Think Multicultural

Over at The Big Tent at AdAge.com, Bill Imada thinks that when it comes to multicultural media buying, focused multicultural ad agencies are better than big multinational ad agencies. Read the whole thing for yourself here, but here’s the gist of his argument:

Having worked with a few of these firms, I know first-hand that these large, often multinational media firms don’t offer the same level of strategic thinking, creativity, cultural awareness, or even the promised savings that ethnic media experts offer and often guarantee.

And while most ethnic advertising firms offer a full array of media services as part of their primary business offerings, nearly all of the mass-market firms are simply trying to appear as if they can do it all — when they really can’t.

If I were a marketer searching for an ethnic media expert, I certainly wouldn’t trust the mass-market media firms. But even if I didn’t have a choice, I’d still demand some proof from the mass-market firms to support their claims of being ethnic media experts. And so should you.

No, Ford and Chrysler aren’t crying because Toyota’s killing them. Well, maybe they are, but I’m not writing about that. This is about connecting to multicultural consumers on an emotional level.

According to the StrategicVision automotive consultancy, car makers have to understand the “emotional payoff” of their cars to multicultural consumers in order to sell them.

StrategicVision found that Hispanics, African-Americans, and Asians all think differently about cars and connect to their cars emotionally in different ways.

So basically, this is a reiteration of what all of the recent studies are saying – to reach multicultural consumers, you have to understand how they are different, how they are affected by language and culture, and speak to them on a level they understand and connect with.

If you want to see where the future of advertising will be, check out this report from eMarketer. According to Group M, online advertising spending will pass TV ad spending in 2009.

Next year!? Everybody knew that online ad spending around the world was growing very quickly and the overall ad market was not growing near so quickly, but this one caught me completely off guard. I never would have guessed it would happen so soon.

Obviously the UK ad market is very different from the US ad market, and it will quite some time until it happens here, but nonetheless, the future is coming much faster than we think.