometimes a deadline or a ticking clock instigates something within me that a leisurely kind of a long time to do something does not. I find that there’s something in that when I interrogate it. The time that I’m spending that’s called procrastination, that’s seen as negative because you’re putting something off. I feel like that’s really an incubation period because you’re thinking about it deeply.

Do you think activism and creativity have become more intertwined?
No. The challenge with people is that we always think the world is only happening now. All of this that we’re experiencing has happened before. To say that creativity and activism is more prominent now is to disregard, oh my gosh, civil rights movement artists, artists of the Vietnam protest era, the Suffragette movement, Japanese internment, Native Americans, people who were enslaved. The intertwining of art and resistance [has been happening] even before people came to this country, before this country was born, and things that are happening in other countries much older and much more mature than ours, so I think it’s not happening now more than ever, it’s just evidence that it is always intertwined. Activism is inherently a creative endeavor—it takes a radical imagination to be an activist, to envision a world that is not there. It takes imagination and that’s not far from art.

You’ve never done a genre film like A Wrinkle in Time before. What was it like to make that transition creatively?
It’s definitely a different creative muscle. The most fun I’ve had making anything was making Wrinkle. To be able to expand the edges of your imagination, to think of world-building, costumes, makeup and hair and planet hopping and all of that stuff. And to do it for 12-year-olds helped me exercise my imagination in ways that are much different than constructing a documentary that’s foundational material for people to think about crime and justice.

How was it received?
It’s been beautiful to watch kids and families embrace a story that was tailor-made for them, particularly kids and families of color and biracial, multiracial families, families that have adopted children, families that are untraditional, kids who feel like they don’t fit in a box.

Some of the things I hear on A Wrinkle in Time, about bullying, mentorship, adoption, being biracial, about being a woman or a girl in science, fathers coming up talking about relationships with their daughters, ego, achievement—all the things Madeleine L’Engle’s book is about and why it’s endured for all these years. It’s been really, really, really special and different.

For three seasons on Queen Sugar you’ve hired all women directors, sometimes giving directors their first shot at TV. Why do you think that’s important?
I’ve just tried to make sure that I’m not the only person in a given room who looks like me. In 2008, I started a film collective called Array that focuses on the work of people of color and women of all kinds to distribute their films. We’ve distributed 18 films so far. We have a film we just released on May 1 called Jewel’s Catch One by a woman filmmaker, about a great woman protagonist. It’s a documentary and it’s fantastic. The idea is that we are correcting past errors and that if we have the opportunity to make sure there are more kinds of people invited to this table called Hollywood that we do what we can to make it so.

Is there anything you took from your years as a publicist, promoting films and the conversations about marketing a piece of creative, that you’ve brought into the process of creating your own narratives?
The only thing that I learned from being a publicist moving into being a filmmaker is that nothing is unpublicizable, nothing is unpromotable. Some filmmakers think they have to hire a certain person, cast a certain person, or creatives think they have to tailor something to an audience to get more eyeballs. I know that’s not the case because I’ve successfully publicized all kinds of films with big stars and with folks that no one knows. It’s about the story. It’s about its execution. It’s about its heart, about what it means to people when they engage with it. That knowledge gives me a freedom when I’m working on things not to feel like I have to put work in a box to satisfy marketing.

Do you have any advice for people who want to make something?
Creativity is a word that is bandied around a lot, but it’s really a magic. It’s a gift. It’s something that has to be guarded, protected and preserved. That desire to want to make something, to want to write something, to want to dance, to want to paint, to want to do whatever—everybody doesn’t have that. So, if you have that—everyone can’t make an ad. Everyone can’t look at a bottle of hairspray and know how to share it with people. All that creativity is a magic that is not permanent. It’s all transitory. It’s very fickle. It’s important for creative people to exercise it like a muscle and care for it like a great gift and not take it for granted, really cultivate it in yourself like a seed and give it the fertile ground to blossom.

You were part of the team working to get the City of Los Angeles to implement inclusion riders. How did that process go and what do you think that will do for the industry?
I was the person who went to the press conference. There’s a large group of people working to make sure the industry in Los Angeles is open to all of the people who live in Los Angeles. When we walk into production offices and sets, we should see crews that reflect the city that we live in. There’s a lot of people working on it and I’m happy to be one of them.

Is that something you would also say about Time’s Up?
Oh yeah. Tons of people working on that. Happy to stand shoulder to shoulder with a lot of remarkable women doing a lot of solid work in that direction.

What was it like to be a member of the Cannes Film Festival jury? This year seemed to have quite a bit of activism at the festival.
Being at Cannes as a juror for the main competition was an extraordinary and transformative experience for me. It was like fuel. The exchange of ideas. The enormous emotion of the filmmakers. The beauty of the films. The vibrancy of the international film community. It all created within me a sense of stronger purpose and greater peace. I just loved and drank in every moment of it.

Is there anything you want to tackle next?
I’m just happy I haven’t run out of ideas, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon. You’ve got to cultivate that seed of creativity, keep pushing and working. There’s not one kind of dream project that I pine for. My dream project is to have a long career, to be Agnès Varda, to be turning 90 and still making films, having fresh ideas and being activated by the work.

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Some brands do everything they can to avoid political controversy. Cards Against Humanity is not one of them.

Last November, the maker of the crude-yet-hilarious party game announced it was raising $2.2 million to buy a small plot of land on the U.S.-Mexican border to prevent a wall from being built on it, then dared the Trump administration to sue them over it.

This was not the first foray into national politics for the popular card game. In 2016 co-founder Max Temkin created a Super PAC called the Nuisance Committee, which purchased billboard ads written in Arabic saying, “Donald Trump, he can’t read this, but he is afraid of it.”

Before the election, the company created custom 15-card add-on packs for both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, asked fans to vote with their wallets for the candidate of their choice, and then donated all of the proceeds—more than $550,000—to Clinton’s campaign.

Taking a sharply pointed political stance is built into the DNA of the company, which was founded and is still owned by a squad of eight comedy-writing friends from the Chicago area.

“We don’t have investors, a board or shareholders,” says Temkin. “We’re accountable to ourselves. We get to choose our customers through what we do. And if there are some out there who aren’t happy that we stood up for the rights of immigrants and refugees, we’d rather they left us alone.”

Few brands have the freedom—or the chutzpah—Cards Against Humanity does. But nearly all are feeling the pressure to take stronger social, environmental and political stances, especially from the youngest consumers to flex their marketing might, Generation Z. How nimbly brands navigate that minefield is crucial to their future survival.

The new digital

The pressure to step up is driven in part by the rise of direct-to-consumer brands that see social activism as part of their primary mission. For example, with Warby Parker’s Buy a Pair, Give a Pair or Toms’ One for One shoe programs, people in developing nations receive a free pair of glasses or footwear every time someone makes a purchase.

But firms are also feeling the heat from social media-driven movements like #MeToo, #TimesUp and #BoycottNRA, which demand that brands pick a side—and do it quickly.

“Traditional brands can no longer sit on their hands and allow well-scripted corporate statements to shape who they are,” says Tripp Donnelly, CEO of digital reputation management firm REQ. “They have to be dynamic and understand they’re talking to multiple generations of people.”

The increase in brand social awareness has given rise to ad agencies that specialize in purpose-driven clients. One such agency, School in Boulder, Colo., operates with an ethos of #GiveaShit, continually working on campaigns that help fund projects for impoverished children around the world.

School founder and CEO Max Lenderman says having a clear purpose gives brands a distinct market advantage, and those that fail to recognize this will be left behind.

“Purpose is the new digital,” he says. “Brands you wouldn’t normally consider purposeful realize they have a role to play. And their customers are recognizing that this is kind of great.”

The middle path

Many brands play it safe by steering a middle path, sticking to issues important to their constituents and close to their core values. But even then, they run risks.

When the Trump administration announced plans to open up Big Ears National Monument and other public lands to oil and mining interests last December, outdoor brands like Patagonia, REI and North Face publicly opposed the move.

Alex Thompson, REI’s vp of brand stewardship and impact, admits there was some risk in taking such a public stance, but says the response from its members was overwhelmingly positive.

“REI believes strongly that public lands are a nonpartisan issue and loved by people of all demographics, regardless of party,” he says. “When the Department of the Interior called for public comment, we felt it was our role as a 17-million-member co-op to engage constructively in the conversation. That’s not to say everybody was necessarily on our side, but we think it was appropriate to follow through on our values.”

Similarly, Whirlpool‘s Care Counts program is solidly in line with the company’s family-centric values. Over the last two years, Whirlpool has donated commercial-grade washers and dryers to schools in poor neighborhoods, so students whose families can’t afford laundry machines can show up to class in clean clothes. The result: a dramatic increase in attendance—from 82 percent to 91 percent during the 2016-17 school year—by high-risk students in cities from Baltimore to Los Angeles.

The Care Counts program is part of a larger portfolio of corporate responsibility projects at Whirlpool Corp., which includes support for Boys and Girls Clubs and Habitat for Humanity. But the company remains resolutely nonpartisan, notes Deborah O’Connor, director of global corporate reputation and community relations.

“We’re not a political organization,” she says. “We sell products to make everybody’s lives easier.”

Conversely, brands that stray too far from their comfort zones, or attempt to shamelessly appropriate social or cultural movements, tend to pay the price. The poster child for inauthenticity remains Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner TV ad, in which the model/influencer joins a peaceful protest march, then manages to quell a potential riot by handing a cop a can of soda.

Pepsi quickly pulled the ad after being accused of trying to commercialize the Black Lives Matter movement.

“That was a poorly executed campaign where both sides tried too hard,” says Tiffany Zhong, CEO of Zebra Intelligence, a SaaS platform that connects brands to teens for research and marketing purposes. “It wasn’t related to Kendall’s brand, and Pepsi hadn’t branded itself as caring about Black Lives Matter or social issues. They were just trying to latch onto a quick trend.”

Z marks the spot

Still, the time when brands can sit on the fence and steer clear of controversy is rapidly coming to an end. The reason? Generation Z.

The first generation to grow up with smartphones in their hands accounts for some 25 percent of the U.S. population, making Gen Z larger than boomers or millennials. Though many are not yet able to legally buy alcohol, they still wield $44 billion in annual purchasing power, according to the National Retail Federation.

Gen Z also has different needs and expectations, says Jamie Gutfreund, global CMO of digital agency Wunderman. They are “venture consumers” who require a lot more information from brands before they’re willing to risk an investment.

“If I’m a member of Gen Z and I’m seen on Instagram wearing a shirt from a company that’s considered ‘unfriendly or bad,’ I’m going to pay a price for it socially,” Gutfreund says. “So I will be extra selective in terms of the brands I support.”

Research conducted by Wunderman shows that nearly three-quarters of Gen Z believe they can change the world, but 85 percent put more trust in private companies than government. And nearly 90 percent say they’re only loyal to brands that share their values.

Yet, there’s paradox at play here. For this generation of consumers, brand loyalty is tenuous and fleeting. The most politically woke, socially responsible, innovative companies in the world are never more than one click away from losing their customers to a competitor.

“Everyone says they’re super loyal until they find something better,” says Connor Blakley, an 18-year-old Gen Z marketing consultant. “And then they jump ship.”

Table stakes

This means asking brands to take risks without any guarantee of reward. Yet those are the table stakes moving forward. Those who fail to be transparent about their values and beliefs will become invisible.

“If a brand doesn’t take a stand, or partners with an influencer who’s taking a stand, people are just not going to see you,” says marketing consultant Cynthia Johnson. “To build a real brand that attracts Gen Z, you will absolutely have to speak up.”

It’s a tightrope for many risk-averse American corporations, which often have difficulty responding to issues at the speed of the internet, notes Mark Ray, principal and chief creative officer at Portland, Ore.-based North, a purpose-based ad agency.

“American business culture is realizing that it doesn’t have the time or expertise to figure this out,” he says. “They need help navigating it from a smart PR person or ad agency that’s paying attention.”

Ultimately it comes down to figuring out what your brand’s values truly are, then articulating them loudly and often.

“If you have a clear idea what you’re about, and you’re willing to take a stand, your customers will respect you and things will work out,” says Cards Against Humanity’s Temkin. “If you’re constantly making every decision on a piecemeal basis, or trying out activism as the buzzword for 2018, people will see through it.”

At a press event in New York, Google announced today that it’s rolling out the Google News Initiative, in which it’s investing $300 million over the next three years. The goal is to help publishers make money and to combat “fake news,” which consists of several products designed to help newsrooms and media businesses.

According to press reports, Google believes it can help support the ailing media industry through the initiative’s products. Take, for example, Subscribe with Google, which will make it easier to purchase subscriptions through your Google account. So far, participating publishers include USAToday, New York Times, Washington Post, and the Financial Times.

The feature gives publishers data and tools to “expand reach,” “drive conversations” and “engage subscribers.” Google, naturally, takes a cut.

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

The company wrote in a blog post that it paid $12.6 billion to news organizations and “drove 10 billion clicks a month to publishers’ websites” for free last year. This sounds like a lot—and it is—but Google, perhaps more than any other technology company, has arguably crippled the economics of media over the last two decades.

Media execs are watching this with a close eye. Raju Narisetti, CEO of Gizmodo Media Group, said that Google has worked toward easing that tense relationship with news publishers.

“While all our and their business models still create friction and competition, it’s been good to see Google rely on Richard Gingras and his Google News team, and be both responsive and receptive to news industry feedback, and also put serious money where their mouth is,” Narisetti said.

The New York Times, which is among the early participants, has been in talks with Google for a while about the search giant’s relationship with journalism. Meredith Levien, chief operating officer of The New York Times, said that while there’s no arguing that the atomization of the experience of journalism has been bad for the business of journalism, she sees the News Initiative as a positive step and is happy to participate. Google’s latest initiative, she said, “isn’t the whole answer, and there’s more to be written here … but the details make sense to us.”

Google is also attempting to stamp out “fake news” through another tool of the News Initiative, dubbed Disinfo Lab. It’s working with First Draft, a project based out of Harvard’s Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, which combats “mis- and disinformation during elections and breaking news moments.” Google is also partnering with Poynter, Stanford, and the Local Media Association on a media literacy project called MediaWise.

“Misinformation and the weakened state of news media is a fundamental, global problem and [I’m] glad Google wants to pitch in to try address what is turning out to be a wicked problem that doesn’t lend itself to easy fixes,” Narisetti said.

The fact that Google is taking on something like fake news holds a note of irony; the company’s algorithm continually and frequently surfaces conspiracy theories and unverified news reports from disreputable publications. After the Parkland shooting in Florida, for example, the No. 1 trending video on YouTube was a video that alleged that one of the survivors, David Hogg, was an actor.

And after the massacre in Sutherland Springs, Texas, the search engine (along with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) helped propagate misinformation dubbing the man who shot and killed 26 people in a church “variously as a member of a pro-Bernie Sanders group, as a supporter of Hillary Clinton, as a recent convert to Islam and as a radical alt-left supporter with possible antifa ties,” according to USA Today.

News organizations and the public have a speed problem. The problem of disinformation or lies travels faster than truth in a world of distributed content and networks—especially today, with increasing encroachments on free press, Levien said.

“I’m interested in how news organizations work together to make the public more conscious of these things,” she said. “The answer lies in how the public that thinks about how it gets its news and is conscious of what it takes to have quality journalism.”

What types of content Google’s algorithm will pull up and whether it will stop surfacing conspiracy theories masked as news remains to be seen.

“Actually, that story should have been done three to five years ago,” Narisetti said. “They had a perfect playbook, and Facebook is idiotic not to copy it, despite just starting to. We can now mostly trust but verify with Google, while we have to verify before trusting with Facebook. A big difference.”

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