The Multicultural Communications Challenge—Creativity And Media Integration Is More Important Than Ever

By Isaac Mizrahi – Co-President of ALMA

Building a multicultural plan that genuinely integrates the creative and the media disciplines is one of the biggest challenges in today’s multicultural space.

Why is this such a challenge? Mostly because there’s still a significant gap in the way brands approach the multicultural opportunity. This article wants to shed light on this problem and suggest a few scenarios to overcome these barriers.

First, it’s important to recognize that the multicultural marketing industry faces the same consequences the overall market has been facing for the past decades, since the industry moved towards a separation between the creative and the media planning and buying disciplines, at both the agency and client’s sides.

While this decision drove a significant amount of specialization and resources that made media agencies more accountable for their clients’ investments, this move also helped the market to “forget” that the true effectiveness of a communications plan is a function of the combined effect of an efficient media plan and a persuasive creative idea. In other words, when media and messaging work together, complementing each other.

It is not a surprise to realize that if not carefully managed, creative and media processes can go down their separate parallel paths and only converge when budgets are put together. In most cases, the creative side is told what the media side has negotiated, and the media side becomes aware of what the creative idea will be only after all-important media decisions are made.

A media plan that’s considered excellent from an efficiency standpoint typically attempts to “stretch” the brand’s budget throughout the year, maximizing weekly reach while trying to lower KPIs’ costs. But this approach misses that the media plan only offers the brand “an opportunity to be seen” by prospects and customers; it does not guarantee that the message will be seen by viewers who now have a myriad of opportunities to skip advertising.

That’s precisely the point where a strong and relevant creative idea can make a media plan better. A compelling idea increases the probability an ad won’t be skipped and will ideally resonate with viewers who think and feel differently about the brand due to the exposure.

Why is this discussion relevant to multicultural communications strategies? Because some advertisers are facing a double challenge. They face the situation mentioned above, where multicultural media plans and multicultural messages are not coordinated and synchronized, and potentially also have to overcome the fact that a significant amount of the reach levels they acquired were based on spillover from non-multicultural media choices.

In other words, a significant number of multicultural media plans start from the premise that multicultural consumers are already exposed to the advertiser’s “general market” media plan. In my opinion, this phenomenon is just the media’s same face of a well-known trend that is already dying as a result of its failure -the “Total Market” approach.

The spillover is real, but when counting the reach of general media plans into multicultural consumers’ reach and frequency numbers, one may forget an important issue. This spillover media brings a spillover creative idea that has not been created to serve multicultural audiences. That does not mean these creative ideas are ineffective or wrong. They are just not created by thinking about the multicultural consumer at the core, thus not always the best message for a segment consumer.

The consequence of this thinking is that most advertisers nowadays assume that their media plans are reaching different segments, and while this is true from a technical standpoint, this reach, while efficient, is less effective than it could be since spillover messages tend not to build equity with those outside of their intended targets.

To provide a few numbers to clarify this rationale, imagine a hypothetical media plan targeting Hispanics, with an average weekly reach of 80% —on the surface, quite an impressive level. Most plans like this have two components. First, the spillover’s reach level represents most of the weekly reach levels, then and only then, the plan incorporates the multicultural media choices.

That means that the 80% weekly reach plan may be delivering less than 40% of culturally relevant weekly reach, a new measure that combines relevant cultural media with culturally driven creative choices.

The real culturally driven reach level maybe even smaller, given that many clients still use translated or transcreated messages to run in their multicultural media plans. In other words, not only are these clients counting on media plans that deliver the majority of the media via spillover, but even the small share of reach that is dedicated to multicultural segments receives creative messages that are not culturally relevant. It’s a misstep twice over.

I asked Gonzalo del Fa, President, GroupM Multicultural, a leading media planning and buying agency, and the Chair of the Board of the Culture Marketing Council, the Hispanic marketing industry association, his opinion on the topic, and this is his take on it:

“We always support the idea of calculating the spill that a GM media campaign has towards different audiences. However, we always encourage to clearly understand the real impact those assets have on those different audiences. That’s why we always speak about straight spill and effective spill because the difference between the two of them sometimes is quite significant, mostly because many of the assets used on GM media are not created with multicultural audiences in mind nor are relevant to that audience.

The best way to accurately calculate effective spill is by applying a discount factor to the straight spill, which leverages proprietary and syndicated data that identifies and measures all the factors that impact relevancy and effectiveness in advertising. It is important to mention that this analysis needs to be done for each multicultural segment since relevancy and effectiveness are not the same for all groups. In other words, your communication campaign is not supposed to just reach eyeballs but connect and engage consumers’ hearts and minds, and that is only possible if you place relevant and authentic content in relevant and authentic contexts.”

Leaders in this marketplace are starting to realize that there’s an opportunity to treat their multicultural communication strategy slightly differently. Here are a few suggestions that may improve the effectiveness of your plans:

1. Consider an integrated planning process where creative and media plans are developed simultaneously, and the agencies share a standard set of insights and data under a shared calendar.
2. Establish that all communications’ common goal is effectiveness, measured on whatever KPIs the client selects (e.g., sales, market share, consideration, Etc.). Having a media plan to reach a percentage of consumers may not be enough anymore.
3. Build an analysis of what percentage of your multicultural weekly reach is from spillover from general market media and what percentage comes from native multicultural media choices.
4. Run an analysis of what percentage of multicultural media reach is filled with dedicated segment creative. You will be surprised by how low this number can be.

Based on these suggestions, new approaches may emerge, either for allocating media and creative resources or developing media plans. For instance, some may consider starting a plan with native multicultural reach and only then adding the spillover numbers at a discounted rate because the spillover reach can’t be treated equally as the native multicultural reach.

This discussion is vital as clients may not be seeing the ROI of their multicultural marketing plans, making them more cautious about future investments. The low ROI may be happening because multicultural consumers do not see relevant multicultural messages often enough. Reaching is not the same as connecting. Beyond just reach, the focus should be on “reach of heart.”

About Author

Isaac Mizrahi is a marketing executive who spent my 29-plus career years working with brands such as Coca-Cola, Bellsouth, Nextel and Sprint, in several different functions.