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AAPRC Weekly: Michael Lewellen

Michael Lewellen
Vice President, Corporate Communications
Black Entertainment Television (BET)
Washington DC


On the weekends you might find Michael Lewellen sitting around the house reading a tome on crisis management. This is what he calls down time. To be fair, he's a wine aficionado and an avid tennis player as well. But the fact is, strategies for staying at the top of his game are never far from Lewellen's mind. "I will forever see myself as a student of this craft no matter how long I do it, and to me that's a good thing," says Lewellen, a 22-year communications veteran. "What it means is that you don't stop learning and you don't stop wanting to learn. Nor do you fool yourself into thinking that you got this figured out, because the moment that you fool yourself into thinking that––it'll happen during a press conference with the microphone in your face––you will screw it up."

As vice president of corporate communications at Black Entertainment Television (BET), Lewellen has to always be prepared for a microphone in the face. He directs all of the corporate communications and public relations strategies for the cable company's multiple entertainment properties. He also serves as lead spokesman and primary media contact. Being the guy who takes it on the chin when BET is accused of running raunchy music videos is not for the fainthearted, and Lewellen's competitive spirit seems especially suited for his high-pressure position. In fact, it was the pressure that comes with being a corporate spokesperson that drew Lewellen into public relations work. "When I saw spokespeople representing companies, knowing how critical their roles were and the risk associated with those roles, I found that to be very intriguing," Lewellen recalls. "When you're the spokesperson, you really have no margin for error…There's a certain excitement with that...The other thing I think that triggered [this career] is that when a crisis happened, the PR people were on the leading edge to meet that challenge."

Lewellen's desire to be on that leading edge has taken him on an impressive career path, one that has earned him recognition from PR WEEK magazine as one of the country's top African-Americans in the field of public relations. His first position in PR, after departing his job as a sports writer at a newspaper in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, was with telecommunications giant Southwestern Bell (SBC Communications). From there he served in various communications and business development roles for global athletic goods giant NIKE, and later as North America Communications Director for Amsterdambased financial services company ING Group. Lewellen re-established his athletic connection over the next several years with positions at Turner Sports in Atlanta and FOX Sports Network in New York. He joined BET in 1999.

His is a PR career focused exclusively on the corporate end of the business, and Lewellen confesses a distinct "gutless-ness" for coping with the inherent uncertainty of agency work. "The fact that the agency environment is so volatile and so hinged upon your ability to keep selling and landing clients––I never found that to be an attractive line of work," Lewellen admits. "What I've tried to do for the companies where I've worked is to take my skill set and focus it behind a single mission."

Lewellen admits, of course, that corporate PR is hardly a slam dunk in terms of job security. In the corporate environment, bad days––and the cyclical nature of business means bad days are always on the way––call for budget cuts. Because communications and public relations do not generate revenue, those areas tend to get cut the quickest. For PR specialists like Lewellen, that means the pressure is on to constantly prove their value. "Proving your value does extend beyond how many clips you can generate," Lewellen insists. "What we try and do--my team and I––is offer strategic value to everything from our programming process to the types of speeches that our executives give. We try to be a service entity and not just an expense item for the company. We find ways to assess situations in the market that may affect BET in some way. When you can contribute strategic value to a company that helps it stay in business and protect those revenue streams, then you are an important part of the business. You aren't just there to be activated when there's a crisis; you aren't just there to get the press releases out. You actually are a contributing part of the business."

While Lewellen has carved out a stellar career for himself, he does wish he'd met more African-Americans along the way. "By and large, especially on the corporate side, there still are not a lot of African-Americans," Lewellen says. "That is the thing that distresses me about the field, especially when you look at the growing ethnic diversity of our country. More and more of the customers out there in the marketplace are of ethnic origin. I would like to think that diversity of the market would create a lot of opportunities internally, but we're still not there yet."

In an effort to help usher more African-Americans into corporate communications, Lewellen is active in numerous professional organizations like the National Association of Black Journalists, the Public Relations Society of America and the National Association of Minorities in Communication. For up-andcoming PR practitioners, particularly students, Lewellen often gives two important pieces of advice: be ready to pay your dues and be ready to follow the opportunities. "The best advice given to me was 'be willing to pay your dues' as a means of developing the skills that you need to be good at the craft, and those words have guided me every step of the way,"

Lewellen says. "I think some students short circuit their development. I think some people who are new at this craft short circuit a real opportunity to grow their skills by wanting to grab for the brass ring too quickly. I've lectured to college students who will tell me 'I'm not accepting a job for less than $50 or $60 thousand per year.' Well, if you can find one of those as a new individual in the job market with zero experience––God bless you––but that to me is an unrealistic expectation."

Lewellen says it's also important to be realistic about where opportunities will be found. "Opportunities are not always in your hometown; they're not always in your favorite city," he points out. "When I left the Bell System in 1991 to work for Nike, some of my African-American friends in St. Louis at the time were saying 'are there any Blacks who live in Oregon who don't play for the Portland Trailblazers?' And I told them, 'there's about to be.' You must be willing to go where opportunity is, even if it's not necessarily a place that's on your hot list."

Projecting five years or so into the future, Lewellen says he hopes his next opportunity
will be with the company he'll retire from. He's matter-of-fact about admitting that BET very likely is not that company. "So much of entertainment is tied to trend and fad and what's hot at one time and what's not so hot at another. I can't see BET wanting a 60-year-old man out there trying to defend music videos," Lewellen laughs. "I see myself probably migrating to an old line industry where I'll sort of finish things up, put in that last twenty [years] and ride off into the sunset."

Until then, the Jonesboro, Arkansas native is hanging tough with BET and the challenges of positioning an entity that holds a unique position in the African-American psyche. "What's been tough is that BET––and rightfully so, I think, to a certain extent––is held to a much different standard by our audience than the other networks," says Lewellen about BET, which is 24 years old and now reaches 78 million homes. "My goal is to really get people to see that there is much more on BET than they realize…We've had six straight years of ratings growth which means that the diversity of the programming that we have is the right thing, that we're doing something right here at BET. But there are still tons of critics out there who criticize the network for everything from music videos to the talent that we have and it's unfortunate. No network––BET or anyone else––can be all things to all people."

Outside of BET, when he's not studying or hitting the tennis courts, Michael Lewellen may be found traveling back to Arkansas to visit family. A divorcee, Lewellen has three children who live in the South––two sons, Elliott and Ethan, and a daughter, Brandi, who's preparing to graduate from her father's alma mater, Arkansas State University, this spring. During his college years, Lewellen played tennis for Arkansas State, and his passion for the game hasn't diminished. For the past 20 years he's been a certified teaching pro for the United States Professional Tennis Association. "My best days as a competitive player, unfortunately, were several pounds ago," Lewellen said. "I look forward to the day when I can finally get my game and my fitness back together."

The oldest of five children, Lewellen has four younger sisters. "They're quite the quartet," Lewellen says with a laugh. "Mom and dad put me in charge of the girls early on, because, my dad said, 'I am just too old for this.' My mom's a retired public school teacher and my dad is a retired Baptist minister, so I come from a long line of big mouth people. I picked the right career."

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The African-American Public Relations Collective (AAPRC) is an assemblage of professionals who provide communication conduits among clients, journalists, media and our communities. We come together as a collective because we recognize the importance of building those same conduits amongst ourselves.

A great deal of what we do is professional development––updating our skills, keeping pace with technology, refining and streamlining processes, providing a forum to tackle the issues that impact our work environment––but we believe our professional lives benefit most from the forging of effective alliances. Connected to one another, we possess the power of a nationwide body of committed, knowledgeable practitioners with an eye on the future.

As we move into the 21st century at lightning speed, mass media and its potent messages occupy an ever-larger part of our daily lives and our collective psyche. The AAPRC is focused on helping our members gain a deeper understanding of media's force and supporting their growth as powerful participants in the global communications network.

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