A child of the Great Depression who grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens, avidly reading books and listening to radio, Byron Lewis got a sense from an early age that the media wasn’t geared toward African Americans. And that ultimately planted a seed that led him to start an agency.

“I began to wonder why I felt a certain way and I was sure the media of that era — the way we were depicted, stereotypically, in negative terms — shaped [people’s] attitudes,” says Lewis, who founded UniWorld Group, an African-American and multi-cultural agency, in 1969, in an interview with Beet.TV.

“From that experience, I learned the power of media, I learned the value of storytelling, and I learned the power of having a good education and an instinct of what I could be,” he adds.

The company was foundering seven or eight years after its inception when Lewis had the inspiration to develop a radio soap opera about black life and experience, which aired for 39 weeks and was sponsored by Quaker Oats. That marked a turning point for the agency.

WPP bought a 49% stake in UniWorld Group in 2000. Lewis stepped down as its CEO in 2012.

This segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and AOL. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.

Lewis was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.

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