A local woman from Claremont is making the borough proud as an advertising executive promoting diversity in her industry.
Tiffany Warren seeks to advance the prospects of people of color, as well as veterans and the LGBT community, in the advertising industry. She is the chief diversity officer and a senior vice president at Omnicom Group, a large marketing and advertising group based in Manhattan.
She has lived in the southern part of the Bronx since 2004. She said she moved there because it reminded her more of the family-oriented community she remembers from her days growing up in Boston, MA.
“It’s refuge from the city,” said Warren, adding “I wanted to be in an environment that was more family like than city like.”
Warren has mentored over 130 people over the course of her advertising career, and she continues to take on a few new mentees every couple of years in addition to her position at Omnicom. She attributes this to the fact that she had excellent mentors of her own, she said.
At Omnicom, where she has been for the past six and a half years, she matches people of color with opportunities within the sprawling company.
“They come to you looking for an opportunity to work at any one of our agencies,” she said. “We oversee 1700 companies, we have 74,000 employees and so it is exciting to match someone who has the right skill set, talent and capability with an opportunity in my organization.”
Matching the right person with the right position never gets old, she said.
Before her current position, she had a similar one promoting diversity at Arnold Worldwide, an advertising company located in Boston.
She has also started her own non-profit, ADCOLOR, to help minorities and people of color be successful in the advertising businesses.
She attributes her commitment to diversity to her being the beneficiary of many inclusionary programs and efforts, starting with Head Start when she was a child and moving onto The Winsor School and Bentley University, which she attended on a diversity scholarship.
She is a proud former girl scout and has been named a 2015 Woman of Distinction by the Girl Scouts of Greater New York.
She called being a girl scout a formative experience in her life. It got her out of her urban community in Boston to a girl scout camp that ironically was located next to Bentley University.
“I spent time doing things that I wouldn’t normally be exposed to living in Roxbury (Boston),” she said.
She sits on the board of directors of the Bronx-based The Ghetto Film School, as well as national boards like Glaad, which seeks to shape the media narrative on gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender people.
