Black media leaders to ramp up demand for a bigger share of advertising investment

Black-owned and Black-targeted media leaders continue to maintain that their companies are treated like second-class citizens in an advertising market that denies them their fair share and pays them rates significantly lower than those earned by larger media outlets.

To underscore their point, the top executives of two of the most prominent Black U.S. media groups will step to the microphone on Jan. 25 for a candid conversation about the state of a campaign, now in its third year, to nudge the industry to equity.

Byron Allen, founder, chairman and CEO of Allen Media Group, and Louis Carr, president of media sales at BET Networks, will talk about their experience navigating a world in which larger, mainstream media outlets can launch with the help of rich, guaranteed advertising sponsorships while Black-owned and Black-targeted networks are told they won’t gain advertisers’ interest until their audiences are large enough to be measured by ratings services.

Allen, who was recently named one of the Bloomberg 50, a listing of 50 people who defined global business in 2022, launched the Black Owned Media Matters campaign in 2020 in an effort to expose longtime inequities in the way advertisers allocate their annual budgets.

In 2021, his Allen Media Group acquired HBCU Go, a network that broadcasts games of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. He later secured a deal to air HBCU football on duopoly stations owned by Paramount’s CBS Stations. Allen Media Group also acquired the Black News Channel, adding it to a media portfolio that includes 12 TV networks and 27 ABC, CBC, NBC and Fox affiliates.

Carr, who celebrated his 30^th year with BET in 2016, has generated more advertising dollars targeting African American consumer markets than any other professional or company, according to Paramount, which owns BET Networks.

He is a recipient of the Hyatt Corp.’s Diversity Award; a Lifetime Acheivement Award from the Patricia Martin Legacy and has been ranked one of the Most Influential African Americans in the cable industry by the National Association for Multi-Ethnicity in Communications.

Carr is also the author of two books, Dirty Little Secrets and The Little Black Book: Daily Motivations for Business and Personal Growth.

Kathy Haley, co-founder and publisher of TVNewsCheck, will moderate the conversation with Allen and Carr.

Allen Media Group is sponsoring and co-presenting this webinar.

Register for the Unity in Black Media Webinar here.