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Bozoma Saint John

Adweek Reveals List of 100 CEOs, Media, Tech Leaders and There's Zero Black Executives on it

This year's "Power List," Adweek's annual ranking of top players in advertising, marketing, media, and tech includes no black leaders.

On Monday, Adweek revealed their 2018 "Power List"— an annual ranking of the top players across advertising, marketing, media and tech.

Adweek listed their criteria for the roundup as including "company value, revenue and growth, market performance, consumer reach, standing among rivals, industry accolades, media buzz and the amount of news each player contributes to the content cycle."

Of course, the top three names on the list were Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Larry Page (Alphabet, Google, Youtube), and everyone's fave,  Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook).

But out of those top three names and the remaining 97 executives and leaders on the list, a striking zero are black.

Earlier this month in an interview with Variety, Diddy lamented the lack of black CEO’s at the helm of companies in the entertainment industry. Interestingly enough, the CEO of his own company Revolt TV is not black and was accused of anti-black racism by a black former employee. But this doesn't excuse the validity in Diddy's point that there is a glaring lack of high-ranking positions held by black people— but the issue extends beyond the entertainment industry.

According to a report in Fortune, 7 out of 10 senior executives are white men, and there are only three black CEOs in the Fortune 500.

In total, there's only been 16 black CEOs at the helm of Fortune 500 companies since 1999. Of course, that includes only black men.

Xerox's Ursula Burns has been the only black woman to run a company on the Fortune 500 list.

And in terms of who does the picking, the racial diversity of Fortune 500 boards isn’t much better. Four out of five new appointees to boards in 2016 were white.

And according to U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data for the Silicon Valley area, a 2015 Ascend report found that the racial gap in tech leadership positions between white men and men of color was larger than the gender gap between white men and white women. The data also shows that race has increasingly limited black women's rise in ranks in the tech industry.

READ: Diddy Criticizes Lack of Black CEOs in Entertainment After Revolt CEO is Accused of Anti-Black Racism

The duality of the issue seems to be the dearth of black faces in high positions, as well as the lack of recognition of existing black faces in high positions. An honorable third mention in this problems-that-need-resolutions list would be the lack of agency and resources given to black staffers at big companies to be able to rise in ranks to high positions.

Oh, and the fourth issue would be racism. The fifth issue would probably be capitalism as a whole.

There are clearly a lot of issues at bay here. Either way, since Adweek made that oversight, here are some standout black CEOs, executives, tech titans, and media practitioners they missed:

  • Bozoma Saint John,  Chief Marketing Officer at Endeavor
  • Kimberly Bryant, Founder of BlackGirlsCode
  • Pam El,  Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at the NBA
  • Jamere Jackson, CFO of Nielsen Holdings plc
  • Abiola Oke, CEO Okayplayer & OkayAfrica
  • Torrence Boone, Vice President, Global Agency Sales & Services at Google
  • Sean Cohan, President, International and Digital Media of A&E Networks
  • Cathy Hughes, Founder and Chairperson of Urban One, Inc.,
  • Angelica Nwandu, Founder of The Shade Room
  • Anthony "Top Dawg" Tiffith, Founder, CEO, Top Dawg Entertainment
  • Jay Brown, CEO, Roc Nation
  • Angela Benton, Founder & CEO of NewME Accelerator