Tobi Oredein

Tobi Oredein is an award-winning journalist, entrepreneur 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 L’Oréal Paris 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 five things: building communities and reaching underserved audiences, building a modern media publishing brand, using AI in a human way in business, entrepreneurship, and working as a modern parent. Founders, marketers, media companies, universities and corporate teams book her, and she is as comfortable in a lecture theatre as on a main stage.

Tobi is a journalist first, and it shows on stage. She reads the book, asks the question the audience is thinking, and lets the guest be the star. She hosts the Black Ballad Weekender main stage in front of 2,000 Black women, and she has interviewed Sabrina Elba, Kamille, Sir Trevor McDonald and Emma Grede on stage.

She is available to host brand events and launches, moderate panels, and lead fireside interviews for companies and organisations who want a host who knows the audience in the room.