by 
Courtesy of Monique Nelson
Sports Illustrated and Empower Onyx are highlighting the diverse journeys of Black women through sports, from veteran athletes to rising stars, coaches, executives and more, in the series, Elle-evate: 100 Influential Black Women in Sports.
Monique Nelson has made her life’s work caring for other people. As president and CEO of UniWorld Group, the nation’s oldest black marketing agency, the Brooklyn native has taken her perspective around the world, from Beijing to Seoul, Guangzhou, São Paulo and Milan, to boot. At UniWorld Group, Nelson and her team focus on adding diverse perspectives to the mainstream, including working with ESPN’s undefeated and the launch of a new NIL program for black college athletes in the fall. But this type of work is not new to Nelson.
Before taking over the agency from founder Bryon Lewis in May 2012, Nelson was the global entertainment marketing leader at Motorola, making sure people of color and the poor could “participate,” in his words, in culture. digital as you go slowly. he seized the globe. Now, after 12 years at the helm of the agency, he reflects on the international journey he undertook to end up at UniWorld, his hometown, and his work to address prejudices about the exceptionalism and perfectionism of people from color around the world.
Long before traveling the world, Nelson was at home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a classically trained vocalist attending LaGuardia High School and working toward her future at Vanderbilt University. “I was lucky enough to get the Posse Scholarship my senior year, for schools looking for more inclusive campuses,” she recalls. The Posse Foundation is a college access and youth leadership development program that provides full-tuition leadership scholarships to public high school students with Posse partner colleges and universities. Nelson, who is currently on the New York Advisory Board for the foundation, was in the pilot of the program with Vanderbilt. “We had the second black queen of the homecoming dance. We had the second president of the Black Student Government Association. If I look back now, what [experience] it started my whole thought process that inclusion is the answer,” says Nelson. “Solving problems really is a lot easier when you have all the perspectives.”
Nelson left Vanderbilt to take up his role at Motorola, where he ensured that people of color and from different socioeconomic backgrounds were considered in the burgeoning digital markets for new technologies. “I really cured my teeth in tech; I was able to do that globally. There were a lot of innovation centers around the world. One in Japan, one in Shibuya where they do the whole game, one in India, one in Milan for fashion,” he says. “This is probably like 2000, maybe ’99. For the United States, this technology was still new. But you went somewhere else and everybody already had a phone, and they were doing amazing things with it, adding accessories to it, matching outfits.”
Nelson credits his time abroad as giving him an international perspective, which was a constant asset as it led companies to greater fluidity and intentional cultural nuance. “I was grateful to be on that team so I could experience that culture mattered, everywhere,” she says. “You couldn’t do the same in Milan as you would in the United Arab Emirates or Dubai, right? I had to think a lot about what the culture meant, even though the phone was going to be ubiquitous; people were not.”
Her current role has allowed Nelson to further her cultural fluency and advocacy work at UniWorld Group, the company’s oldest African-American marketing agency, which was founded in 1969. She came to UWG in 2007 as an account director, before quickly become a director of brand marketing. entertainment and integration, around the same time that global Internet culture was booming. She recalls that Lewis appreciated the digital mindset of his leadership, something he was less fluent in due to the generation gap.
“We realized that it will no longer be just television, radio and the press. You have the Internet, this digital space, which is going to come to life.” This put her in another unique position to ensure underrepresented groups were considered as these emerging technologies took over the world. “I just sat through a lot of the meetings, making sure they didn’t forget us, or forget that black people were going to be a part of this,” she says. “People of color were also going to participate, so don’t leave us out.”
When global brands and companies reached out to Black leadership agencies in the summer of 2020, Nelson and his team were more than ready. “If we weren’t built for this moment, I don’t know who works. It was just the quintessential moment where you think it’s dark. But I looked at that moment and saw the true clarity,” he says. “People can really see what’s going on right now, and we’re going to use it as an opportunity to support each other in our purpose. We had a purpose before purpose was a thing.”
Today, Nelson is focused on being a strong example of lovingly leading her two sons and supporting her partner. She hopes that future generations, and especially Black women looking to run businesses and change industries, will take their network into account and value those who keep us connected to reality. “I would say a strong partnership bond, a strong community is key to being successful at any level,” she says. “You’re never good at it all the time. You just have to have people around you who are like, Okay, excuse my French, but that wasn’t right. Right? Just to give you that relief and that ability to be your best. Don’t be afraid to be wrong. You make much more progress when you make a mistake. It’s not always up to you.
When it comes to brands that haven’t caught up with the kinds of actions Nelson advocates, his advice is simple. “Brands that are really focused on the customer and the consumer are hypersensitive to this right now and they should be focused. If you don’t have a multicultural strategy or at least a point of view in your diverse market, I don’t know how you’re going to be in business,” she says. “The brilliant thing about discovering facts is that you found them; you cannot ‘un-find’ it. That’s what we’re trying to do, raise awareness. It will never go away. Difference and fear are always intertwined; they will never leave. We just have to know they’re there and get people to deconstruct and be reflective about what that means at work.”
Naya Samuel is a contributor to empower onyxa diverse multi-channel platform that celebrates the stories and transformative power of sports for Black women and girls.
