The Globetrotters’ long winning streak continues.
On Saturday mornings, the TV series Harlem Globetrotters: Play It Forward is filling it up, attracting young viewers, especially young Black viewers, with a show featuring Black characters connecting with minority communities.
Following up on that success, Hearst Media Production Group, which produces the show with the Globetrotters, is entering into a partnership to develop inspiring, multicultural content for HMPG’s educational and informational programming blocks with Sunwise Media, a Black-owned media company.
The showrunner for Play It Forward is Ri-Karlo Handy, also CEO at Sunwise.
Also Read: Sunwise Rises With Focus on Positive, Diverse Series
“The thing that’s cool about Play It Forward is it’s for and by and about the community,“ Handy told Broadcasting+Cable. “They’re doing real stuff that I can think about as a Black person, something that grabs my attention.”Handy said the numbers for the show are jumping with ratings in the time period up 55% year over year among 18- to 24-year-olds. Those numbers create an opportunity to reimagine Saturday morning programming.
“Because of that success, they were excited at the idea of doing more multicultural, African-American-facing shows for Saturday mornings,” Handy said. “We're going to bring that multicultural audience that we attracted with Globetrotters, but in a true partnership, versus just a work for hire.”
Amy DeGregorio, senior VP, managing director of sales for educational/informational programming at Hearst Media Production Group, said the early success of Play It Forward has been “highly encouraging.”
She said Hearst has an “aspiration to develop more content that reflects the topics of diversity and inclusion.”
Hearst and Sunwise addressed the success of Play It Forward and their future plans at media agency Magna’s Equity Upfront on Wednesday (February 9), where advertisers are introduced to opportunities to sponsor minority-owned companies and programming with multicultural themes.
Working with a known entity like Hearst Media Productions Group brings a level of familiarity with media buyers and sponsors. “This is us telling all the brands in the room, ‘Hey, this is a new model. You’re going to partner with Sunwise and Hearst,'” Handy said.
“You look at TV One, BET and Bounce TV, basically none of those networks are Black-owned,“ Handy said. æYou have all these corporations that have made commitments to spend media dollars on Black-owned companies. Honestly, what they’re having to do is change to Black-created, because Black folks don’t own any of these channels that are serving Black audiences.”
Hearst’s E/I shows air in three-hour blocks on NBC, ABC, CBS and The CW, helping those networks and their affiliate stations fulfill their government obligation to provide educational shows.
Elverage Allen, partner and head of advertising sales at Sunwise, noted that Saturday morning kids shows are restricted in how much advertising they can run and what types of ads they can accept. But he said brands would be offered an opportunity to have their products integrated into the show, ensuring that whether they’re watched on broadcast, cable or streaming, the message gets delivered.
Many advertisers haven’t looked at educational/informational (E/I) programming as an advertising opportunity, but if they have community-based initiatives, sponsoring E/I programming could be a place where those companies can tell their stories and build their brands, he said.
Handy would also like to see more African-Americans working at the advertising agencies. His Handy Foundation is already playing an important role in workplace development in Hollywood, training and recommending minority candidates for production jobs.
“We really operationalized solving the problem of, how do you source talent from these communities when there’s really no training or college they can go to?” he said. “I think there’s a gap in a lot of industries like that, where there’s a desire for people but no mechanism to train them and place them.”
Ad agencies have made equity and diversity a priority, but the needle has barely moved, Handy said. “If Hollywood can do it with the Handy Foundation, we’d like to see it translate to advertising as well.” ■
