Sensis Bureau » African American

Fewer search consultants a good thing…

Jose Villa — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:13:35 +0000

Adweek just published an article citing a significant drop in the number of agency reviews being handled by search consultants. For those of us running smaller agencies, this is welcome news. Search consultants have always been closely tied to the larger holding company-owned agencies, and infrequently invited smaller, more forward-thinking ad agencies. As they old saying goes, “no one ever got fired for hiring IBM” and search consultants were probably the biggest propagators of this mentality. Search consultants were also not very adept at handling ethnic agency reviews, so Hispanic, African-American and Asian ad agencies should see this as welcome news.

But there is always a flip-side – as the Adweek articles discusses. Now more and more agency reviews are being in-sourced to corporate procurement departments. Large corporate procurement departments are typically not well versed in procuring “creative” professional services (and rightly so, as these procurements are typically few and far between). However, with the advent of Supplier Diversity efforts, they provide more opportunities for smaller, women- and minority-owned agencies to get their foot in the door that search consultants did.

Some Stats

Eric Robertson — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 19:34:52 +0000

A finding of note for advertisers is the 73% of Black respondents who say they respond favorably to advertising featuring multiple cultures. Sixty-eight percent of respondents say they favor companies who benefit the African American community. Overall, many respondents don’t feel enough content “speaks” to the community as a distinct culture with its own needs and values.

Ghettoizing Black Advertising

Eric Robertson — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:57:10 +0000

While getting my feet wet in the world of Afican-American advertising and marketing I am coming across various articles relevant to all targeted and “urban” markets. I just love the fact that urban means black and latino, but not quite Asian or other targeted markets. Before going any further, I must admit growing up the ads I saw that were targeted at African-Americans should’ve been offensive but was just funny to me and my friends. These ads usually contained some smiling and a lot of singing and dancing. Which is fine if its works but I didn’t need all of that to convince me have my parents buy me a happy meal, I already wanted one anyway….Ok so, since the singing and dancing is offensive when doing it for the sole reason of appeasing black folks, how do you target an African-American audience effectively? I mean in this country there is such a thin line between what is considered offensive and what is acceptable when referring to black audiences how can you target them without coming under fire. Atleast in the Hispanic market you can target with the use of language and culture. So in order to target blacks do advertisers have to do that little extra and add some cliche ebonics phrase like “You go girl” or “I’m gonna tell my momma” and ghettoize their ad. Or can they just use something as simple as the music in the background to dictate the tone of the ad. I have no idea and am still learning so I will get back to you…

Eric Robertson, Developer