Tech
Sundial Is Turning Its Multicultural Media Portfolio Into One Advertiser Buying Platform
In July, ESSENCE Ventures, the investment and operating arm of Sundial Media & Technology Group, took a minority stake in Offscript Worldwide, the parent of REVOLT, connecting Sundial’s portfolio of brands with a cable network, Gen Z creator platform, and content production infrastructure. Building the technical infrastructure to make that possible is the job of Cedric J. Rogers, Sundial’s Chief Product & Platform Officer.
Cedric came to the role in June after co-founding Culture Genesis, which has been described as the largest Black-owned digital video network, where he spent eight years building monetization infrastructure for multicultural creators on YouTube. Before that, he spent nearly 10 years in business development and developer relations at Apple.
At Culture Genesis, he helped creators such as Kai Cenat and iShowSpeed raise their CPM rates and access brand deals. Watching his wife, Ava Pearl, run Curly Culture, a creator brand with a largely Latina following, he identified a different problem: women of color were not accessing the same monetization infrastructure.
“Women are making 30% less than men in the world of content creation,” Cedric says. That observation became the founding logic for Creator Currency Networks, which powers the CreateHER Network he has since brought into Sundial.
Sundial’s portfolio spans ESSENCE, Refinery29, Beautycon™, AFROPUNK and SOMOS. It has built its position around live events and community-specific content, with ESSENCE Festival of Culture® drawing a collective audience of 500,000 this year, according to the company. Connecting those communities to a single advertiser buying surface is what Cedric is now tasked with building, using the SMART platform, the CreateHER monetization rails, and the Offscript partnership as his three primary components.
The CreateHER Network Addresses the Pay Disparity Through Layered Inventory
The CreateHER Network’s design addresses the 30% pay disparity through a four-step monetization model rather than a single product feature.
The first layer is programmatic: Sundial bundles a creator’s ad inventory alongside ESSENCE, Refinery29, and SOMOS and sells it as a package, commanding higher CPMs than YouTube’s standard ad system delivers individually. Revenue from YouTube-direct sales passes entirely to the creator. For inventory Sundial sells on the creator’s behalf, the split is 50-50, but because Sundial prices that inventory at a premium, creators net more overall. “We’re able to sell [a creator’s] inventory at a higher premium,” Cedric explains. “So then [they’ll be] able to take advantage of that.”
The second layer is branded content: Sundial includes individual creators in direct brand conversations when selling to advertising partners, rather than limiting them to programmatic placements.
The third brings creators onto stages at ESSENCE Festival of Culture® and Beautycon™, providing both an amplification moment and a branded content opportunity at the event. At this year’s Creator Podcast Festival, a first-year addition to ESSENCE Festival of Culture® held at the convention center’s second floor in New Orleans, three fully equipped podcast studios were available for creators to record, edit, and receive finished episodes in partnership with ESSENCE.
The fourth layer is a network where creators share business intelligence, collaborate on content and exchange information on deal structures. “That to me is the largest way to help women make more money,” Cedric says. “To share the information so that all boats rise at the same tide.”
SMART Turns Community Conversations Into Advertiser Category Targeting
Sundial’s internally built SMART platform is an agentive AI system, an LLM the company uses for audience segmentation and targeting across its community portfolio. Its first deployed interface is Essie, an AI assistant built for ESSENCE Festival of Culture®. Attendees could ask Essie which stage Keke Palmer would appear on, where to find wheelchair access, or how to navigate the event’s roughly ten concurrent stages. “Many people found her very helpful to navigate the ESSENCE Festival experience,” Cedric notes.
Every interaction Essie handles generates a signal about what ESSENCE community members are actively thinking about, which conversation category they are in, and when. Sundial uses that intelligence to give advertisers targeted access by category: health and wellness, beauty, fashion, or family.
“How can they reach these women at scale in the specific conversation category that they’re looking for?” Cedric says, describing the advertiser proposition. The goal is to extend the same intelligence layer across SOMOS and every other Sundial community.
The REVOLT Investment Adds Cable Distribution, Content Studios and a Younger Audience
Sundial’s portfolio had no linear cable distribution before the Offscript deal. REVOLT does. When ESSENCE Ventures took a minority stake in Revolt New Media Holdings LLC, that distribution became available to Sundial brands through the partnership. “There’s a world when you think about bringing ESSENCE and Refinery29 and taking those brands and putting them on that distribution now,” Cedric says.
The deal also adds content production capacity. Revolt operates studios in Atlanta, while Sundial’s offices are entirely in New York. Before the investment was publicly announced, the two companies had already used Revolt’s Atlanta facilities to produce an ESSENCE Festival of Culture® interview featuring artists Latto and Monica.
Demographically, the two portfolios are complementary. Revolt positions itself as multicultural and Gen Z-skewing, younger than Sundial’s core ESSENCE audience. Together, a single advertiser buy can span Black and Latina women across multiple life stages and formats, from cable to digital to live events. Cedric names Coca-Cola as a strategic partner already interested in that combined reach, and notes that large agency holding companies benefit from consolidating purchases into fewer media partners rather than negotiating separately with every brand and creator network.
When Discipline Becomes the Core Product Problem
When two portfolios with multiple live events, creator networks, and brand relationships combine, the first challenge is selection. Cedric draws on advice he says Steve Jobs gave him at Apple: “Focus is about what you say no to.”
Art Basel is the near-term test. Revolt already runs its own annual installation there. Sundial is now working to layer ESSENCE into that event and to bring a partner such as Coca-Cola into a joint experience. Next year’s ESSENCE Festival is the larger canvas; Cedric describes potential celebrity-creator athletic events and competitions as examples of how Revolt’s programming sensibility could operate inside the ESSENCE framework and generate content that retains advertiser value for months after the event ends.
The same discipline governs brand partnerships. Sundial has declined deals Cedric describes as financially attractive but misaligned with its audiences. “We get brands that will reach out to us about things that could be lucrative, but not as genuine and authentic to what our audiences really want,” he says. That selectivity, he argues, is what makes the platform commercially viable.
The Five-Year Goal
Cedric’s five-year vision has two visible development arcs. The first is a writers’ platform: an open contribution layer where independent writers publish under the ESSENCE or Refinery29 masthead and share in the resulting revenue. “How can we reach independent writers, give them the platform of ESSENCE or Refinery29, writing an article, reach our audience, and then share that revenue back?” Cedric says. “That’s the future.”
The more technically ambitious goal is AI-personalized live experiences. Cedric envisions ESSENCE Festival attendees arriving at a curated event that reflects what SMART has learned about their individual interests. “Leverage our technology to understand you, and to know that, ‘Hey, when she gets here, she wants to see X, Y, and Z,’” he says, “and making sure that happens.”
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