New billboard on 94 West takes aim at diversity

“Sometimes, you have to follow where a project leads you,” says Message Maker Chief Creative Officer Sam Bluesky. “When the people at Belonging Begins with Us came to us, they said they wanted to use the racially diverse cast of the hit film Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse to send kids a message about the value of diversity. Their simple, powerful idea was, ‘We are stronger together.’ Beautiful. We were happy to accept, and got right to work on design. But after a couple of days, our Head of Continuity Don Downer came to us with a troublesome observation: the whole point of the film Across the Spider-Verse is that these Spider-Men from different timelines aren’t stronger together. They have to stay far apart — segregated into their own particular timelines, if you will — or else they risk destroying the very fabric of reality. What’s more, the epic chase scene in which a thousand different Spider-Men — and Women! — try to catch one special Spider-Man named Miles Morales, and fail spectacularly at it, also seems to indicate that we aren’t stronger together, not when ‘we’ can all be eluded by a single exceptional person. That got us thinking: how valuable is diversity, really? I mean, we’d like it to be true, but looking around the office at Message Maker, I see a lot of people who look pretty similar, and we’re doing great. In the end, we had to change the billboard from a poptimist aspiration to a painful inquiry. But we think that’s a good thing.”