As marketer interest rises, Black media brands are investing in growing community coverage

By Kayleigh Barber

In 2020, a flurry of brands took to social media to share their support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Then, needing to walk the walk, some of those brands started spending more of their media budgets on Black-focused media brands in shows of support — and to build brand affinity with those publications’ audiences.

Fast forward seven months after the killing of George Floyd and publishers with Black-focused brands and audiences, including Blavity Inc., G/O Media and NBC, are seeing a continued interest, if not an increase in interest, in advertising deals from both new and legacy sponsors.

And with that revenue lift, comes further investment in covering Black communities and supporting the journalists who are telling those stories.

Blavity Inc., a digital publisher for millennial and Gen-Z communities of color that owns Blavity, AfroTech, 21Ninety, Travel Noire and Shadow & Act, saw its business grow 50% year over year — an ongoing pattern of growth from when it was first founded in 2014, according to CEO Morgan DeBaun, who declined to discuss revenue growth specifics.

During summer 2020, following the civil rights protests and the platitudes of support many brands were sharing on social media, DeBaun said that a lot of the company’s advertising clients reinvested in new or continued campaigns. Several sponsors, that she declined to name, signed multi-year, million-dollar deals with Blavity Inc. in 2020, she added.

Meanwhile, DeBaun noted that there were younger businesses that came into the sponsor fold as they began to build out their diversity and multicultural advertising plans for the first time last year. Brands in the technology and retail space, in particular Spotify and Facebook, showed a significant increase in interest in reaching potential Black consumers.

“Many of our advertisers don’t ask, ‘how can we reach the Black community,’ but rather “how can we help the Black community from a media perspective?’” said Sherine Patrick, manager of digital investment at media buying agency Mindshare, which recently launched its Black Community private marketplace back in July. “That said, the benefit of doing the right thing has been mutual. In our launch campaign, we saw increased efficiencies in CPMs, a substantial lift in brand message association [and] an increase in brand awareness.”

Like Blavity, NBC’s NBCBLK vertical and G/O Media’s The Root are not new to covering traditionally marginalized communities. NBC built out its BLK vertical in 2015 along with its other diversity verticals: Latino, Out and Asian America. The Root was first created in 2008 by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Donald E. Graham and was later sold to its current owner G/O Media in 2019.

Both of the brands are receiving additional support from their owners to continue growing their journalistic coverage in 2021.

Michelle Garcia, editorial director for NBCBLK who joined the vertical in July, said that under a large parent company like NBC, she and her team of two writers are able to explore more topics that are of interest to Black readers besides the “doom …read more

Source:: Digiday