Working the intersection of international youth culture and corporate finance, Richard Wayner dresses mogul casual. For an interview in a Tribeca café, he shows up in a slate-gray Polo Ralph Lauren suit and an Ozwald Boateng shirt open just enough to reveal a silver crucifix.

Wayner, 39, laughs easily for someone with so much to manage: He’s CEO and chairman of Alliance Trace Media, which includes the urban style magazine Trace and a French TV station of the same name, and CEO of the L.A.-, New York-, and Nashville-based True Agency, which handles major ad campaigns for Nissan and other clients.

In the world Wayner promotes, people—especially young, good-looking people—travel, dance, and mate outside their cultural boundaries. The True Agency filed a trademark on the term describing this concept, “transculturalism,” which Wayner claims is as simple as combining red and white wine to make rosé. “People will always intermix, interact, socialize, dabble in different tastes,” he says. “It’s the reality, the natural evolution of things.”

Who qualifies as transcultural? Wayner, for one. Raised in the South Bronx by his St. Kitts and Nevis–born mother, he went on to Harvard, Stanford, and the “Sciences Po” in Paris. There he experienced a multicultural metropolis beyond New York and, he says, “developed an idea as to the power and potential of people of color globally.”

Later, traveling for Goldman Sachs, he encountered youth scenes united by hip-hop—in L.A., in French Arab and African suburbs, in Hong Kong and Tokyo. “I started to connect the dots,” he says. “I saw that the people who were congregating in these urban-style clubs weren’t one type of person; it was this polyglot. And to me that was so powerful.”

Sensing an opportunity, he sought out others in the same groove: Claude Grunitzky, who started Trace in 1995, and Olivier Laouchez, former head of a Paris-based rap label. Grunitzky shared the concept of transculturalism, Laouchez his vision of an international urban music channel. Wayner helped bring the ideas together, milking his Goldman Sachs network to procure the seed capital for TraceTV.

The trio launched Trace in 2003, targeting an audience that reflects their vision. The station is available in 95 countries, mostly via local satellite networks, with feeds in English and French. “It’s not possible that one country can monopolize youth culture,” Laouchez says.

Trace’s blend of local culture reportage and videos—hip-hop, African, Caribbean, Latin, and Algerian music—draws some 2 million French viewers a week. It’s a small market, but Wayner is betting that urban music in immigrant-heavy Europe is like rap in the U.S. circa 1980: about to explode.

Asked how Trace differs from BET or MTV, Wayner says it is more ambitious, meaning that its cultural compass begins but does not end in black America. The demo DVD intercuts familiar faces like 50 Cent and Janet Jackson with a Puerto Rican reggaeton concert, a Brazilian model showing off her piercings, house beats at a Mumbai nightclub, and a booty-shaking contest in Sopot, Poland. It’s catchy, but does anything besides sex hold it all together?

“There’s this dirty-money aspect to business and the media—it’s got to get dealt with,” Wayner says. “Obviously there are a lot of sexy girls on the channel.” He argues that the plentiful bare skin is a means to an end. “One of the things we do is give access to original content from all over the world. Producers, journalists, artists—we give them a platform.”

As Wayner tries to scale up Trace’s shoestring budget, he also has an ad agency to run. In one of America’s most segregated industries, the True Agency struts its transcultural credentials—employees even list their ethnicities on the website. For Nissan’s Black History Month campaign in February, Wayner plans to test a bit of Trace-style content in the U.S. market. The spots will show break-dancers in Bogotá, hip-hop stylists in Tokyo, and other characters that recall Wayner’s club-hopping days. The tagline: THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IS EVERYWHERE.