Think Multicultural

It’s official - the concept of “minority majority” markets has become a reality in 1 out of every 10 U.S. counties, according to a recently released U.S. Census Bureau report.

CNN just ran a story on the data - which is very compelling.

Leading the way is Los Angeles County, home to the 2nd largest city in the U.S. - the City of Los Angeles. As of 2007, almost 71% of LA County’s residents are minorities, lead by 4.7 million Hispanics and 1 million African-Americans.

It’s also interesting to note that 3 New York boroughs - Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx - have more than 1 million minority residents each.

For anyone that follows my posts on TM, you know I have been talking about this seismic demographic shift, and that it is creating huge opportunities and threats to the advertising business as we currently know it. Multicultural advertising is no longer a niche strategy - it is quickly becoming the mass market. Hispanic, African American, Asian and other emerging market agencies know this, and general market shops see the writing the wall. It’s only a matter of time before big ad spenders start to rethink who their lead agency should be.

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?