By Kevin Ross,
CEO
3BAAS Media Group
I want to share this article under the hood I recently came across. If you find yourself pondering whether creating blog posts, digital content, and audio podcasts from an afrocentric perspective is really worth all the energy you're putting into it, that you're reading this now is certainly no coincidence.
Forgive me for dispensing with the pleasantries, but you need to stop with all the complaining. This is not about YOU -- at all!
The synergy that each one of us are faithfully sending out into the universe is profound in ways we have only begun to fathom. Whether its Content Black Woman, The Field Negro, Undercover Black Man, or Young, Black & Fabulous, a new intellectual Black Renaissance is being spawned through a cacophony of unbridled voices speaking passionate truth to power, racism, beauty, business and yes, even sometimes meaningless pop culture.
Never before have the shackles of our rich, painful past been so rusted and unencompassing. Collectively, technology has freed Black people. And deep down, many of us understand that more than we're willing to acknowledge.Because by admitting that our definition of success, or lack thereof, rests solely with the stroke of a keyboard or the recording of our image, we now have no choice but to concede that playing the "woe is me" victim card is like playing Spades without the jokers. You could do it, but why?
Black people, we are literally at the end of the runway and it's time to "Man-Up" folks. Unhappy about not getting that book published, your business up and running, you're radio or television career popping off -- that's on you. The Internet has emancipated you.
EXHIBT A:
The chief marketing officer dreads opening the survey request from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People each fall.
The request is always the same: Detailed data on where the brand this CMO manages spends its sizeable advertising budget -- including black-owned media. And each year, the request for a breakdown of ad budget is politely declined by the marketing chief, who cites its proprietary nature.And so each year, the brand winds up with an F in the area of marketing and communications -- along with 16 others -- in the NAACP annual Consumer Spending Guide. The stated goal is to measure corporate America's relationship with the African-American community -- a consumer segment that represents 13% of the U.S. population with spending power of $845 billion in 2007 -- a figure expected to leap to more than $1.1 trillion by 2012, according to the University of Georgia's Selig Center for Economic Growth.
“All things being equal, we’d have no problem supporting” black-owned media, said the CMO, but “a lot of the true African-American owned media companies are small and very decentralized. That doesn’t fit our strategy of needing to have a national reach. We have looked at some of the options, but the delivery is so small in relation to cost it doesn’t fit our strategy.”
Some of the biggest names in black media today actually are owned by corporate titans. The most notable example is BET, which founder Bob Johnson sold to Viacom for $3 billion in 2000. Then there’s Essence: Time Warner’s publishing arm took full ownership of the legacy brand in January 2005.But the most dismal rate of media ownership among African-Americans is in TV. Only five African-Americans own full-power commercial TV stations; they collectively own eight out of 1,379 commercials stations nationwide.
The minority-ownership rate in TV has plummeted in recent years, falling nearly 70% in the past decade, according to a 2007 Free Press study.
Recent declines in TV ownership are attributed to the bankruptcy in May 2007 of a single company: New York-based Granite Broadcasting, which operated nine stations in seven states. That’s not to say that TV ownership among African-Americans was ever strong.
But TV is certainly not the only place where black-owned media outlets are in decline. Newspapers historically have been an area of strength for black ownership. Blacks published newspapers as early as the 1820s, and there were 250 newspapers operated by African-Americans by 1950, according to a report by the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council.
Yet today, there is no longer a daily black-owned newspaper. The last daily black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, cut back to a weekly schedule in February.And since 2000, the industry’s trade group, the Black Press of America, has seen its membership decline to 189 weekly newspapers from 300. National weekly circulation for its members has dropped to 250,000 from a high of 500,000 in 2000, according to John Smith Sr., chairman of the trade group. Mr. Smith, publisher of The Atlanta Inquirer, a weekly newspaper with a circulation of 42,000 (down from 60,000 two years ago), blames the internet for the circulation declines.
Indeed, with advertisers stampeding toward digital marketing, it’s hard to overlook the fact that not a single legacy black media brand has made a successful transition to the online world.
Consider EbonyJet.com: Its traffic is so small it doesn’t register with ComScore or Nielsen. The website aggregating the biggest black audience online is Time Warner’s Black Voices. The second-most popular is BlackPlanet.com—owned by five Asians until Radio One's recent purchase.
But Eric Blankfein, senior VP-channel insights director at Horizon Media, New York, said advertisers should not just look at traffic figures, noting that there are opportunities to gain more credibility with the audience by buying in outlets owned by African-Americans.
In 2001, Black Press launched a national network and news portal, BlackPressUSA.com, “to bridge the gap as far as technology is concerned for member newspapers,” Mr. Smith said. Despite the efforts, the site has garnered little traffic and has yet to register with ComScore and Nielsen/NetRatings. Mr. Smith said the site gets about 10,000 hits a week.
It’s not limited to newspapers. The legacy magazine brands—Ebony, Jet, Essence and Black Enterprise, all black-owned except Essence—are struggling to gain new readers. Average circulation was essentially flat from 2006 to 2007 for all four, according to the Magazine Publishers of America.
The low rate of media ownership in broadcast has been blamed by some on the policies of the FCC, including David Honig, executive director of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council. “The relative success of minorities in the weekly-newspaper industry was possible because no federal agency acted as the gatekeeper of newsprint and ink,” Mr. Honig wrote in a recent report. “In broadcasting . . . the FCC’s regulatory policies ensured that media companies could not cross the line from print to broadcasting.”
That’s not to say ownership rates in radio are stellar today, even if they do surpass that of TV; African-Americans own just 3.4% of the full-power commercial broadcast radio stations nationwide.
The largest black-owned radio company is Radio One, based in Lanham, Md. The company operates 53 radio stations in 17 urban markets but has been struggling of late. On March 23, it announced plans to sell KRBV-FM in Los Angeles for $137.5 million, using some of the proceeds to invest in its internet strategy, according to Chief Content Officer-Interactive Smokey Fontaine. “If we can reach more African-Americans than our competitors at the other big media companies online, we can then offer more reach to advertisers.”
But to some, it’s more than a question of reach. “Media targeted to African-Americans is not valued to the degree that other media is,” said Earl Graves Jr., president-CEO of Black Enterprise, publisher of Black Enterprise magazine, which has a subscription base of 525,000 and an estimated 4 million readers.
Since 1970, the magazine has published an annual list of the top 100 black-owned businesses, including media companies. After the takeover of Essence by Time, Mr. Graves removed the legacy media brand from the list.
Despite the magazine’s tough stance on what constitutes a black-media property, Mr. Graves questioned whether efforts such as the NAACP’s survey does black-owned media any favors, especially in reshaping marketer misconceptions of the value of targeting black consumers.
“It’s counterproductive when people feel they are filling it out under duress,” he said, suggesting instead the argument for spending more on black media should be made on economic grounds. “Tell me how this makes sense: 15% to 20% of your business is coming from this market but you spend less than half to one-half percent of your marketing budget on it.” [Source]
Now, if you don't have something to say after reading this article, you really have NO BUSINESS being on this site!