How Shar Caesar Douglas brought #YouTubeBlack to EMEA

Shar Caesar Douglas is known for leading with a diversity-first approach in how she supports more than 30 million YouTube creators across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). See Ad Age's 40 Under 40 list here. As YouTube’s head of creator marketing for the region (and the team she helped build from scratch), the 36-year-old taps into her understanding of cultural communities to ensure YouTube’s campaigns are representative of regional diversity. To this end, Caesar Douglas helped bring #YouTubeBlack, a commitment to uplift and grow Black creators on the platform, to the U.K, in 2019 and Sub-Saharan Africa in 2020. Earlier this year, she orchestrated EMEA’s launch of the $100 million #YouTubeBlack Voices Content Fund, which generated nearly 25 million views. Internally, Caesar Douglas is seen as a champion of employee education around social justice issues as part of YouTube EMEA’s Racial Justice Steering Committee. She also coaches colleagues through performance reviews and challenging experiences as co-lead of Google EMEA’s Black and Latinx Marketer group. In addition, she is co-founder of The Peak Project, a non-profit that drives inclusion and education through reading, and is an angel investor in minority-led healthcare and fem-tech. If you could have dinner with one person, alive or dead, who would it be and why? Rihanna; on top of being an incredible artist and storyteller, I’m so impressed by how she’s created and grown international businesses while maintaining a commitment to diversity. What are the top two social media sites you use on a regular basis? I watch a lot of YouTube, naturally. Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of the Formula 1 channel. And then I love Dimma Umeh’s channel; she’s from Nigeria and we brought her to Cannes Lions 2019 (along with other Black creators from the U.S., Germany and France) to do a panel on diversity in advertising. What's currently on your bedside reading list? “Becoming Supernatural,” by Joe Dispenza. It’s all about using meditation to manifest your dreams. I’m big on setting goals and recently started using his manifesting exercise at the beginning of every quarter. Every year I like to reread a couple of books that have moved me, and this year it’s “Girl, Woman, Other,” by Bernardine Evaristo and "Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype," by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Esté. What was the last show you binge-watched? "Lupin" season 2. When I lived in London, we would train to Paris all the time. Now that I live in Washington, D.C., I loved being transported back through the show. At what age do you hope to retire? 50. There’s still so much that I want to accomplish as a marketer, like running a carbon-neutral marketing team, for example. But I also see my career evolving to focus on purpose-driven work, whether that’s making an impact in business or civil service. See Ad Age's 40 Under 40 list here. Correction: Shar Caesar Douglas is 36. Her age was misstated in an earlier version of this article.

How Shar Caesar Douglas brought #YouTubeBlack to EMEA

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