If you’ve worked in multicultural marketing at any point in your professional life, you undoubtedly heard some reference to what makes multicultural audiences different from their general market counterparts. One point of difference I have heard over and over, in various forms and variations, for audiences as diverse as Hispanics, African-Americans, and even Asian Americans, is their heavy social tendencies. They typically have larger households, non-nuclear families, and bigger social groups (that often mix family and friends interchangeably).

If you follow new media and digital trends at all, you’ve also undoubtedly seen statistics about how multicultural audiences over-index in social media usage (think social networking, blogging, instant messaging, etc.).

I just read a very interesting article by Joe Marchese of MediaPost positing that the agency of record of the future will be, at it’s core, the social media agency of record.

Mr. Marchese looks at how social media is transforming the advertising business, and makes a case for each type of current agency model, and handicaps how each is positioned to be the coveted “Social Media Agency of Record.”

The interesting thing for me is how incredibly relevant his analysis and future view is to the multicultural advertising agency business model. Think about it – our markets are already ultra-social, and have embraced social media and all it’s extensions at a far faster rate than the general market. If you accept this fact, then Mr. Marchese’s new reality is all the more relevant to multicultural advertising agencies.

So who is best positioned to be the Multicultural Social Media Agency of Record?

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