Media Brands Navigate The Multicultural Future

Two great presentations at Monday's Entertainment and Media track
took on the multicultural consumer. It's a popular topic: the undeniable fact
of a diversifying US population forces brands to rethink their approaches.
Especially so, when you consider that the demographic prizes marketers most
covet ' Millennials and Gen Z ' are at the front of this change.

Thomas Grayman from Spike TV applied the latest neuroscience
techniques to this thorny problem, and came away with a valuable insight about
how representation impacts viewers of color at a subconscious level. Yatisha
Forde of NBC Universal took the 'reaching the multicultural consumer' rulebook
and tore it right up, asking us to turn our assumptions upside down: as
multiculturalism becomes the 'New Mainstream', start with the Hispanic consumer and reach the rest of the market
from them.

Spike TV had a typical media brand problem. It had built its
brand on appealing to young white men, and now it needed to reach a broader
audience. It had a roster of strong reality and celebrity shows ' like tattoo
throwdown Ink Master and personal finance boot camp Life Or Debt. But how could the brand market its line-up to
viewers outside its former core audience?

Grayman described how Spike TV crafted ads for its shows and
tested them with cells of white and non-white consumers, using NeuroInsight.
NeuroInsight's techniques monitored brain response to the ads ' in particular,
the extent to which long-term memory is activated by a piece of content.

Initial results made tough reading for a brand looking to expand
its audience for a more diverse era. Despite diverse casts with people of color
prominently featured, the ads scored lower among the non-white participants on
engagement and on long-term memory activation. Emotional response was starkly
negative. What was going on?

Lip Sync Battle - what did it get right?

By exploring response on a second-by-second basis, Spike TV
could find out exactly what the problem was. On average the ads were a turn off
for non-white viewers, but with a stark in response before and after the first
prominent appearance of a person of color. As soon as one appeared, memory
encoding jumped. And the ad in which people of color appeared prominently
throughout ' for celebrity miming challenge Lip Sync Battle ' saw no difference
between white and non-white response.

Grayman called this moment of truth for non-white viewers 'the
invitation' ' the point at which they unconsciously register that yes, this
show welcomes them. With this insight, Spike TV has been able to retool its marketing
as it looks to build and diversify its audience. The moment of invitation needn't
involve visual representation ' one ordinary Persil ad found its 'invitation'
in the closing seconds, with a snatch of Montell Jordan's 'This Is How We Do it'.

Multicultural representation is a hot topic ' it's generally
framed as both a social and commercial good, based on the overall positive
effects of under-represented groups seeing themselves in the media. Spike TV's
study offered proof of its impact at an individual level ' representation is
the key to unlocking engagement, attention and long-term impact.

Yatisha Forde of NBCUniversal took that insight a step
further. The brand's CultureFirst' approach flipped the traditional
multicultural script. Instead of taking a Total Market insight and 'translating'
it for different minority groups, the CultureFirst approach takes insights
designed for a particular consumer ' a young Hispanic woman ' and then
transfers them to the total market. By not using whiteness as an assumed
baseline, CultureFirst is able to get ahead of cultural trends, not play
catch-up. As Forde put it, 'Total market strategies driven by Latino human
truths will drive stronger consumer resonance among Hispanics and
Non-Hispanics, due to the profound, pervasive and permanent nature of Latino
culture in the US.'

In practical terms, this meant ads that started
Spanish-language and tested just as well among Hispanic and non-Hispanic groups
when transferred to English-language. It also meant feeding into NBC Universal's CurveReport ' the company's large-scale trend tracker. CultureFirst helped
NBC Universal locate a group it called 'the New Mainstream', made up of Hispanic
consumers but also Hispanic-inspired consumers: again, moving the assumptions
of what 'mainstream' culture is to better reveal the future shape of the
market.

The trends uncovered were the most fascinating part of Forde's
report. Some were pragmatic ' putting the spotlight on La Jefa ('the boss'),
figurehead of a trend towards female-owned small Latina businesses, a segment
that's grown 87% over the last decade. Others had profound implications for
cultural identity ' 'Otherland', shorthand for the way in which Hispanic and 'New
Mainstream' consumers are comfortable with multiple cultural identities from
the broad to the niche: Hispanic and witch, Blaxican and skater. But rather
than dividing consumers into segments of one, these intersectional identities
become hubs by which like-minded people can find each other.

The CultureFirst approach has led NBC Universal to re-think
the way it treats culture. Younger generations, it realises, want to see
themselves as the owners and tellers of their own story, not simply as an
audience. So honouring existing culture is only an important first step. After
it comes sharing culture without appropriation, by giving its owners the agency
to tell stories. Then finally helping people inspired by these stories to
connect.

Both these presentations were inspiring beginnings to TMRE
2016. Grayman's showed how new technology can crack the trickiest of marketing
problems. Forde's was an inspirational vision of a genuinely future-focused
marketing, which puts demographic change at its centre.