Group Black is Built to Serve You

We created Group Black to help the industry meet their commitments and change the equitable ownership of media.

If you work in the advertising or media industry then you know we are constantly under a mandate to change. Usually it’s a corporate mandate, but this time it’s a societal mandate. It’s from the implicit pressure of this imperative that we have built Group Black. 

In 2020 we saw a sea-change in the industry: brands and agencies - for the first time ever - made a long-overdue commitment to spend with minority-owned media by pledging anywhere from two to five percent of their total annual media budgets.

At first we were encouraged by what this would mean for traditionally undervalued, under-distributed and under-funded voices, as well as overlooked creators and influencers. More importantly we were inspired by how this would enable social change. 

Our best calculations suggest this is about $25bn being committed to black-owned media. But there was a problem: only about $1bn of black-owned media inventory existed! 

One-billion dollars might sound like a lot, but let me put that into perspective: while I was at Mondelez International I spent about $4bn on media. This made us the 7th largest media buyer on the planet. So that means that the entire inventory of black-owned media in the USA equates to approximately 25% of media spend of one Fortune 100 brand. 

So while brands want to diversify their media investment, there simply aren’t enough black-owned media options to satisfy demand. 

That’s the problem Group Black seeks to solve by changing the equitable ownership of media and to providing scale to black voices. At the same time fuelling a richer pipeline by providing a way for brands to buy across an ecosystem of black owned media at scale.

Media Under a Mandate

In 2012, I walked into Mondelez International with a mandate to drive digital transformation. I asked my boss, industry legend Dana Anderson, for some advice. She simply said, “Don’t mess it up.”

The first thing I learned was that you have to set targets. We set out to spend 10% on mobile - at the time, a fast-emerging, untapped promotional platform. The next thing I learned is that you have to hit those targets. And, that's when the ‘scale’ problem first became apparent to me.

When I looked at the mobile landscape, back in the early 2010s, there were hundreds of small-players from apps to mobile games to a variety of advertising tech each running across multiple different platforms. But if you want to drive change you need to move capital quickly. That can only happen if you have operational scale on the buyer-side. 

My solution was to turn to Google - where I signed the largest mobile only deal at that time, which also allowed me to aggregate a ton of players under one media-buy. But this created its own problem: this partnership was so new that it lacked the creative sensibility of mobile. We had to constantly go back and fix our understanding of engagement, how to manage creative, how to implement measurement and so on.

Today the mandate is different but the challenges are the same. Then it was about digital disruption. New platforms with new formats creating new consumer behaviors. Today it’s about cultural disruption. 

The Inclusion Age

My hope is that these new black-owned media commitments will help us to enter what we are calling ‘the inclusion age’ where we no longer have to fight for diversity and inclusion because there is equity across our industry. 

But if we are not careful then fragmentation, lack of scale and most importantly the absence of understanding how to communicate in this new world, will confound the vision. That’s why the work we are doing over at Group Black is about expanding the reach of diverse voices through creating unique partnerships between black-owned media properties of varying scales to take advantage of their collective power.

Collective Bargaining 

When I graduated in college in 1999 the National Basketball Association (NBA) created a collective bargaining agreement. In 1989 the average salary of an NBA player was $170K, ten years later it $2.7m, and today it’s close to $10m. That’s the power of collective bargaining - it allows you to tap into a larger pool of money by working together. 

There is no reason black-owned media should be fighting over the same $1bn, when there is $25B within our collective reach. Group Black was created to ensure that we can expand the opportunity, unlock greater economic benefits for the black community, empower each owner through encouraging cultural affinity, while providing operational efficiency. 

Group Black was built to represent the collective interests black owned media companies. If you’re one of those companies you should reach out!

A Commitment to Social Change

It’s wild to think that none of this existed a year ago. When we pitched most of the agency groups all we had was a PowerPoint and a dream that we would get a $20m commitment from the top-five holding companies. To date we have commitment that we’ll exceed this from the largest brands and agencies in the world.

In exchange for that commitment we have promised to understand the challenges of media owners, buyers and brands, to deliver on their needs, and most importantly to move at the speed they need us to move. As such we are making commitments to ensure we have best-practice measurement, accountability, scale, communications planning, brand protection, channel management, and reporting.  All of the pieces that make us competitive, and more.

By the time I left Mondelez International we had shifted from 3% of spending in digital to over 32%. This added hundreds of millions of dollars to the bottom line, and billions to the top line. 

Media really can transform a company, and now it can transform the world.