Urban Affairs

Giving non-urban brands like NASCAR 'hood-friendly appeal is seemingly mission: impossible. For Joseph Anthony and his Vital Marketing team, though, such ghetto-pass distribution is all in a day's work. "Urbanizing” Fortune 500 companies for the past five years, Vital Marketing has gone from an ambitious if financially deficient idea to the fastest-growing urban and multicultural marketing unit in the country. Nike, Bausch & Lomb, Levis and the U.S. Army are among the Manhattan-based company's supreme clientele. "I like to call us a ‘true urban success story,'” says Vital CEO Anthony. "It's a situation where we took a whole different approach to start our business, and it paid off in bulk.”Indeed, Vital Marketing has humble roots. The 31-year-old Anthony, along with partner Kwad Tufuoh-established the company in 2000, using earnings from consulting work. "We didn't have a dime of business capital to start off with,” recalls the Queens native. "We knew that the sense of urban marketing we were offering was in high demand. We just needed one big chance to prove ourselves.”