Ethnic Consumers Are Front Page News Today

Pull together a bunch of posts and news from this blog during the past year, throw in some lessons from the master's level Ethnic Marketing course I teach at Johns Hopkins University in DC and voila, you'll essentially arrive at the major USA Today story in today's edition (the Friday, Saturday, Sunday paper) by business writer David Lieberman.

Lieberman's hook is the following: "One of the most intriguing new developments in media is taking place in a part of hte industry that many executives used to dismiss as a backwater. Call it the year of ethnic media, the vast collection of mostly tiny broadcasters, cable channels, newspapers and magazines that target Hispanics, Asians and other audience niches. Advertisers who once deemed ethnic audiences too small, too poor or too old to take seriously are looking at them anew as immigration rates soar."

Oops, did he forget to mention the huge African American consumer and media market, which is often grouped with these others as requiring special approaches? (He quotes an ad exec. from E. Morris Communications, Black Enterprise Magazine's [African American] Agency of the Year, but doesn't mention this market.

And his piece does a fairly good job at touching upon some of the growth areas in ethnic media outlets and audiences. It reads slightly like a nod to the PR teams at SiTV, Univision and ImpreMedia which have been pushing major newspaper for exactly this kind of story (though of course I believe they deserve attention, generally).

I do think he could have done a better job of integrating developments in the ethnic marketing strategies of major corporations and the growth of ethnic marketing firms who know best how to reach these growing ethnic audiences. Data on any notable growth in the consulting industry players specializing in ethnic marketing would better help to support the claims made in the article.

Finally, his first sentence is "Forget the Internet for a moment," but I think this is a mistake (not because his paper has probably overplayed Internet marketing to the detriment of other marketing efforts) but because he never even mentions the growth in the ethnic audiences online and the large number of websites that cater to Hispanics, Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and African Americans, among others. This is also a growth industry that deserves attention, and a least a mention.

Click [here] for the full USA Today article.