This campaign creatively brought the power of shopping Black-owned to life by making it central to our story. The hero film follows Keke Palmer as she spends the day searching and shopping Black-owned. Throughout the film we see Black-owned products and meet real Black business owners. We accelerated consumer engagement and more directly tied this work to commerce by allowing viewers watching the hero film on YouTube and on the campaign microsite to buy Black-owned products featured in the video. As a result, featured businesses anecdotally shared that the campaign helped them amplify their online presence and following.

Google’s Black-Owned Friday campaign was born in 2020 to uplift Black-owned businesses disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Now in its 4th year, this initiative remains relevant as only 13% of Americans say they regularly shop at Black-owned businesses. While the campaign is called Black-Owned Friday, we wanted our core message to transcend a single day.

With many of these businesses still feeling the lingering economic effects of the pandemic, our most recent iteration of the campaign focused on building awareness of and engagement with the continued importance of the message to search, shop, and support Black-owned. By spotlighting Black-owned businesses, we’re helping to spur economic equity with their counterparts to close this gap for good.

Spending at Black-owned businesses still lags behind many other businesses. Our brief was to create a social-led campaign encouraging people to shop Black-owned not only on Black Friday, but all year round using Google tools to help them to discover and connect with Black-owned businesses across the country.

Our objectives were threefold:

1) Economic Empowerment: Uplift Black-owned businesses by driving direct consumer support and providing tools for businesses to enhance their online presence in order to capitalize on increased demand.

2) Discovery: Highlight how businesses can identify as Black-owned and consumers can subsequently find Black-owned businesses via the Black-owned business badge on Google Search, Maps, and Shopping, making these businesses accessible to a wider audience year-round.

3) Cultural Shift: Amplify the narrative of supporting Black-owned businesses, igniting a movement that stretches beyond a single shopping day.

The creative concept tapped into ’90s nostalgia by working with Keke Palmer to recreate the ’90s club classic “100% Pure Love” by Crystal Waters into “100% Black-Owned.” By flipping our lyrics to “100% Black-owned,” we reinforced the pride and power of Black entrepreneurship to all races and united generations of music lovers around a great cause. It was brought to life via a shoppable music video featuring 50+ Black-owned products and brands from across the country. We helped businesses to be discovered by highlighting the Black-owned business badge on Google and created bespoke social content for business owners to use on their social channels.

The creative insight of leading with a highly shareable sound invited people to remix, share, and make their own videos and made both the campaign and the brand message inescapable as Black entrepreneurs and consumers began showing us what “100% Black-owned” meant to them.

We knew that millennial and Gen Z consumers readily create content from existing sound and video elements on TikTok and Instagram. So we tapped into this behavior by setting our campaign to an inescapable earworm of a song and encouraging users to use it as the soundtrack for their own videos highlighting their business or a favorite Black-owned business. This was a successful strategy: Through community management, we saw many comments on social posts calling for the song to be available on music streaming services and subsequently hundreds of videos were created with the song as the soundtrack. “100% Black-Owned” quickly became an evergreen anthem celebrating Black entrepreneurship that business owners are still using to create social content.

Our hero film is a reimagination of Crystal Waters’ “100% Pure Love,” which we dubbed “100% Black-Owned.” In the film, we follow Keke Palmer as she visits real Black-owned businesses, interacting with their owners and reminding everyone to shop Black-owned every day.

To accurately represent national Black businesses, we mobilized satellite team members across multiple U.S. cities to capture a range of businesses, which were seamlessly integrated into the hero film and the entire campaign during postproduction.

The campaign microsite featured Black businesses and shoppable products from across the U.S., and highlighted tools to help businesses be discovered and shopped more easily. We had prominent OOH in NYC and LA, and a hyperlink on Google.com, promoting Black-owned on some of the world’s most visible media, and digital media on social and YouTube. Media ran for about two weeks and the campaign reached millions of people.

“100% Black-Owned” was successful, surpassing objectives across campaign touchpoints:

Massive Reach: 374M+ impressions and 14.6M+ video views effectively amplified visibility of Black-owned businesses to a large audience. This directly supports our objectives of discovery and economic empowerment.

Overwhelmingly Positive Sentiment: The campaign garnered 99% positive/neutral sentiment on social, indicating a strong resonance with the campaign’s message and a cultural shift toward prioritizing support for Black-owned businesses.

Social Engagement Boom: The campaign doubled social engagement from the previous year (355K in 2023 vs. 161K engagements in 2022). This proves our success in sparking conversations, actions, and exceeding consumer mobilization goals.

Community Participation: Viewers organically used the song as a soundtrack to highlight their Black-owned businesses on Instagram and TikTok, validating the success of our participatory approach.

Positive Press: 40+ positive press mentions in major outlets like AdWeek and Black Enterprise, expanding reach and credibility.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, a mission we’ve delivered on by helping the historically underrepresented be seen, found, and supported. For Black-Owned Friday specifically, we found that many people simply aren’t aware of the diverse spectrum of Black-owned businesses or products in the communities near them. Additionally, Black entrepreneurs may not know about the free tools Google provides for business owners, like the Black-owned business badge in Google Search, Maps, and Shopping, and AI tools like Product Studio, which can supercharge their product marketing. We were inspired to take action by raising awareness and driving action, ultimately creating meaningful economic impact for Black entrepreneurs and their communities.