For the past 6 months, I have been speaking with brands and advertising agency leaders about the importance in creating greater equity in Ad tech, and educating them on the realities of data bias, and how it’s impacting their ROI. 

We need to have a seat at the table, and it starts with ownership of the technology. With more dollars being invested in programmatic advertising and data driven targeting becoming more of a priority, it’s critical that we have diverse ownership in ad tech and the programmatic pipes that will determine where the money goes, ensuring that diverse owned media doesn’t get overlooked in the process.

With 90% of digital display advertising being invested via programmatic, there needs to be greater equity and ownership in advertising technologies to ensure the future of the industry includes authentic engagement with diverse audiences. And the numbers don’t lie in terms of economic impact when Black leaders are brought to the table. Increasing Black ownership in technology has the potential to drive economic growth, create jobs, and address racial wealth disparities. Research by McKinsey & Company suggests that closing the racial wealth gap could add $1.7 trillion to the U.S. economy by 2030.

This is why Hero Media has launched Hero One—our addressable, data powered programmatic platform for advertisers. We believe that cultural insights paired with predictive targeting are the future of performance advertising. Hero One is our managed service AI powered, programmatic marketing platform that leverages predictive technology combined with the industry’s first cultural graph to deliver contextually relevant advertising that performs. Hero One identifies and reaches consumers most likely to convert. We build custom machine learning models using historic and real-time data to predict future actions for every campaign.

This, I firmly believe, is the future of ad tech, and therefore, the future of our industry. Marketing and media are still limited in its understanding and appreciation of the impact that diverse communities have on culture at large. In fact, if Black culture in the U.S. were quantified, its value would undoubtedly surpass that of entire nations’ GDPs. Black consumers’ collective economic power in the U.S. alone is set to expand dramatically, from about $910 billion in 2019 to $1.7 trillion in 2030. It’s one thing to authentically represent the culture for consumers; the bigger challenge is getting mainstream and non-minority executives, brand leaders, and agencies in the mainstream to focus on and value what the difference in perspective has on elevating the way that culture is depicted.

Although in recent years, advertiser spending on Black-owned media has nearly tripled, reaching $880 million in 2022, $880 million represents only 1.16% of overall ad spend. This obstacle is what Hero Media seeks to overcome, which also represents a massive opportunity for us to open up the aperture to Black-owned media, specifically through advertising technology and our first-of-its-kind Black-owned ML-powered DSP. You can learn more about what we hope to accomplish in Essence here.

-Joseph Anthony, Chairman and Founder, Hero Media