Think Multicultural

A Reuters story from last Friday made the bold prediction that not everybody will get rich from online advertising.

The gist of the story is that although ad dollars are flowing to online marketing, there are so many companies rushing to launch advertising-supported web properties that at some point there will too many ad-supported properties for the ads to actually support.

I’m going to go ahead and file that under “Things I just assumed were true.”

Using basic economics principles (unlike psychology, I did take econ):

1) Where there is demand, there will be supply. Because there is a lot of demand for online properties on which to advertise, new web properties are springing up every day.

2) Markets are not perfectly efficient. Supply and demand will almost never exactly match up. Because there is a lot of demand for website advertising space and some websites will make a lot of money, it is a certainty that too many people will get into the business.

That’s not to say that people should not be launching new ad-supported web ventures. Quite the contrary, one reason Reuters wrote an article is that there is a lot of demand for quality ad placements online. But the emphasis is on “quality.” Ad-supported ventures, both large and small, will fail because they don’t connect with people. With all the good ideas and great new websites, there will be turkeys. And the turkeys will fail.

There will also continue to be winners, and the winners will succeed. The real issue for new websites is not to worry that there will be winners and losers, but rather to focus on creating value through a quality website that connects with people. If a website does that, the pageviews and ad impressions will come, and so will the advertisers.

The backlash against Facebook has started. That’s not really shocking news. Everything that gets as much hype as Facebook has recently must have a backlash. It’s some kind of psychology rule that I would probably know if I had ever taken psychology. But I didn’t.

When I talk about a backlash against Facebook, I’m not talking about the “digerati” in Silicon Valley and New York, led by TechCrunch, who get all worked up about the latest thing and then ditch it in fifteen minutes. They’re just a parody of themselves. The first shot in the Facebook backlash that I can take seriously came from a thirtysomething mom in Orange County.

Mayrav Saar is a brilliantly funny columnist for the Orange County Register. My friends and I read her column religiously (I subscribe via rss feed) even though we don’t live anywhere near Orange County and couldn’t have less in common with her target audience there.

Mayrav’s column this week is about how she’s over Facebook. In her opinion, it’s not really fun and it’s not really useful – it’s just some creepy utility that annoys you while trying to collect every last piece of information about you.

Or, I might add, allows college students to waste time, which is what it was originally designed for anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not declaring Facebook dead. Far from it. They’re about to close a VC funding valuing the company at about 10 kajillion dollars and Google is scrambling to ward off whatever “threat” that Facebook poses. I’m just saying that maybe Facebook isn’t really cool anymore. Maybe all those comparisons to GeoCities aren’t so outlandish after all.

What does this have to do with multicultural marketing and advertising? As marketers, we are always trying to get to where the customers are and to associate our brand with their positive feelings for the newest and coolest. In today’s online world, where clients demand the newest and freshest ideas and then only spend money on the tried and true, Facebook, like SecondLife before it, may be shaping up to be neither tried and true nor fresh and cool. Online advertising is a treacherous world where the crystal ball is very, very murky.

Facebook could be the next GeoCities or it could be the next Google. Tread carefully.

Way back sometime in September, the New York times did a profile of John Gallegos from Grupo Gallegos.

The article does a decent job of talking about the attractiveness of the Hispanic market overall and the Hispanic ad market in particular.

The story includes this quote by Gallegos on why anyone would advertise to the low-income Hispanic demographic, which makes the case for the Hispanic market as well as any I’ve heard:

“You ask: the guy who just came across the border with a coyote, do I want to go after him, too? Well, he’s going to get a job. He’s going to work. He’s going to start buying products and contributing to the economy. So while he might not be viable for a Mercedes today, I can introduce you to people who came here illegally or legally, with nothing, and are now driving a Mercedes. Advertising is aspirational. I want to aim ahead of where my audience is. Unless it’s the equivalent of beef to Hindus, I always say, any product and any service should be sold to Latinos in this country.”

He’s right. Although not all Hispanics drive new cars and buy Playstations right now, one of the reasons that many Hispanics immigrate to the US is because it gives them the opportunity to aspire to those things.

There’s a funny part later in the article where, although the article is ostensibly about how the Hispanic market is maturing and Hispanics are a growing sector of the US economy, the NYTimes reporter still feels the need to phonetically spell out how to say “Gallegos.” Pretty funny.

The end of the article is by far the strongest part. The reporter asks whether bilingualism and biculturalism in the Hispanic market will disappear the way it has in other American cultures and subcultures. The example she uses is that of Yiddish print ads from the early 20th century that were in both English and Yiddish, similar to a lot of the Spanglish ads you see today. As Hispanics become a larger and more mainstream part of the US economy and culture, will the Spanish language come with them into the mainstream? Will Spanish-speaking Hispanics become the norm in the US and spread to the rest of the country, or will today’s Hispanic children and their children after them embrace English and leave their Spanish roots behind them? What then of Hispanic advertising? The same fate as Yiddish ads for Woodbury’s Hair Tonic?