Roland Martin Says His Platform Is Real, Chevrolet Should Send Ad Checks To Him, Not Ozy Photo: Roland Martin attends the premiere of Dave Chappelle's untitled documentary during the closing night celebration for the 20th Tribeca Festival, at Radio City Music Hall, on June 19, 2021, in New York. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)
Veteran journalist Roland Martin has injected himself into the Ozy Media drama. That’s the digital media group founded in 2013 by Black entrepreneur Carlos Watson and Samir Rao that is all over the news due to allegations of fraud and financial mismanagement. Over the years, Ozy attracted big-name investors and major partnerships with corporations such as automaker Chevrolet.
By 2020, Ozy had raised more than $83 million in funding, Gizmodo reported.
Martin, who founded his own podcast “Unfiltered” in 2018 and media company Black Star Network (BSN) in September 2021, recently called out Chevrolet for making deals with Ozy instead of dealing with companies like his — what he described as “real” Black-owned media companies.
Martin recently tweeted, “According to the @nytimes, @chevrolet and a lot of other brands spent BIG MONEY on @carlosWatson’s @ozy YouTube show. While we were out here fighting for ad dollars to Black-owned media companies, the ad agencies were happy to send it to Ozy.”
While corporations were courting Ozy, they paid no attention to media companies like his, Martin added. Martin tweeted. “RolandMartinUnfiltered @blkstarnetwork reps got NO LOVE from Chevrolet and their ad agency, and we have REAL numbers and REAL engagement with Black consumers. I’ve told my team to call Chevrolet first thing in the morning. With Ozy imploding, let’s see what they do now.”
In addition to purchasing advertising on Ozy, Chevrolet announced in May that it was sponsoring the OZY Genius Awards (OGAs), which was supposed to offer 10 college students up to $10,000 as well as mentorship.
In the Genius Awards press release, Ozy is described “a next-generation media and entertainment company that aims to help curious people see the world more broadly and more boldly by introducing them to ‘the New and the Next.'”
The press release said that Ozy began as a digital magazine in 2013, and evolved into a modern media company, featuring “award-winning podcasts, 100,000-person festivals and Emmy-winning TV series with leading networks, including A+E, HISTORY, Lifetime, Amazon, Hulu, OWN, PBS and BBC.”
Meanwhile, various news media are reporting that most of these claims by Ozy aren’t true and Ozy’s management has been caught up in a web of deception.
Everything boiled over this weekend, leading to Ozy Media announcing it was shutting down.
A Sept. 26 New York Times article documented the downfall. According to the Times, Ozy boasted about a $40 million investment from financial giant Goldman Sachs, which was apparently impressed by the media company’s huge social media following and its “great relationship” with YouTube.
There wasn’t a great YouTube relationship. Ozy staged a call between Goldman representatives and an impersonator whom Ozy claimed was Alex Piper, the head of unscripted programming for the YouTube Originals team.
It was later revealed that the Piper impersonator had been Ozy’s co-founder and chief operating officer Rao.
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“In addition to Rao’s deception, the Times also found that Ozy’s purported web traffic didn’t add up,” Gizmodo reported. “In 2019, the company said it had 50 million unique monthly users. Yet Comscore, a leading media analytics firm, found that Ozy only reached about 2.5 million people at some points in 2018. Comparatively, it reached approximately 230,000 and 479,000 people in July and July of this year, respectively.”
Ozy claimed to have more than 20 million newsletter subscribers. An investigation is underway. On Sept. 28, the Ozy board said it had hired an outside law firm to investigate the company’s business activities and leadership team. On Oct. 1, Ozy, which has 75 full-time employees, announced that it was shutting down. Ozy CEO Watson promised CNBC that the company will reopen.
