Think Multicultural

The Equality Forum released a study that “suggests that gay and lesbian voters voted as a block in the recent mayoral primary election in Philadelphia and that gay and lesbian voters were markedly more likely to support their candidate than their neighbors.”

The study doesn’t try find the causes of the gay voting block, only notes the effect. I suppose two theories could be that either the gay community found one candidate more “gay friendly” than the others or simply that members of the gay community had similar political interests in mind that were more strongly supported by one candidate than the others. A third explanation might be that the study used “gay neighborhoods” as the source of their voting data, and the issues in the Philly mayor’s election may have had a particularly strong effect on those neighborhoods.

Regardless of the cause, the effect remains that the gay neighborhoods all voted very strongly for one candidate. Bear in mind this was a Democratic primary – this wasn’t a liberal Democrat against a conservative Republican. These were all Democrats.

This is an isolated study done with some very high level data, but it would probably do politicians and their strategic advisors some good to dig a little deeper to find the cause.

The study can be found here:

http://www.equalityforum.com/press/GLvoters-FinalReport.pdf

Trendwatching.com has a report out today covering the gay community. I haven’t had a chance to read it all the way through yet, but it has a lot of information and seems interesting.

I just read an interesting, and refreshingly critical Wired piece on how much money major brands are wasting on Second Life initiatives.

How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life

It is interesting because it follows Coca-Cola’s decision to invest in a Second Life “island” called the Virtual Thirst Pavillion, and shows how little return on investment it is generating. This is refreshng because all that anyone in our business talks about these days is how Second Life is the next big thing - how Virtual Worlds will revolutionize the advertising world much like mySpace and YouTube have over the last few years (I would actually question this assertion as well). In fact, the article shows how little activity and “traffic”, in Web analytics terms, Second Life gets. Yet major brands are pouring millions into Second Life programs.

The article got me thinking about how crazy this is in relation to most marketers hesitancy to invest appropriately in multicultural marketing, whether traditional or online, targeting Hispanics, African-Americans, Asians-Americans, and/or GLBT.

To put it in perspective, the article mentioned that some brands are spending upwards of $500,000 a year on building and managing Second Life programs that are reaching maybe 100,000 people in the U.S. In stark contrast, the most recent 2007 AdAge Hispanic Fact Pack shows that the #8 Hispanic Web site in terms of revenue, Terra Networks, only generated $852,000 in ad revenue in 2006, even though it had 1.3 million unique visitors per month and 38% reach among the 14-16 million online U.S. Hispanics.

If I was Coke, I might consider building a virtual “Mundo Coca-Cola” on Terra.com…