Erica Hughes is helping bridge the gap between culture and finance, and she’s doing that as the senior director of multicultural marketing at Ally. Hughes attended SelectCon in Atlanta and spoke with rolling out about their partnership with UnitedMasters and the importance of creatives understanding their finances.
What is your role?
My role at Ally as the senior director of multicultural marketing is to build content, media, and programs to help Ally bridge the gap between culture and finance with multicultural communities. We partner with partners like United Masters because they have a huge groundswell and community of creators that help us connect as a financial services brand to talk about generational wealth, economic mobility, all the things that are really important to creators, but all the things that are also different for creators than you see for those who work nine to five. We’re really excited to be partners with United Masters and helping drive this conversation about how you make sure that you’re creating wealth for yourself for the creative economy.
Why is it important for musicians and creatives to know the financial side of their business?
Finance is really the basis of everything you do in any industry that you’re in, music business included, and creator economy included, especially because a lot of minority-owned businesses don’t last within the first two years of coming into fruition. A lot of those reasons are financially related. [Suppose] we can start to have conversations on the ground level about how you make sure that you’re thinking about your financial education for your business and the way you think about your personal finances to manage that in a more holistic way. I think that’ll help us create a more successful cycle of business and for creators and creatives too.
What is your superpower?
My superpower is truly helping communities of color unleash the power within them. I come from the inner city of Flint, Michigan, so coming from a city like Flint, there are mainly minorities, and you see a lot of different things. For me to be able to be extremely successful, I have a passion for making sure that communities of color are well within and are unleashing the power within them.
Why should more women of color be in leadership roles?
Women of color and Black women are leaders. Black women are so powerful in the sense that a lot of us have had to bootstrap it throughout our whole lives. We’re caregivers for family members, for kids, and I think that makes for amazing leaders. The leadership skills that you have from being a mother or a caregiver for your mother and leading through your family translate so well to corporate America and any business-type environment. I also think that when you have more diversity at the table, your ideas are better before that. Research has said that when your team is diverse and your company is diverse you have a better portfolio-forming outcome as a business, which is extremely important. Lastly, I think when you’re building events that appeal to the Black and Hispanic community, you have to have people who have a seat at the table who understand these audiences. I talked before about my background from Flint, Michigan, and there’s no way that I would be able to understand creators and all the things that they’re going through if I didn’t live it each and every day. It just makes for more authenticity when you’re creating events and creating things for people and communities of color.
