Group Black Reportedly Fails to Deliver $500M Black-owned Media Advertising Promise

Group Black once promised $500 million in advertising to Black-owned media, now that the company has failed to deliver on its promise, many are questioning what its future holds.

After once promising $500 million in advertising to Black-owned media, some folks are scratching their heads at what went wrong at Group Black, a lengthy piece published in Business Insider reveals.

Formed in 2021 by Travis Montaque, Bonin Bough, and Richelieu Dennis, Group Black was created with a vision of equipping Black-owned media with $500 million in advertising dollars within its first 18 months. Three years later, those promises have fallen short, executives have departed the company, and the future looks less promising.

“I think most folks were optimistic, passionate, about the business,” said one executive who has since left the company. “We were going to change the face of media.”

Moreover, before Group Black’s tentpole event at Cannes Lions in June, where leaders traveled to throw an exclusive nightclub event to connect with marketers who would be cutting the check, Montaque announced he was going on leave. Many insiders say this was simply the latest sign that things at the company had gone awry.

“They presented an idea that they’d do many big deals,” said one publisher. “None of that happened.”

During its inception, Group Black was formed on the heels of promises by big advertisers like Walmart and Coca-Cola, which publicly pledged to pour more of their ad dollars into Black-owned media, which only accounted for less than 1% of overall ad spending at the time. When Group Black entered the market, it received a $75 million target media investment from the world’s biggest buying agency, GroupM.

Other top donors at the start of Group Black’s plan to secure more funding for Black-owned media included Proctor & Gamble (P&G), which, along with GroupM, told Business Insider that they were unable to comment on the amounts invested due to the information being proprietary. Spokespeople for the companies did, however, confirm that they remained partners with Group Black.

On the contrary, Urban Edge Network CEO Todd Brown said despite signing with Group Black, the company never saw the advertising dollars they were initially promised.

“All that came was a bunch of invites to a bunch of events,” said Brown, whose company owns and operates a TV channel centered around HBCU sports. “Going to Cannes is not a business model. I don’t know anyone in the Black space who’s making money with Group Black.”

Despite initially pledging to help bring dollars to Black-owned media companies, in an effort to scale, Group Black expanded its reach to other media companies like She Media, NBCUniversal, as well as Zeta Global. In April, the company announced its acquisition of the lifestyle network Galore Media, which primarily focuses on publishing via social media.

“We have more momentum today than at any other time in our short history, with initiatives announced recently with major networks, brands, and talent,” Bough wrote in a post shared on LinkedIn before the news around the company’s shortcomings was released.

Beyond just Group Black, there has been a shift overall in the Black-owned media spending that was promised in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. In 2022, advertisers saw a significant drop in media spending overall as they prepared for looming economic uncertainty and began buying with their regular media partners once again.

Corporate America has also pulled back on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts or shut them down completely.

“It’s been difficult all around at the moment as Black lives have, frankly, stopped mattering within the agency world,” said Christopher Kenna, the chief executive of BA Diversity Media, a minority-owned media and tech company that isn’t within Group Black’s network. “I’m not surprised Group Black is having the same problems. We were milked dry and then, when the mood changed, told, ‘Sorry, the clients are not interested anymore.'”