Freelancers often find themselves at the bottom of the corporate ladder when it comes to rights and payments. The fear of tarnishing their reputation or losing potential future work leads many to remain silent when clients exploit their labor. As a result, sometimes we sacrifice our rightful earnings, allowing clients and companies to trample over our clear rights to be compensated fairly for our work.
In this particular installment of my “Name and Shame” article series, I am addressing the practices of “Brand Advance Limited” and “BA Diversity Media,” two companies in the inclusive advertising and media industries.
Through transparency and accountability, I hope to encourage a change in how freelancers are treated and to ensure that we all receive the respect and payment we deserve.
Please note that any name marked with an asterisk (*) during its introduction is a pseudonym and not the individual’s real name.
How I Joined
Back in 2021, I had seen an editor I followed on X (then Twitter), Jamie*, who shared that a digital magazine, Chapter Z, was looking for writers applications.
I reached out to him via e-mail and was onboarded roughly a month later.
At that time, we were a team of eight writers, each receiving bylines on topics handpicked by Jaime twice a week. Chapter Z was intended to be a digital magazine featuring thought pieces on video games, media, fashion, sports, and news.
It was a subsidiary of the UK-based company, Brand Advance Limited. BAL offered comprehensive services for reaching minority and underrepresented consumers, assisting brands and agencies in producing truly inclusive advertisements.
How We Got Paid
The payment process was straightforward in theory, but as you might expect from the fact that you’re reading this article, it was incredibly tedious in practice. Here’s a brief summary:
- One of our bylines was published by the magazine.
- We’d immediately send an invoice with the published article(s).
- We’d wait 30 days.
- Accounting would then pay us.
During my first few months working with BAL and Chapter Z, all my invoices were paid on time. Perhaps it was just beginner’s luck.
What The Work Was
The other writers and I were thrilled with the topics Jamie assigned us. As writers who typically catered to SEO-driven clients, the chance to write without the constraints of keyword usage was refreshing.
We had to submit our articles within a tight four-hour window since they were all time-sensitive, which provided excellent training for writing under pressure. The payment was also decent, at least from my perspective.
Although we hadn’t spent much time with Jamie as editor-in-chief, he had been consistently kind and supportive in all of our writing endeavors. A few months into the new year, we received the news that Jamie had been replaced by Anne* as editor-in-chief. I found this strange, given that we had only worked with Jamie for about four months, but I rationalized it as something typical in the business world.
What I didn’t anticipate was what this change truly signified.
That would become clearer as time went by.
The Evolution
After Jamie was replaced by Anne, a few things changed. While Jamie had previously assigned us articles, Anne required us to pitch our own original ideas to her.
At first, I worked exclusively writing for Chapter Z, but Anne soon invited me to write for Gen B, the PoC British music-focused magazine.
Later, the number of writers increased, and so did the magazines. Chapter Z and Gen B both had their USA counterparts, making them four magazines, and another editor-in-chief, Joubert* was assigned to the Gen B duo.
Chapter Z USA would focus on Gen Z news on this side of the pond, while Gen B USA focused on PoC music and arts. Then, Gen Hx was created, with a focus on a Hispanic audience. Later on, HypeQ also joined the collective, with a focus on LGBTQ+ news. A final magazine was added: Includedmag, which featured news and thought pieces on disabled people.
I couldn’t imagine how Joubert and Anne managed so many articles from so many writers, but I figured they had to be really well paid to do so.
Regardless, working with Anne and Joubert as editors-in-chief was amazing. Sometimes, Anne would ask me to interview really famous authors, by asking me to come up with questions to ask them via Google Docs, and then writing articles about them.
However, the pieces fell through last minute, for reasons unknown to me to this day. At some point they even offered posting some of our articles in the Evening Standard. I was baffled with the opportunity. This also didn’t take place.
I worked writing for Chapter Z, Chapter Z USA, Gen B, Gen B USA & Gen Hx for several months. I loved working for them, as it helped me explore thought opinion pieces that my SEO and scriptwriting clients would’ve scoffed at instantly, and I still didn’t have the confidence to pitch to a larger, higher paying magazine for them.
It was the perfect middle ground. I did wonder, however, how the magazines brought in any money to pay for the writers and the editors.
They didn’t seem to have any kind of advertising going on, but I figured that either it was one of these cases:
- The magazines were still growing in audience and the Brand Advance team was planning to advertise on them eventually, as a long-term project. They just hadn’t gotten to that point yet.
- The magazines were more of a corporate social responsibility-ish concept to help budding freelancers kick off their careers.
However, it wasn’t just the working modality that shifted; something else changed as well. Now, whenever I sent an invoice, it would take at least two months instead of the established thirty days. Sometimes, I had to perform several follow-ups for the same invoice, without receiving any confirmation from the accounting e-mail.
Since I had no contact with the team’s other writers, I thought this was just happening to me. At first, I paid it no mind, but so many invoices were going unpaid for months that I had to begin pestering both Anne and Joubert with status updates on them. Both editors-in-chief mentioned not having knowledge of the goings-on of the accounting department, but they were aware that many people were apparently not being paid.
This was a little disconcerting, but, once again, I made the mistake of rationalizing it in favor of the company.
This was just the accounting department being overwhelmed with the needs of the actual company, plus managing payments for more than 30 freelancers. Joubert even had me translate a press release mentioning how the company had basically multiplied its profits, expanded across the UK, France, Germany, India, Canada, and the US, and had hired a new CEO EMEA. If the press release was any indicator, the company was swimming in money.
The First Fall
But fast forward to October 2022, and Anne sends an e-mail mentioning how the magazines’ publication output would be slashed. Article pitches would be reduced, and some magazines would close for good. This was logically because of budget constraints. Perhaps the project wasn’t working.
I invoiced for all of my work until then as soon as Anne announced this. Anne ended up resigning, and Joubert took over all of the remaining magazines in December 2022. I had written many articles for all of the magazines, except for HypeQ and Included.
However, I only received a small payment in December of 2022. I pushed forward. Joubert requested for me to send his prior invoices.
I did, but still didn’t receive payment, and accounting kept ignoring my emails.
Finally, in early 2023, contacted another of the magazine’s writers, Fred* who recommended I reach out to the company’s CEO.
I did so, and he quickly responded. In our interaction, he was understanding, appreciative of my work, and came up with a solution in less than an hour. Accounting sent over payment for one of my outstanding invoices immediately, but not the other. Since these were big invoices for me, I felt guilty of bothering the CEO with the request, but in hindsight, this was a dumb mistake on my end.
I should’ve followed up with the payment for the other invoice right away, but I was so grateful that he had provided me with a solution immediately that I decided to leave that for another date.
I’d greatly regret that later on. The magazines were then paused for several months.
The Project Begins Again
A new editor-in-chief, Vincent*, reached out in September that same year to see if I was interested in writing for Chapter Z again. The magazine was going to be revived, and they were eager for some articles. Excited at the opportunity to write about interesting topics again, I sent over some pitches. Vincent published two of these, but soon my e-mails went unanswered for months, at least until November 2023.
This time, the CEO of Brand Advance Limited reached out to the writers to see If anyone was interested in writing for the magazines again.
His communications implied eagerness, so I quickly jumped on board.
BA Diversity Media Replaces Brand Advance Limited
This is where the legal matters start to become more complex. I later discovered that BA Diversity Media, the company to which we would now be sending our invoices, was actually distinct from Brand Advance Limited.
This distinction will become important later.
Anyway, this time, our editor-in-chief was Amelia*, and we’d be working with much more organization than before.
We’d work by adding our pitches to a Google Sheets, and Amelia would handpick the best ones for each magazine. They even hired a SEO specialist to perform keyword research on all of our pitches so we’d know what keywords to integrate, bless his heart.
These new processes, plus the CEO’s enthusiasm, let me know that this time, the project would be long-term. We resumed work in January 2024, and I resent my old invoice from 2023 along with newer ones.
However, things went downhill really fast. Just two months after we began working with Amelia, she was replaced with Laura*, and my past invoices went unanswered once more.
I also took note of something far more sinister.
Laura seemed to be overworked. Her communications implied that she was working as editor-in-chief for the magazines as an extra task on her platter as a full-time employee of BA Diversity Media. Although she never confirmed this, it was a little jarring considering how eager all of the other editors-in-chief behaved.
By April, Laura announced that we’d get paid less for our articles moving forward.
No stranger to the magazines being put on hiatus by this point, I was already ready for them to cancel the project once more. Thus, I wrote less and less articles and kept e-mailing accounting for my payments. Once more, crickets.
The Cat Is Out of the Bag
Finally, after several months trying to communicate with the team and having our invoices unanswered, a brave writer from the team sent a mass e-mail inquiring what was going on.
Brace yourself. Things get really messy moving forward.
This had been the exact same thing that happened to me. The. Exact. Same.
Another writer quickly echoed the sentiment.
Okay. This was getting out of hand. It seemed like everyone had been operating under the same knowledge as myself for months. They kept writing with the expectation they’d be paid, but they weren’t.
The CEO chimed in and reassured us that all writers would be paid that day. Great!
They also mentioned how one of the companies (BAL) was going to be closed. This was unfortunate, and having written for them for years by then, definitely struck a chord with me. I’d really miss writing about topics I loved, but at least we’d all get paid and all of the endless invoice-chasing would cease.
At least, I thought that, until the company’s managing director revealed that the company would be put into CVA.
Anxious, I asked for a timeline. I had already gone through a similar process with another company who had filed for bankruptcy and never paid their freelancers. I decided to wait until any of the so-called administrators reached out.
As you can imagine, they never did. A colleague resurrected the e-mail thread a week later.
Other writes suggested joining to discuss solutions. We agreed to redact a letter mentioning how we’d formally request payment or take action on social media in case we never received it.
In response, we were told we’d get paid again. This time, on June 3rd.
Of course, this was yet another lie.
We spent the next month either sending more back and forth with the CEO, who kept requesting empathy when we were literally being scammed out of our money.
Our articles, which took us hours of research and work, were live on all of the magazines’ websites, and yet we still weren’t paid by them.
No creditors had reached out, and it was clear they weren’t going to.
Where was the empathy for us?
After some additional back and forth, the CEO mentioned how all articles written for BA Diversity Media would be paid.
Understanding the situation, albeit disappointed that it had been handled so terribly, I proposed a payment plan until our outstanding invoices were paid. Things seemed to go in that direction, and we were even asked for our outstanding invoices to move forward. Obviously, this meant more back and forth, several follow ups and ignored e-mails for weeks until we got any sort of response.
Eventually, the managing director requested I change some of the information on the invoices before they could process them.
I had already learned to not get my hopes too high with this company, but it seemed like finally I’d get paid for my work.
Except that I wouldn’t.
This time, the CEO claimed I couldn’t be paid for any articles before February 2024, despite them being currently used for the magazines anyway, and despite all of their invoices having been sent months, some of them years before that.
Apparently, this was because these articles were written for Brand Advance Limited, which was under insolvency, and not BA Diversity Media, which is the currently running company, and formed in 2024.
Although I’m not a lawyer, this didn’t make much sense to me, since the magazines were still posting content, and still using our unpaid articles from back then. Nothing seemed to prevent the company from paying its debts considering this was content they were still actively using, and had no intention of removing.
Plus, BA Diversity Media had history publishing content on their social media since 2022, so I was aware it was not a new company.
And knowing the track record, this was likely another lie to avoid paying.
But then again, I’m not a lawyer.
Still eager to receive my money, I dug up more information on the company to take things public myself.
What I did not expect, was to find something so concerning as I did.
The Glassdoor Reviews
I looked up the company’s name on Glassdoor. I blamed myself for not investigating more on the company before, but oh well, there I was.
I was shocked that all of its reviews were so dreadful.
Almost all of them blamed management for one thing or the other.
It seemed like the mismanagement and mistreatment of the company’s workforce wasn’t limited just to its freelancers, but also to its employees.
Employees overworked and underpaid. Treating employees as slaves. This one, in particular, left me flabbergasted.
After digging up some more, I found out that the company’s freelancers weren’t the only ones not getting paid.
The Providers Were Also Scammed
A quick LinkedIn search to some of the company profiles led me to discovering someone else, who was not a writer, complaining about Brand Advance Limited’s failure to pay them. I reached out to them for insight on their situation.
A company called Motivead had followed up for payments on LinkedIn and other platforms after no one at the BA Diversity Media or Brand Advance Limited team provided them with information, or payment, of course. They were also unsuccessful in receiving it.
After discussing the situation with one of its members, he also revealed to me that other companies also had outstanding invoices of over $100,000, and were in the same situation.
The Bottom Line
This serves as a cautionary tale for freelancers and service providers considering working with this company or any of its affiliates. While the company itself isn’t a scam, its management is clearly so poor and irresponsible that one must approach any business dealings with extreme caution.
By naming and holding accountable those who neglect their financial obligations, we can begin to shift the narrative and empower freelancers to assert their rights without fear of retribution.
I hope that, through this article, you’ll avoid the mistakes I made in continuing to work for a company that consistently showed me so many red flags, and yet, perhaps in my deluded belief that they valued my work, chose to ignore.
