Tobi Oredein

Tobi Oredein is an award-winning entrepreneur, journalist and speaker. She is the founder and CEO of Black Ballad, the leading media platform and community for Black women in Britain. She is a businesswoman with a mission. Black Ballad has outlasted its mainstream competitors and, in the process, evened the media playing field for Black female journalists and writers, paying over £1.5 million to Black women along the way. Through her leadership she has become a prominent voice in conversations about race, culture and gender in Britain.

Tobi has led Black Ballad’s transformation from a free site to a membership model, and now to a media company that produces research and insights so brands can serve this audience better and Black women get the service they deserve.

Tobi has collaborated with major brands including L’Oréal Paris, Garnier, Google, This Girl Can, the NHS and Spotify to create campaigns and experiences that empower Black women to live their best lives. These partnerships deliver content that resonates deeply with Black women while helping brands engage authentically with an audience that is too often overlooked.

In celebration of Black Ballad’s tenth anniversary, Tobi created the Black Ballad Weekender, a flagship event that brings together 2,000 Black women from across the UK for a weekend of ambition, community and inspiration through panel talks, masterclasses and brand activations. The Weekender showcases Black talent across industries and is fast becoming a staple in the cultural calendar for Black British women.

Before Black Ballad, Tobi spent a decade in journalism, starting at TV Times and IPC Media, and she has written for The Guardian and The Independent. She still writes every week: her Founder’s Letter goes out to more than 23,000 readers and is the longest-running newsletter for Black women in the UK.

She is a wife, a mum of two and a Londoner, and she writes openly about founding a company in the messy middle: past the launch, before the exit, still scaling.

Black Ballad started in 2014 because Black women were almost absent from newsrooms and from the pages of the magazines Tobi worked on. Under Tobi’s leadership it has gone from a free site to a membership model, and now to a media company that produces research and insights so brands can serve this audience better and Black women get the service they deserve. It runs the UK’s biggest weekend for Black women and has outlasted the mainstream titles that launched alongside it.

Everything Black Ballad makes starts with what its readers actually say. It holds over 100 million data points on an audience no one else has this level of insight into: her finances, her beauty and hair habits, her health concerns, her travel ambitions and everything in between. That data feeds the editorial, the events and the partnerships, which is why brands from Armani Beauty to the NHS come back.

Tobi is an international public speaker who has spent twelve years building a media brand in public, and she talks about it the way she writes: first person, specific, and honest about what went wrong. She brings Black Ballad’s audience data with her, so a room leaves with numbers as well as a story.

She speaks on four things: building communities and reaching underserved audiences, using AI in a human way in business, entrepreneurship, and working as a modern parent. She guest lectures on the same themes for journalism, media, marketing and business students, using real Black Ballad numbers and real mistakes.

Her journalism training shows when she is the one asking the questions. She hosts the Black Ballad Weekender main stage in front of 2,000 Black women, moderates panels for brands, media companies and cultural institutions, and has interviewed Kerry Washington, Sabrina Elba, Kamille and Emma Grede on stage.

Most brands and media companies want to reach Black women and get it wrong: the wrong message, the wrong channel, the wrong moment, or a campaign that is forgotten the day it ends. Tobi has spent twelve years building the community, the data and the trust that show what works, and she consults for companies that want to get it right. Her work with Garnier Haircare, below, is the proof.

She works with marketing, insight and leadership teams on how to reach and keep underserved audiences, and how to build a community that lasts rather than a campaign that ends. Everything is grounded in Black Ballad’s 100 million data points and what its readers actually say, so the advice comes with evidence, not opinion.

Tobi started her career in journalism and still freelances. She writes on race, gender and where the two meet, and on how that intersection shapes the things Black women live with every day: beauty, politics, health and pop culture.

Her comment pieces and features have run in The Guardian, the BBC, BuzzFeed, Grazia, Glamour, Stylist and many other titles, and every week she writes the Founder’s Letter, Black Ballad’s newsletter to more than 23,000 subscribers.