Embracing the current trend (will it stay?) of looking at the Hispanic/Multicultural market from a cross-cultural perspective, Ogilvy Culture celebrated its inaugural Cross Cultural Conference yesterday in New York City. Last November Ogilvy introduced Ogilvy Culture, its cross cultural practice.
The conference had good attendance from Ogilvy clients and partners belonging to the African – American, Hispanic and “multicultural urban” advertising and media industries.
Highlights of the full day event included David Burgos, lead of Millward Brown’s Multicultural Practices introduced his new book “The new majority is multicultural: Implications for marketers and agencies. The panel “Using Sports and Entertainment to connect with the cross cultural audience” focused on how sports and entertainment always have been the common denominators in connecting audiences across racial and global divides.
Rick Marroquin, Multicultural Lifestyle Executive, Creative Artists Agency emphasized the importance of soccer for Hispanic/multicultural audiences. “While 36% of Hispanics watch soccer on TV, only 14% of non Hispanics watch,” Marroquin noted. In addition, Hollywood is increasingly depending on the popularity of its movies among multicultural audiences, or “as Marroquin put it: multicultural audiences are increasingly the owners of social currency.” Another common denominator across the multicultural sector is the trend towards more branded content. Time shifting technologies make the use of branded entertainment even more necessary so that brands get their message across to tech-savvy – traditional advertising – avoiding consumers, Marroquin and the other two panelists Katherine Johnson, Head of Client Development and Partnership Marketing, Turner Entertainment and Cynthia Nelson, COO of Todobebe Inc. agreed on the fact that it is not about blind product placement anymore, but about three key words: Content, Context and Brand, Turner Entertainment Johnson said. The trend goes hand in hand with the increase of marketer produced media like Red Bull’s recently introduced U.S. edition of its monthly Red Bulletin magazine.
“Urban” Target
During the full day conference which included a Multicultural Media, Technology and Research Partner Fair, it was interesting to see that a sizable amount of attendees and Fair participants represented companies belonging to the urban sector , which mostly targets to Hispanics and African Americans living in large cities. Media and advertising companies catering to this audience present at the Conference included online ad network Urban Ad Serve, Orange Advertising, Terra, HBO. and magazines such us The Source, Black Enterprise and Vibe.
