The marketing industry is currently fighting several battles. The battle for consumer attention, the battle around inclusivity and the battle for data transparency, to name a few. It can be easy to compartmentalize each individual issue, but many of them are interconnected: all a piece of the puzzle in a larger ecosystem. A recent study from Nielsen found that attention and inclusivity go hand-in-hand: Between 66.6% and 76% of Black consumers say they pay more attention to an advertisement if they feel it reflects their culture, compared to 45.8% of the overall population.
“These historically excluded audiences and communities and consumers now expect table stakes,” said Charlene Polite Corley, vice president of inclusive insights at Nielsen. “Especially if you look at your consumer or audience member of tomorrow, the future, this younger generation, this is the standard of how they expect brands and content and creators to show up.”
Nielsen’s “The Black influence: How Black culture & identity drive the market” report pulls data from an array of the company’s data sources, including its Big Data + Panel, its National TV Panel, Ad Intel and more.
The inclusivity payoff
As marketers reckon over the place of inclusivity in advertising, Black consumers are increasingly looking to brands to spotlight and cater to their communities. For example, 70% of Black consumers overall say they will stop buying from brands that devalue their community, a four-point increase from 2023. Additionally, the percentage of this demographic that said they expect brands to support causes close to them jumped from 59% in 2023 to 63% in 2025.
Like all consumer groups, the Black demographic is not a monolith. While the Black and African American community overall say they pay more attention to ads that reflect their culture and ethnicity, that number changes when looking at different subdemographics, such as those living with a disability (68.7%), those who also identify as Hispanic (74.4%), those who are multilinguists (74.5%) and those who are members of the LGBTQ+ community (76%).
“From a brand advertiser, marketer perspective, there's a lot of new ground,” said Corley. “There are a lot of untapped places and spaces to speak specifically to this audience and culture.”
Black consumers are also more likely to engage with and support creators who reflect their identity, per the report. A little under half, 48%, of the total population strongly or somewhat agrees that they make an effort to support creators who share their identity, per the report. The number jumps to 56.9% when looking at Black consumers alone, and climbs to 65.8% when looking at those who identify as both Black and Hispanic.
A brand’s values or actions can also impact the buying behavior of not only consumers as a whole, but tastemakers such as content creators. Forty-six percent of Black consumers and 43% of consumers overall have changed buying behavior due to a brand’s value or actions. That increases to 57.1% when looking at Black content creators and 52.5% of content creators overall.
Meeting consumers where they stream
Black consumers over index when it comes to certain free and ad-supported channels. For example, YouTube has a 12.6% share of the streaming audience overall and 16.3% of the Black streaming audience. Similarly, Tubi has 2.1% of the overall audience and 4.7% of the Black audience. On the other hand, Netflix has 8.3% of the streaming population overall and just 7% of Black audiences. However, Black audiences spend a larger portion of their TV time on streaming services than the population overall.
Black consumers also spend more time watching live TV, on average five hours more per week than the U.S. population overall. Black consumers are also more likely to actively engage on social media during live programming at a rate of 25.1% compared to the 20.5% of the overall population.
“I think being thoughtful about a traditional ad campaign on linear television and how your brand is speaking with your potential consumers and showing up alongside them on social platforms or digital platforms can be really powerful,” said Corley.
