ABOUT

At Last year, in partnership with the U.S. Black Chambers Inc., Google launched Black-owned Friday—a reframing of the busiest shopping day of the year into a day to support Black-owned businesses. This year, they wanted to maintain the momentum of the movement, directly impact many more businesses, and do more than inspire by getting people to act. We tapped Grammy-Award winning artist T-Pain to craft and produce a song that encourages consumers to support Black-owned businesses—no matter what they’re shopping for. The song called out a wide variety of products from vintage furniture and bath bombs to skillets and dog hats. We brought the song to life with a unique video that let people directly shop over 100 products from more than 50 Black-owned businesses. The video prominently displayed Google's Black-owned business badge in each scene, and called out specific references of how to use Google to search for Black-owned shops. Big brands have used product placement in music videos to get attention for their brands for decades, but smaller businesses don't have the luxury of budgets and resources to secure award-winning artists to promote their product. So we used the power of Google to give small Black-owned businesses an opportunity for their product to show up in a big way. Nine of the business owners whose products were shown in the video were featured alongside our celebrity talent, which included T-Pain, multi-platinum selling singer Normani, comedian Desi Banks, and emerging singer/actress Tanerélle.