To be clear, it was a completely self-serving effort. After laying out the case for advertising directly to Negroes, the film names Ebony, Jet, Tan and Hue, all Johnson publications, as the preferred vehicles for those ad dollars. There is no mention of the hundreds of Black newspapers around the country, from which those magazines generously rewrote articles and cribbed story ideas.
…It also made Johnson very wealthy. As the advertisers got bigger, so did the money, giving Johnson the room to expand to other business ventures. One major advertiser, Chrysler, would eventually make Johnson its first African American board member, along with 21st Century Fox, Zenith and Continental Bank.