The program started with $500,000 in 2021, on the heels of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Since launch, Pinterest has invested more than $3.3 million to offer ad credits, cash payments and content creation equipment to the more than 150 creators who have been accepted into the program. The fund originally started with eight creators in its quarterly program, though it’s unclear how many participants are in each cohort as Zeny Shifferaw, global content partnerships lead, inclusion at Pinterest, declined to offer specific details.

This year’s expansion comes in collaboration with Shopify, to include U.S. and Canada-based small businesses, independent publishers and boutique creator agencies from historically marginalized communities. Meaning, the program now has expanded its definition of a creator, whether that be an influencer or small business owner. The financial details of the partnership with Shopify were not divulged.

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The reports show mixed results in companies’ efforts to diversify their newsrooms. Digiday has tracked these efforts since companies began publicly releasing data on their demographics following a media reckoning that was ignited by the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

Condé Nast and NPR improved the diversity of their staff by a few percentage points in 2023, as did Gannett (which published data on their workforce as of Jan. 1, 2024). But white people made up the same share of the employee base at Hearst and The New York Times in 2023, compared to 2022. Meanwhile at Vox Media, the percentage of white employees increased year over year.

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But then the deal went through and Musk’s reign began.

“And 10 days after I left, he chose to buy it and I didn’t expect that. That was when the hammer came down,” Rivera said. “It just felt like the ground was pulled from under us.”

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It will be a way for the agency to extend diversity practices to more areas of the business and expand the opportunities for suppliers that are not certified as a diverse company, said Christopher Boland, owner of Boathouse Group, Inc.

“A lot of the people we started working with initially were like us — and diversity was simply a way to try to bring in people who are not like us,” Boland told Digiday. “Now we’re at a point where we need to bring that to suppliers. We’ve done it throughout our business, but it was just a conscious effort to try to make it different and … make it better.”

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Four years after the 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked organizations to make corporate and financial pledges, agencies of all stripes and sizes have sometimes felt challenged over how to keep making progress with their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Some have developed scorecards, metrics and other internal tools to increase representation, while others have invested in the communities and partners with whom they want to work more closely. Still, it can be difficult to quantify the results and ensure a continuous momentum when focusing on DEI as a business imperative.

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While the recent advertising slowdown has also impacted the amount of money allocated to marketing to media companies created for non-white audiences, Parker Morse, CEO and founder of My Code said that it hasn’t stopped marketers from realizing the value in reaching multicultural audiences.

In fact, while the industry standard is 5% of advertiser budgets earmarked for multicultural marketing, that figure has turned into a floor, not a ceiling, over the past few years, he said, adding that the expectation is that 2024 will see a return to growth in this sector.

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In this week’s Digiday+ Research Briefing, we examine how Snapchat is pitching itself as an alternative to current social platforms, how Priceline and other e-commerce companies are approaching generative AI, and how legacy programmatic media buying practices often disadvantage Black-owned media companies, as seen in recent data from Digiday+ Research.

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Following an on-stage conversation at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in December, Kerel Cooper, president of advertising at Group Black, joined Digiday once again on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast to dive further into his continued efforts to shed light on the legacy programmatic media buying practices that often disadvantage Black-owned media companies. 

Working with ad verification firm Double Verify, Group Black pulled together research that illustrates just how much ad inventory on Black-owned media companies is cut from media budgets when rudimentary tools like keyword blocklists and domain-level categorization are implemented in media buys. 

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The independent trade group will add Yin Woon Rani, CEO and CMO of MilkPEP, as vice chair, plus five new leaders to its board of directors as it aims to increase DEI impact across the marketing industry. The board appointments come from global brands and agencies, including Colgate, E.&J. Gallo, H&R Block, Publicis and Havas Media.

This comes as media agencies, their clients and consumers have pushed to increase DEI efforts across the business. In recent years, agencies have strived to increase diversity and representation internally and expand their client offerings and partnerships outside of the organization — but it has not been without obstacles. From trying to prove and measure impact to criticism over the rate of progress within these companies, many continue to feel challenged in including DEI as a business imperative.

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This will increase the scale of Culture Genesis’ inventory, with access to BuzzFeed’s portfolio of multicultural brands like Cocoa Butter, Pero Like and HuffPost Voices. BuzzFeed, meanwhile, gets an ad sales partner to help sell its ad inventory. The details of this deal, including the financial cut and any sort of data sharing agreement, were not made available.

The move comes at a timely point for the digital publisher: BuzzFeed needs to boost its ad sales. The company reported digital advertising revenue was down 35% year over year in its Q3 earnings report on Nov. 2, 2023, bringing in $32.6 million for the quarter.

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But to access those budgets, agencies are pushing Black-owned media companies to prove that they are non-white owned, according to conversations with four media execs. At stake, they say, is the money set aside by advertisers to support non-white media companies following the the media reckoning spurred by the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

Who’s asking for these accreditations?

Black-owned publishers told Digiday that they are being asked — or encouraged — by ad agencies like Dentsu and Publicis to get accredited by third-party companies that, in some cases, have been around for years.

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The offering will aggregate first-party data from 10-15 diverse-owned companies across health and beauty, travel and finance sectors, said Bonin Bough, co-founder of Group Black. 

Group Black, the Black-owned media company that operates an ad exchange to sell ads across other publishers, including Essence, Reach TV and Pod Digital Media, will disseminate the data into new audience segments. Bough said that advertisers will be able to buy ads against those audiences across Group Black’s owned-and-operated platforms and the Group Black Collective, which includes 250-plus Black-owned media companies, like any other data layer platform – but one specifically targeting Black and Hispanic audiences, he explained.

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But almost four years later, some of those efforts — at least the more public ones — seem to have lost their steam. Media companies that were publishing their workforce diversity reports at a relatively regular, annual cadence delayed posting those reports on their sites, including BuzzFeed, NPR and the Los Angeles Times. 

BuzzFeed published its diversity reports in October 2020, January 2022 and then not again until November 2023. NPR, which has released its past two reports in October, is not publishing its report with 2023 data until next January. The Los Angeles Times published a report in February 2021 and February 2022, but has not released a report publicly since then. Gannett typically publishes newsroom-level diversity data (including for USA Today) each year, but has yet to release the data for 2023.

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But according to recent conversations with half a dozen executives at Black-owned publishers, this issue hasn’t improved — even for their lifestyle content. The execs told Digiday anywhere from 15% to 37% of their traffic can get blocked at times, which can lead to underperforming campaigns. And because it takes time to explain and correct those issues with advertisers and agencies, by the time the issue is fixed the lost impressions can threaten their sales teams’ ability to resign clients.

Verification firms like Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify have added more tools for programmatic media buyers to use in their campaign planning, including contextual targeting tools, layered on top of advertisers’ general keyword blocklists. But when combined with publishers’ own verification strategies for brand-safe content, all of these tools can clog the pipes and reduce publishers’ available inventory, publishers have said.

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For the most part, the advertising industry’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts have been an uphill battle, even after the promises and commitments that were made in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd.

The industry’s stalled DE&I progress has been a point of critique. Despite the promises, media companies are still mostly hiring white people as of this year. In 2022, 90% of agency leaders identified as white, up from 73% in 2021, according to the 4A’s 2023 Diversity in Agencies Survey Report. Meanwhile, DE&I positions are drying up after a surge in hiring, with those positions facing the brunt of budget cuts in times of economic crisis, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. 

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