A New Cohort of Black Media Collectives Is Here

In 2020, brands and agencies pledged to devote more marketing spend to Black-owned and Black-targeted publishers. But the immature advertising infrastructure of the sector—a lack of programmatic pipes—as well as scale challenges, soon bottlenecked the effort and benefited incumbents in the space. Since then, in a bid to address these technical issues and capitalize on the growing demand for multicultural media, a new cohort of Black media collectives has emerged. These organizations, which include Bomesi [Black Owned Media Equity and Sustainability Institute], B Code, Blavity360 and Group Black, have over the last three years pioneered an approach to the collective model that represents a radical departure from previous incarnations, prioritizing collaboration and tech support, according to interviews with founders and media buyers. "Collectives have become key in addressing certain scale challenges encountered within the multicultural space and can be useful in simplifying agency investment across a broader variety of publishers than would be possible through a direct buy," said Joshua Bareño, senior director of multicultural at GroupM. "The biggest contribution, though, is helping publishers modernize their media offering and enabling them to be better prepared for working with agencies directly." The evolution also comes as non-white audiences are poised to surpass white audiences as the majority demographic in the U.S. over the next two decades, according to the Pew Research Center, making these consumers all the more valuable as looming privacy shifts force advertisers into direct relationships with publishers. Beyond traffic farms The collectives, which include both Black-owned and Black-targeted models, still serve the core function of a typical ad network, combining the reach of their members to tap into larger, direct ad buys. Throughout much of the last decade, smaller publishers joined collectives to bundle their reach in hopes of tapping into large, direct ad buys that would have been previously unavailable to them. However, the transactional nature of these relationships, as well as their inherent power imbalances, often led to tension and disputes over their equity. For instance, between 2012 and 2016 publishers like Vice and Complex developed ad networks in which the companies could present their members' traffic as part of their overall reach, according to a publisher that participated in one such program. The enhanced footprint these ad networks provided helped companies like Complex secure lucrative sales, but the member publishers typically received none of the payout. Traditional ad networks also generally pay members based on the traffic they generate, but that dynamic can result in larger members receiving an outsized proportion of resources and attention. As a result, it can be challenging for smaller publishers to reap the putative advantages of the collective model. But this time around—media collectives are no new concept—the organizations have placed a greater emphasis on growing their members into sustainable operations rather than viewing them primarily as sources of traffic. To do so, the collectives now provide technical support to their publishers, including website and tech-stack audits, discounted subscriptions to vital enterprise software, and measurement and analytics tutorials. They also offer entrepreneurial resources, such as grants, mentorship programs and coaching, many of which are underwritten by sponsors. “Programmatic advertising is attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spend in seconds, and if you’re not in a position to tap into that, the dollars don’t flow your way,” said Damian Benders, general manager of creative collective B Code. “At the end of the day, brands are trying to sell their product efficiently, and scale matters.” Signs of success The new blueprint for these collectives aims to account for previous issues. They differ on a fundamental level, in that they are minority-owned and serve Black and multicultural publishers—a critical distinction from past ownership structures, according to Group Black co-founder and chief strategy officer Bonin Bough. They also place a premium on equipping members with the technical infrastructure they need to win competitive ad budgets. For instance, the nonprofit Bomesi has partnered with companies including Kargo, Vox Media’s Concert, Fabrik Media, JW Player and Reset Digital to provide its 280 members with discounted access to ad products. The collective has dispersed nearly $2 million in direct revenue since its inception in 2020, according to founders Rhonesha Byng and DéVon Christopher Johnson. It pays its members using a proprietary model that apportions revenue on a weighted scale, rather than on a per-traffic basis. Likewise, B Code—an extension of My Code—increased the top-line revenue of its members by 100% in 2022 by integrating publishers’ back-end technology into its proprietary platform, according to Benders. And at Blavity360, the collective under Blavity Media Group (BMG), the company works directly with brand safety groups like Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify to reduce the volume of ad impressions lost to keyword blocklists, according to Mike Hadgis, chief revenue officer at Blavity. New entrants to Blavity360 see a 75% lift in average RPMs, and the collective now generates 30% of BMG’s total revenue. Brand-funded accelerator programs Hands-on instruction, including analytics tutorials, accelerator programs and grant funding, often accompany the technical improvements. In July, Bomesi awarded seven member publishers $25,000 grants as part of a three-month accelerator program underwritten by General Motors. In the first quarter, Blavity360 similarly launched a grant program that provided $15,000 and mentorship to two of its publisher members. The programs, while nascent, trade on the idea that a collaborative approach will help the multicultural media ecosystem expand quickly and more sustainably, according to Johnson. Plus, the demand is mutual: Brands looking for incremental growth can find it by tapping into multicultural audiences, but to do so, they need to cultivate relationships with publishers engaging those audiences. “The increase in the number of these collectives is a response to both need and opportunity,” Johnson said. “The need is more important, but without the infrastructure, neither gets served.” This story is part of the Advancing DEI special feature.

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Black-Owned Publishers Are Building More Collaborative Collective Models to Court Brand Budgets

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Mark Stenberg

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