ELEVATING BLACK + MULTICULTURAL MEDIA

Revolt’s digital viewership is booming. It surpassed the Sean Combs-founded company’s TV eyeballs last year and added 100 new advertisers, said CEO Detavio Samuels, who noted 2022 is on track to triple that number with new distribution including Roku and Amazon, and a growing podcast network. The new Revolt Studios in Atlanta is at work on programming from docs to news to lifestyle to music, said Monique Chenault, President of Revolt News, Documentaries & Nonfiction Programming, who said 14 projects are currently in development.

Revolt Black News is digging into issues that matter to audience across the African diaspora. “We know Black people are not monolithic,” she said. In the sports arena, Revolt announced a partnership with fandom brand Overtime to create a “sports franchise with a hip-hop lens.” Branded studio #000000 (its name derived from the hex color code for Black), which “taps into audience insights to understand culture and nuance” and works on content from short-form to series like “Bet On Black,” a “Shark Tank”-like show featuring Black entrepreneurs and an activation with Frito-Lay.

Morgan DeBaun, founder and CEO of Blavity, a digital media company for Black culture, highlighted company media brands including flagship 24/7 Blavity News, Travel Noir, Shadow & Act, 21Ninety and the AfroTech summit, which jumped early on the Web3 bandwagon and use of tech tokens. Blavity also just released its own NFT collection that allows access to channels, information and, coming soon, job opportunities, she said.

The Blavity Originals team is creating custom shows and IP not only for its owned and operated channels but with partners including TBS and Pinterest. New branded videos and streaming shows are debuting on its OTT platform Blavity TV. “Partnerships with corporations and brands are crucial to elevating the next generation of Black creators and entrepreneurs,” she said.

Earnest Petite, Culture and Trends Insights Lead at YouTube, said it’s been more challenging during the past few years identifying trends emerging from diverse communities: “We often work with agencies who have cultural expertise to identify to cultural or content trends associated with different communities, and internally we use first-party YouTube data to do deeper dives and understand the origins and who’s watching, and how these trends are changing and shifting.”

Paula Castro, Multicultural Creative Business Partner at Google, emphasized the value of experimentation to drill down on insights. “A lot of times what works for a general audience might not work for multicultural audiences,” she said. She also cautioned against brands taking their TV assets and plopping them on YouTube. “A lot of times they think a TV asset is going to resonate on YouTube, but you have to think about how consumers are engaging on YouTube. If it’s a mobile device—and multicultural audiences over-index on mobile devices when watching YouTube—the framing is different, and it doesn’t always translate.”

Black Enterprise, which began as a magazine in 1970, now sees more than 13 million unique monthly users on its website, a number that’s grown 1,300 percent since 2019. Rooted in business, the brand has expanded editorial coverage into lifestyle, arts and culture, health and wellness, sports, and travel and leisure. New virtual video series include weekly show “From the Corner Office,” which spotlights issues relevant to Blacks through peer-to-peer conversations, “Beyond the Hype,” and women-focused “Sisters Inc.”

Future Today CEO Vikrant Mathur said working to help brand clients reach diverse audiences has been part of the company’s DNA since its inception. “This philosophy guides our content acquisition strategy, our editorial optimization as well as our product roadmap. As a result, our channels over-index on multicultural audience segments, which can all be uniquely reached through our extensive targeting capabilities,” he said. When it comes to another hot topic, brand safety, “Future Today has developed features that provide advertisers with the ability to contextually target content that is brand relevant with the appropriate reach and frequency caps that maximize user experience and brand recall,” he noted.

SPOTLIGHT ON THE CREATIVE

Branded content can take a variety of shapes. Sephora worked with Digitas and Epic Digital to create the long-form doc “The Beauty of Blackness,” about Eunice Johnson and the launch of Fashion Fair, the first national cosmetics company that focuses entirely on Black women. “Storytelling brings people together. It creates community and we want to make sure we are doing that with our work. We love brand stories because they are the heart and soul of your brand, but we are super passionate about lifting Black creators, Black founders, Black entrepreneurs,” said Candace Payne, Director of Brand Strategy at Sephora. It all starts with the story, she added. “Who you are as a brand, what your brand values are, what are the things you stand for. Is there a story that can bring all that to life, without it feeling like advertising.”

Raven Elyse, an influencer with 1.8 million YouTube subscribers, offered some advice to brands looking to partner with creators: “When you are doing your collaborations, let the creator be the creator, as much freedom as you can give them. I’ve spent a lot of time learning what works best on my channel, what my viewers want to see and how to grab their attention. In order for me to do those things I have to have creative freedom.”

Fifty-seven percent of consumers are looking at creators as influencing purchasing behavior based on their recommendations, according to Johanna Lara, Head of Sales Strategy & Programs at YouTube BrandConnect. For brands working with creators, “You want to make sure it’s organic,” she said.

SCENE + HEARD

“We need to think about this is an organizational, transformational way, getting to our senior-most folks and making sure anybody who has any power and influence uses it in way to drive change personally.” – Soon Mee Kim, Chief DEI Officer, Omnicom on driving DEI action

“Snapchatters aren’t cord cutters; they’re cord nevers.” – Peter Naylor, Snap VP of Sales, Americas

Stay tuned for another indepth report tomorrow. Have some NewFronts news to share? I’d love to hear from you at [email protected].