There definitely was a learning curve, and establishing the work relationships with the publisher websites wasn’t always easy.

In 2012 we will further develop our online advertisement offering. There are also plans of re-doing our own corporate website. Re-working a website is always a big project, I know from personal experience, so I don’t want to talk too much about it, until it’s actually ready to go live.

I was the one who built this website back in 2006, so I will be a bit sad to see it go. But now that we also offer online marketing services, it is time to change our online image.

First, The Economist had an amazing front page article on how immigrants are disproportionally larger drivers of the economy, and how their links through the diaspora can open-up business for their host countries:

A recent study carried out by Duke University showed that, while immigrants make up an eighth of America’s population, they founded a quarter of the country’s technology and engineering firms. And, by linking the West with emerging markets, diasporas help rich countries to plug into fast-growing economies.

It’s always pleasant to see The Economy throw it’s huge weight behind a story and give it’s opinion. And when The Economist says that imigrants are a plus for the economy of a country, we better listen, because they think long and hard before publishing stories.

Then there is our very own Globe and Mail, with an article on marketing to these same immigrants, but this case specifically the Latin America diaspora. Just the intro of the article is significant proof that main-stream marketers have understood the power of ethnic marketing:

When there’s a gold rush on, smart people look for silver.

In the last few years, Canadian marketers have been retooling their organizations to target newcomers to the country. Ethnic media are bursting with ads targeting Chinese, Filipino and South Asian immigrants. (Or at least as bursting as media outlets are these days.) But there’s another group of newcomers, all but unknown and ignored, …

The article is an interesting read, going on to explain how the Latin American community is under-represented in marketing efforts, yet targeting it might reap larger benefits than expected.

Finally, our very own Director, Borislav Nicolov penned an incendiary article on the futility of efforts to force uni-language signs in Quebec, when these efforts don’t take into account the reality of the world’s population as a whole.

All this to say that with modern telecom technologies and modern travel technologies, the world has definitely gotten smaller. No one can stay isolated from their neighbors. Border cannot remain closed, as the demographic and economic future of many depends on what foreigners will bring to the table.

Let’s not forget that the US, the greatest power today, was built, and continues to be propped-up, by what some people could call “foreigners”.

Let’s embrace this reality. And include it in our future marketing efforts.

A great image by The Economist, the “foreigners” arriving with their laptops, cell-phones and briefcases (full of what?).

L.A. resident Amber Duick received an unsettling e-mail from someone she didn’t know who, oddly, seemed to know her very well.
…
As the week went on and Sebastian seemed to get closer to L.A., there were more e-mails and even some videos chronicling his trip, and numerous references to tussles with the law.
…
It was only days later that Ms. Duick received a final e-mail containing a link to a video which explained the entire thing had been a virtual punking: It was, in fact, an ad campaign for the Toyota Matrix.

Reade the full story on the Globe and Mail here.

I am no artistic director, but it is pretty clear to me (as it should be to any reasonable person) that pulling prolongation pranks, over the course of numerous days/weeks, and putting people in uncomfortable situations for so long, cannot in any way be a good method for selling a product.

Not only are consumers getting wary of traditional advertisement, because of the barrage of ads that attacks them in print, on TV and on the web, but now consumers will also be turned-off from the so called “interactive advertisement”. This is not the first case of interactive advertisement backfiring; remember the fake-tourists that were in fact actors posing as tourists and asking passers by to take photos of them, which was all a stunt to promote a certain digital camera (I forget the name of the culprit camera maker at the moment).

But what really cough my attention in the article was the following quote:

“Years ago, you could put a message out there and control who was going to see it by carefully targeting,” notes Jack Neary, the chief creative officer of TBWA\Canada. “If you wanted to reach a fisherman, you put an ad in a fishing magazine. But now with the Internet, which is fundamentally still a mass medium because of its pervasive nature, anything – even if it might be targeted to a very young gaming-oriented young guy – can get out there into the world, and anyone can stray into the path of that stuff, can get subjected to it.”

And here I come back to printed ethnic press: it allows you to do that careful targeting that is mentioned in the quote above. Sure it might not be as sexy as actors impersonating someone or some event, but it gets the job done! It reaches exactly the people that you wanted to reach, and gets the message to them in straightforward and clear way.

This is just one more example of a growing trend: a move away from what was considered “traditional” media 10 years ago.

Complementing the free OTA high-definition digital TV stations, plus the cheap Netflix (less than 10$ a month), plus the free streaming on the Internet (did you know you can watch all the CBC’s hockey games live streaming on their site), and the effect is, the customer saves close to a thousand dollars a year, while maintaining their TV watching habit pretty much the same, if not better (less time in front of the tube can only do you good).

This “non-traditional” TV media consumption is becoming more and more “traditional”.

How are marketers to react to this? The fact is that people are not consuming less media, they are consuming a richer cocktail of media. We went from 40 hours a week of cable TV (which made reaching the consumer easy for advertisers), to 10 hours of free OTA digital TV, 20 hours of web surfing, and more hours reading traditional or digital displays, free newspapers in the Metro and more and more different media sources.

I am no media guru, but the general answer seems obvious: like in investment, diversifying your media reach seems to be the key strategy today. Getting your message across many different platforms seems like a reasonable idea in the face of this changing media consumption patterns.

And coming back to the ethnic press, advertising in such media is just one more (powerful) way of diversifying your media offering.

This is a problem that does not plague the ethnic printed press. There is no AP or Post Media or Reuters written content in ethnic press. Because of the difference in languages, ethnic newspapers must have all their own articles written specifically for them, and by their own staff.

This availability of fresh content is an extremely powerful and positive point, propping-up the ethnic press and keeping its readers captive.

So it comes to no surprise to me to see that the ethnic press is getting some recognition in the current federal election in Canada. As the following article by The Globe and Mail points out, politicians are now actively meeting with representatives of the ethnic press.

Yet another sign of the impact that printed media by the different ethnic communities can have.

Well, it is actually no miracle. Other numbers indicate that during last century Canada welcomed 13 million immigrants. In other words, in the next 20 years, Canada will welcome as much as 50% of the immigrants it did for the entire last century. Following this trend, Canada should welcome up to 40 million new citizens until 2100.

The trend is here to stay; the future will be noisy and multilingual. How to manage this future is a pressing question for many advertisers.

Part of the answer is to learn how to communicate with all these new citizens.

And this is where we come in. Contact us, at Ethnique Media Inc we communicate with the world.

PS: Translated from this blog post.

Aucun miracle, cette croissance est due à l’immigration. D’autres chiffres indiquent que durant le siècle précédent, le Canada a accueilli seulement 13 millions d’immigrants. En d’autres termes, en 20 ans le Canada accueillera plus de 50% de nouveaux arrivants que durant tout le siècle précédent. Dans cette optique, jusqu’au 2100 le Canada accueillera 40 millions de nouveaux arrivants.

Rien ne permet de croire que la tendance se renversera; le futur est donc bigarré, bruyant et multilingue. Comment le gérer est LA question improbable.

Un début de réponse consiste à savoir comment communiquer avec ce monde qui arrive, échauffé, barbu, souriant.

Contactez-nous; Ethnique Media inc. communique avec le monde.

Our fall semester has enabled many of our Montreal newspapers to enjoy advertising from CSIS (Canadian Society of Immigration Services) for which we have conjointly worked with BCP.

The census will reveal the extent of several well-documented trends, such as the growth of America’s Hispanic population [...]. Cesar Conde, president of Univision Networks, a Spanish-language media company, says it will be a “wake-up to marketers”. Once the results are in, firms are likely to invest more in marketing to minorities, to develop more products to appeal specifically to them, to advertise in languages other than English and to hire more racially diverse models.

Basically, this new census will further cement the importance of ethnic-oriented marketing.

And hand-in-hand with this switch in marketing, comes the even bigger change: the move to hyper-targeting that marketing is experiencing, through ethnic and community media, to specialty media and content-targeted Internet advertisement:

Peter Francese, a demographer at Ogilvy & Mather, an advertising agency, thinks the 2010 census will permanently change marketing. When companies analyse the census data, they will see that cities, and even some neighbourhoods, are so diverse now that broad advertising campaigns are no longer suitable. Mass-market advertising, he says, will become “extinct”. Marketers will instead have to focus on reaching specific households—just as the Census Bureau is preparing to do.

The article clearly mentions the fact around which Ethnique Media is built:

“At Kang & Lee, more than 20 years of consumer research for our clients has consistently illustrated that our target, Asian-immigrant consumers, do, in fact, gravitate to their native-language media for the comfort of the language, as well as for the daily editorial content that contains richer news and information from Asia, (and from within their own ethnic communities in the U.S.) than would otherwise be featured regularly in any mainstream media outlet.”

As it is clearly stated above, Ethnic press has an undeniable advantage over tradition press: this advantage is its content, and the fact that is geared towards the communities themselves.