Think Multicultural

I just left Miami Beach and the 2nd annual ad:tech Miami conference. Per Danny’s earlier post, there was a noticeable drop in attendance from last year (I didn’t attend, but I also heard the same comments from past attendees). However, I was found most of the panel discussions insightful and interesting - particularly the ones pertaining to Latin America.

There was one topic that was discussed in a few panels and kept coming up in my conversations at the various networking breaks and parties - what will the ad agency of the future look like?

This is a question that I think about all the time - I guess you could call it the “thing that keeps me up at night” (although my 16 month old daughter Maya holds that title most nights). I run a multicultural interactive agency - a niche within a niche. There were panelists at ad:tech from a handful of Hispanic-focused interactive agencies… another niche within a niche. One of the principals at one of these Hispanic interactive agencies made the case that interactive will be integrated within traditional ad agency capabilities in the future.

I had a similar conversation with the CEO of a large general market interactive agency who asked me “do we have to expand into traditional in the future?”

Someone even brought up the question of whether multicultural advertising will inevitably have to be integrated into general advertising as the U.S. population becomes more and more diverse (we already see this happening in places like Los Angeles where “minority majorities” are causing clients to hire multicultural ad agencies as their lead agencies).

This is a big question that I making some bets on. I am very curious what some of you out there think? Here are some interesting thought starters?

1. Will there room for specialists interactive agencies like Hispanic interactive agencies?
2. Will traditional agencies need to have specialty digital capabilties like SEO and mobile?
3. Will traditional agencies continue buying interactive shops or will the opposite start to happen?

Can someone explain to me why the Black Leadership Forum and the American Corn Growers’ Association (?!) are opposing a potential search deal between Google and Yahoo?

Anyone?

I just spoke at a very interesting conference in Chicago yesterday - the 5th Annual Multicultural Marketing for the Financial Services and Insurance Industries conference.

Although the conference was small in attendance (around 60 total attendees), most of the people there were heavy hitters from the largest financial services and healthcare companies in the U.S. In fact, I would estimate that 80% of the attendees were marketers from Fortune 1000 companies.

The conference had a very effective structure, with larger group-wide presentations on broader demographic trends affecting the financial services and insurance industries, followed by break-out roundtable discussions dealing with the Hispanic, African-American, and Asian markets individually. I moderated 3 very active and interesting roundtable discussions on the Hispanic Baby Boomer market.

One thing really stood out to me after Day 1 of the conference - Financial Services, and particularly Healthcare companies, are VERY interested in figuring out the multicultural markets.

I know that historically these industries have not invested heavily in reaching multicultural audiences. However, based on the attendance, questions, and general discussion at this unique conference, I would venture to say that this will be changing very rapidly.