Think Multicultural

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.

Most of the contributors to ThinkMulticultural will be at the AHAA Conference in San Antonio this week. Keep an eye out for Diane Salcido, Jose Villa, and Danny Allen, and come say hi.

Diane and Danny will be spending a lot of time at the Admixture booth in the exhibit hall.

Jose will be in the sessions, being frustrated at how few Hispanic marketers understand online advertising.

I wanted to give everyone an update on our recent posts regarding the HispanicAd.com 2007 Media Planning & Media Executive of the Year Award process.

In case you didn’t read them, we posted our initial concerns on

3/12/08
and a follow-up post on 3/17/08

I received a phone call from HispanicAd.com CEO Gene Bryan in response to our posts. Gene explained to me that the nomination process is complicated, since they receive so many different nominations. In fact, he mentioned that the volume of nominations is so large that the cut-off for making the short-list (as announced on their emails) was 400 nominations.

There you go… if you want your favorite media planner or media executive nominated, you better get a significant movement going (or have 399 friends in the industry)!