Advertising Week 2009 Focuses on Multicultural Business Growth

To help celebrate Advertising Week 2009 this September, The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) will present a very special session of its Multicultural Advertising Council. The Advertising Week session, entitled "The Time is Right: On the Path to Multicultural Business Growth," presents an expansive new direction for supporting and enhancing multicultural business growth, which will have a significant impact on the research, advertising and marketing industries.

Nancy Bates, senior researcher for survey methodology at the U.S. Census Bureau, will share the results of a powerful new segmentation program developed by the Bureau, which will drive marketing and advertising of the 2010 Census.

"The segmentation enriched our multicultural approach to marketing the 2010 Census by identifying the underlying constructs of hard-to-count populations. Not only do we get a sense of where these populations reside, but we now understand how to adjust the mix of media, especially locally targetable media like Out-of-Home, radio and news, to best deliver our multicultural messages," Bates said.

This new knowledge about ethnic consumers will have far-reaching implications to marketers. In this Multicultural Advertising Council meeting, participants will learn new approaches to targeting their products and services to multicultural audiences by exploring crucial questions such as: How are the clusters with a high concentration of ethnic consumers different from those without? What did you have to do differently to get a high response from ethnic consumers? What best practices can we glean based on the Bureau's research?

Another highlight of the meeting will be the presentation of a three-year ARF plan that will replenish, rejuvenate and reinvigorate multicultural marketing. The plan will be unveiled by Ron Franklin, GlobalHue's vice chairman of research and planning.

This plan will provide opportunity and share-point analysis, models that confirm the value and establish the ROI of multicultural marketing, best practice case studies from the industry, and a multicultural intern program that will supply the cultural resources needed to fuel cultural growth by marketers and advertisers.

The mission of the ARF's Multicultural Advertising Council is to address the issues and definitions of multicultural groups; to evaluate existing multicultural research; to assess whether "ethnic" groups are properly represented in general market and media studies; and to consider ways to improve the credibility of ethnic research.