Days out from the inaugural event, Blackweek’s organizers already have a long-term vision. “We want this to be the Black Davos,” Walter T. Geer III, Blackweek co-founder and VML’s chief creative officer (CCO) of Innovation for North America, told ADWEEK.
From Oct. 15-18, Blackweek will debut in NYC, where senior marketers from brands including Ugg and Saucony will take the stage along with agency and DEI leaders from Dentsu, Ogilvy, and General Motors. The event will focus on unlocking the spending power, potential, and influence of Black and diverse consumers, founders, creators, and execs.
“This is an economic-forum-meets-marketing conference,” explained one of Geer’s co-creators, Joe Anthony, chief executive (CEO) and founder of Hero Collective. “The economics of [Black and diverse] consumers are too often overlooked because we’re not in the positions of power in corporate structures to prioritize them,” he said.
This “insights gap,” as Anthony puts it, is what Blackweek wants to address in its first year of programming. The slate includes topics ranging from CMOs discussing how diversity can drive business growth to a sit-down with George Floyd’s brother, Philonise Floyd, on corporate America’s “broken promises.”
Anthony and Geer launched Blackweek at the start of 2024 alongside five other Black and Latinx industry leaders: Monique Nelson, executive chair at UniWorld Group; Dabo Ché, founder of CHÉ Creative; Andre Gray, CCO of ANNEX88; Gabrielle Shirdan, founder of Kitchen Table; and Adan Romero, evp and executive creative director of Razorfish.
The seed was planted during Anthony’s birthday party celebration in Jamaica in 2023; a gathering where a community of “proud and successful” people of color gathered. “I knew we had to replicate that on a bigger scale,” he said.
‘We’ll lose money this year’
Blackweek is self-financed by its founders with support from sponsors, including WPP, Dentsu, IPG, and TikTok. Anthony, Geer, and Nelson told ADWEEK that despite industry backing, the launch event will be loss-making.
“We will not make a profit or break even this year,” Geer said. “We went into this understanding that that was a real possibility of happening. But the conversations we’re already having for 2025 show us this was an investment worth making so far.”
The forum lands amid an inflection point for DEI in ad land, where execs have long discussed building a more diverse, inclusive industry but failed to demonstrate much progress.
