Buzzfeed has inked a new deal with Culture Genesis, a YouTube network that financially empowers multicultural creators, that will allow it to bundle and market advertisements to diverse audiences.
Culture Genesis, which oversees content creators like Steve Harvey, Kai Cenat, Cam Newton, and All Def Digital, will increase its scale of inventory to include BuzzFeed’s portfolio of multicultural brands like Cocoa Butter, Pero Like and HuffPost Voices, Digiday reports.
Buzzfeed will, in turn, gain an advertising sales partner to assist in the monetization of its ad inventory.
Under the agreement, advertisers have the opportunity to purchase brand activations, editorial sponsorships, and media inventory from both Culture Genesis and BuzzFeed across various platforms, including the web, YouTube, social media, connected TV, and FAST channels.
Together, BuzzFeed and Culture Genesis reach 55 million households.
Financial terms and any potential data-sharing agreements were not been disclosed. Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed, said the ad split “depends on the nature of each deal,” including which creators are involved and the inventory.
“The concept of packaging multicultural content to be sold by a [multicultural and] Black-owned principal is gaining traction as a way to add scale to what may otherwise have been too small of partner to be added to a media plan,” Peretti said. “It also provides another space for advertisers to spend money in support of [multicultural] audiences, as there remain few Black-owned media areas with enough scale and targeted reach.”
While the deal will help put more money and ad power into the hands of diverse creators, it still points to a larger issue regarding Buzzfeed, a predominantly white company with a 52% white workforce as of November 2023, securing ad revenue many companies and corporations had set for more Black publishers.
These types of deals could be “taking dollars that are earmarked for Black-owned media networks or publishers and essentially filtering it to white-owned media,” Justin Barton, senior vice president of digital strategy and partnerships at BLACK ENTERPRISE
, says. “You’re essentially using Black-targeted or Black-directed dollars and then pushing it off to a publicly-traded company and that’s not the intent of these pledges that the agencies or brands have made.”
Dévon Christopher Johnson, co-founder of The Black Owned Media Equity and Sustainability Institute (BOMESI) applauded the deal while expressing his hope that it won’t outshine advertisers’ diversity commitments.
“What I hope this becomes is an additional line item in the media plan [for agencies and brands]. What I hope it does not become is an easy way out from doing other diversity efforts,” he said.
Cedric J. Rogers, co-founder and CEO of Culture Genesis, noted the companies’ 50/50 revenue split with its creators and promised that all the inventory (including BuzzFeed’s) sold to advertisers as part of this deal will include diverse creators.
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