Karen Blackett, OBE

CHAIRWOMAN, MediaCom UK

Karen Blackett is chairwoman of media buying and planning agency MediaCom where clients include Coca-Cola, BSkyB, Audi and Volkswagen. She was UK chief executive for five years, having joined the agency 20 years ago, and has helped launch the first government-backed apprenticeship scheme for the creative industry, which she hopes will foster diversity within marketing, advertising and communications. Warned by her father that being both black and a woman would mean she had to work twice as hard, Reading-born Blackett has done just that, and was named the UK’s most influential black person in the UK in the 2015 PowerList, as well as on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour Power List in the same year. She describes spending time with her five-year-old son Isaac as her ‘tonic’, and gets back to her Caribbean roots at her home in Barbados.

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