NBCU, Group Black Plan to Launch Multicultural Content Hub E!+ on Peacock

Brian Steinberg

17 June 2024 at 0:00 am·3-min read

NBCUniversal is tapping an outside company to help it bring a broader array of viewers and advertisers under its media tent.

Group Black, a collective that aims to spur the development of Black-owned and Black-produced media, will curate programming and develop new original content for a new hub on NBCU’s Peacock streaming service known as “E!+.” NBCU already operates a popular cable network that is called E!, but the two will not be managed in tandem. Rather than diving deeper into celebrity news and reality programming, E!+ will feature a set of new originals from producers solicited by Group Black as well as NBCU library content, Group Black will also work to sell commercial inventory to advertisers.

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The new hub is expected to launch later this year.

“This is an open call, in a way, for amazing content and storytelling that exists and can’t find a home in the general market,” says Cavel Khan, Group Black’s chief growth officer, in an interview. Advertisers, he says, are “recognizing that their growth is coming from this multicultural audience and they need to have more reach and resonance with that audience.” He will oversee E!+ along with Peter Blacker, executive vice president of streaming and data products and head of diversity, equity and inclusion for NBCU’s advertising and partnerships division.

The E!+ initiative marks the latest effort to develop media outlets that speak the nation’s increasingly diverse audiences. Most advertisers are still looking to reach large crowds through TV and other venues. But as digital media gives them the power to aim more precisely at specific swaths of consumers, advertisers are growing more interested in reaching smaller groups of the people most likely to buy their goods and services. There is hope that such dynamics will spur Madison Avenue to support minority-owned or minority-run media ventures that have in the past been denied the millions in advertising that flow to mainstream outlets.

Other media companies are also trying to stand up new efforts to cultivate diverse audiences. Disney in 2021 launched its Onyx Collective, a content brand largely set up on Hulu, that aims to burnish stories from creators of color and underrepresented populations. Fox’s Tubi has collected a group of Black-led independent films under the rubric “Black Noir Cinema.”

The new E!+ represents an expansion of an alliance between Group Black and NBCU unveiled last year. Group Black was granted exclusive rights to sell ads within Peacock programing that featured dramas, comedies and movies led by Black creatives, as well as in a curated collection of NBCU content that features Black voices. Such stuff is likely to be part of E!+, says Blacker, including the recent Peacock drama “Bel Air” and the miniseries “The Best Man: Final Chapters.”

“We have shows from the 80s, 90s, 2000s, a very robust library,” says Blacker. In the past, such programming might have been given a more prominent spotlight during Black History Month, he says, but once that was over, “we stopped featuring it. And the thrust is the audience would say, ‘Where did you put this content?’ Now we are able to prioritize it and make sure it’s easily found.”

The alliance attracted more than 30 advertisers, and NBCU’s Blacker says the sponsors saw increases of nearly 20% in metrics such as brand recall.

Group Black is backed by a group of Black media businesses, including Essence, Holler, Afropunk and The Shade Room, and its senior executives include entrepreneurs such as Travis Montague, Richelieu Dennis and Bonin Bough. Group Black recently acquired Galore Media, a media company that covers fashion, beauty and pop culture, and launched She’s Good [For Real}, a digital outlet that spotlights health issues for Black women and their families.

The partners hope they’ll deliver something new that advertisers crave. “It’s easy to get reach,” says Cavel, “In the marketplace, what’s different is attentive reach. Attentive reach is what we are here to curate.”

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