It’s a marketer’s dream: Hosting a sold-out event for 10k attendees. That brands are begging to be a part of. Oh, and that was headlined this year by none other than Taraji P. Henson, Kerry Washington, and Jennifer Hudson.
That’s Shareese Bembury-Coakley’s reality as one of the driving forces behind CultureCon, the world’s largest festival for Black creatives and entrepreneurs.
Here’s how she makes the magic happen.
Meet the Master
Shareese Bembury-Coakley
Vice President, Business development and partnerships at CultureCon
Claim to fame: Successfully sold a partnership between the TV show Killing Eve and buy-now-pay-later service Klarna; deliverables included an in-app experience that sourced pieces from Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh’s (truly incredible) wardrobes. (Lesson 0: Look for audience behavior that you can amplify. Bembury-Coakley had noted that viewers were asking questions on social media about designers.)
Lesson 1: It’s not “Why this?”, it’s “Why you?”.
At CultureCon, Bembury-Coakley tells me, people make a run for Activation Alley as soon as it opens.
It’s not just that the activations are amazing or that a particular brand is there — it’s that CultureCon’s attendees have high expectations, because they trust that this year’s activations will be as good as the last. (More on this in a minute.)
With events and experiential spaces becoming ever more saturated, I ask Bembury-Coakley how she stands out in a crowd. Her answer is deceptively simple: Instead of answering the question, “Why do this idea?” answer the question, “Why do this idea with me?”
“It’s not just about it being a unique idea,” she says. “Oftentimes, people can’t answer the ‘with me’ question.” To answer it, evaluate your cultural relevancy, your community, and your consistency.
And think of it as a lens. When you focus your ideas through “why me,” you can frame your deliverables in a way that makes it “as easy as possible to get buy-in.”
Lesson 2: Build trust before opening wallets.
Trust was a through-line in our conversation, both interpersonally and between brands and audience. Bembury-Coakley credits much of her success to having had amazing advocates throughout her career — but “it‘s double-sided,” she says. “It comes with the very heavy responsibility of making sure that you’re also fulfilling your promises on the back end.”
In other words: Trust is not something that Shareese Bembury-Coakley takes lightly.
She carries this responsibility into her work with brands and partnerships. I ask her what makes her say “no” to a CultureCon partnership, and she immediately says, “anything that would betray the trust we’ve built with our community.”
Trust is the underlying reason that Activation Alley is so popular — brand activations “aren’t a necessary evil that you’re connecting with for a free water bottle,” Bembury-Coakley says. They’re “a testament to how authentically our partners have showed up in the past.”
The secret behind the Activation Alley hype is pretty simple, really: Consistency.
Lesson 3: Creators have audiences. Brands have bosses.
“Creators should always remember that their point of contact has a boss,” Bembury-Coakley says. “Usually the person they‘re talking to is a stakeholder — but it’s generally not the key stakeholder.”
“Anything that you can do to be a resource to make it easier on your partner is going to increase the likelihood of them working with you again,” she says. “I think sometimes you look at the brands as a whole, but they are [made up of] individuals.” It’s easy for creators to forget that “figuring how to navigate these brands internally in a way that makes it easy on them” — and that makes them more likely to want to keep working with you.
And on the flip side, “the brand should always remember why they wanted to work with that creator to begin with.” What often happens, she says, is that a creator’s content might be slightly controversial, but once they’ve signed with a brand, the brand “wants them to be extremely brand-safe in a way that would be betraying their audience.”
See? It all comes down to trust.
Masters in Marketing was a proud sponsor of this year’s CultureCon, which took place October 4 – 5, 2025.
Lingering Questions
This Week’s Question
When it comes to building partnerships for CultureCon, how do you decide which people to collaborate with — whether that’s speakers, creators, or community leaders — to make sure they authentically represent CultureCon’s mission and resonate with your audience? —Deesha Laxsav, Senior manager of brand marketing, Clutch
This Week’s Answer
Bembury-Coakley: At CultureCon, data is paramount to everything we do. So, we‘re not making assumptions about our audience, we’re not just coming up with ideas. We’re really letting that [data] inform everything that you see.
So, the programming that you see being hyper-relevant? Our communities told us what they wanted, the brands that they like to engage with, the speakers they wanted to hear from, and we listened to them.
I think a lot of brands and communities are sometimes trying to go against the grain, trying to push something on their audience, and it‘s not what they want. We evolve and iterate [based on data], and that’s why the brands and the community and the speakers can come out and have a great time.
Next Week’s Lingering Question
Bembury-Coakley asks: I think nostalgia is something that‘s been overdone. I would love to know: What’s a better way for brands to engage with communities or consumers that they want to connect with?
