Jonathan Jackson is a co-founder and former head of corporate brand at Blavity Inc., the largest media company for black millennials, which maintains five unique sites covering travel, lifestyle, beauty, technology, and culture. At Blavity, he oversaw community engagement, strategic partnerships and brand initiatives to help media clients and agencies better serve their audiences and engage more authentically in culture.
While at the Berkman Klein Center, he will be looking for frameworks and unique ways to measure black cultural influence (and the economic impact of black creativity) both inside the U.S. and abroad. He'll also be looking at the relationship between the advertising and marketing landscape, and its complicated relationship with black cultural outputs, and new models for sustainability and commerce that give black creators and makers a sustainable way to grow and produce their work.
As individual creators begin functioning more large media entities, he wants to explore what that means for how black creativity is distributed, consumed, and commoditized, and what that means for new business models, intellectual property, and consumption of culture across borders and regions in and outside the African Diaspora. He is also interested in tools to help people take control of their digital influence and monetization strategies. You can find him intermittently tweeting and aggressively liking things on Twitter, or on Instagram with captions that are much too long at (@jon__jackson).
