Target Multicultural TV Viewers by Program Genres

Summary

Myths abound about planning and buying TV to reach multicultural audiences. The study seeks to dispel them, as it calls for targeting these increasingly valuable audiences by program genres instead of by the networks associated with ethnic groups and insists that the industry needs a new measurement standard in this area. Among the practical implications:

• Advertisers should “segment ethnic audiences by demographics, psychographics, and attitudes—just like they do for the overall, general-market population.”
• The authors advise against “(relegating) multicultural media planning solely to ethnic-media networks.
• “Media planners (could) adopt a methodology of percentage of rotation of culturally nuanced commercials, which could be based on the percentage of ethnic viewership of a program or of the population.
• “The result is creative spillover between general and multicultural markets and between digital and broadcast modalities.
• “This is where a context planner, versed in multicultural nuance, can inject a multicultural consumer strategy into the media-planning and -buying process that sets the course for greater media engagement with ethnic audiences.”