Reaching multicultural audiences is often spoken about separately from putting spend behind media owned by members of underrepresented groups – and when this happens, brands are missing an opportunity. For our recent research report Engaging Multicultural Audiences, we found out what Mirror Digital’s CEO, Sheila Marmon, has to say about why the two can and should go hand-in-hand for advertisers.

Q: Why should marketers’ strategies for reaching multicultural audiences also include investing in media owned by members of underrepresented groups?

A: Authenticity builds trust and trust builds brand loyalty. Marketers need consumers to believe in their message and/or products. To do that, consumers need to experience authentic representation from those marketers. As diverse-owned media operators, Mirror Digital is a part of the target audiences these marketers fight to reach. Our approach to driving client and partner success is rooted in prioritizing ad campaigns that deliver both measurable results for our clients and lasting financial empowerment for diverse and underrepresented audiences.

Q: Some advertiser and agency commitments to backing diverse-owned media haven’t lived up to promises. Why is this?

A: Those advertisers and agencies choose money over mission when the fact is, they could choose both. Despite a shared responsibility, and in some cases a publicized promise, brands who never implemented a diverse audience growth strategy may not understand the value proposition, have the capabilities in-house to get it done, or in some cases, may view the idea of diverse partnerships as something that is dispensable. Without the pressure of accountability, reneging on their commitments is easy. Those same brands will be remembered for their actions or inactions, but diverse-owned media and audiences are not going anywhere.

Q: In a landscape of tighter budgets and high demands for scale and efficiency, how can committed advertisers maintain their support for diverse media and creators?

A: We have to start with educating the market on the value of multicultural creators and media outlets. Efficiency does not always equate to efficacy. As a diverse-owned media company, we have been in hundreds of rooms and on thousands of video calls informing and educating brands on diverse growth audiences and how we can effectively connect with them. We maximize every investment because we are a proven partner who consistently yields meaningful results. Advertisers should start by understanding the opportunity and pushing for campaign budgets and programs to specifically target diverse-owned media companies, audiences, publishers, and content creators. In turn, these strategies will help propel them to deliver stronger outcomes. To gain traction, agencies need to effectively demonstrate and communicate these powerful results to brand clients’ marketing teams and leadership.

Q: Campaigns that target diverse-owned media are often considered to be tests or experiments. What’s your best advice for ensuring that they last?

A: The first step is designing and investing in tests that matter to a return on investment. Often we see some agency partners make a small investment that is not able to drive any real impact. When these types of tests are meaningful and are proven effective through measurable results, they can and should be scaled. When advertisers and agencies lean into diverse media partners for their endemic expertise and connectivity to these communities, they will see the return on investment with BIPOC consumers and move beyond a test-only mentality. Media targeting for diverse audiences is still lacking, and growth depends on reallocating resources to reach the new multicultural America. Diverse-owned media and creators must also be supported with tools that quantify their impact and reinforce their role in media strategies.

Interested in learning more about multicultural marketing strategies? Download our report, Engaging Multicultural Audiences. 

Did you know Infillion was the first company to ever build ads for bilingual audiences that allow users to toggle between languages in real time? Michael Colella, SVP and Executive Producer of Infillion’s Creative Studio, gives a behind-the-scenes look at this technology, which has been honored by the MediaPost OMMA Awards and the ARF David Ogilvy Awards.

Q: What was the impulse behind building this first-to-market technology?

A: Hispanic audiences are almost 20% of the U.S. population, and over half of them are bilingual to some degree. But some of them prefer English, some prefer Spanish, and some change their preference based on what content they’re watching, who’s in the room with them, or any other number of reasons. Empowering them to switch languages in real time, without needing to restart the ad, was a way to not just speak to them, but allow them some agency in how they prefer to be reached. So when a client, Nissan, came to us with a campaign to reach bilingual audiences, we thought it was time to take on this creative challenge.

Q: What tech challenges had to be overcome to make it work?

A: We had to pay close attention to ensuring that the technology could toggling between two audio and video assets at the exact timestamp that the user hit the toggle button, eliminating any visible lag or content shifting effect. We had to engage our engineering team pretty extensively here. But with brands increasingly challenged to gain the attention of consumers, a sense of immediacy and instant gratification is a must. 

We also faced a challenge in figuring out how to incorporate closed captioning. At Infillion, we strive to design for inclusivity, and we had two options here. We could either render the closed captioning as part of the video asset, or develop a solution where we’d leverage a transcript, allowing users to toggle closed captioning on or off. We settled on developing a transcription solution since it offered us the most flexibility and efficiency to deploy creative.

Q: Ads that toggle between two languages had been built and deployed before – including using Infillion’s TrueX format – but never with a real-time toggle. Why do this? How does it make a difference for the user?

A: One study after another says that consumers like choice in their advertising, and that can extend to the language that the ad is served in. This kind of ad technology is technically challenging, but it’s worth it. But the more exciting outcome was developing a solution that could be consistent across all devices, especially on CTV. The future possibilities here are.

Q: What kind of insights can a brand gather from a real-time language toggle ad?

A: The main insights brands can gather from real-time language toggle are the nuances of users’ language preferences. Maybe they always prefer English, or always prefer Spanish, or prefer one on mobile and one on CTV – where, presumably, they might be watching with others who aren’t as multilingual as they are. By determining a user’s preferred language of communication, brands can tailor their content and targeting accordingly. Especially as advertisers look to target bilingual audiences who speak languages beyond Spanish, the possibilities are endless.

Interested in learning more about multicultural marketing strategies? Download our report, Engaging Multicultural Audiences. 

Over the years, multicultural marketing has frequently overlooked Asian audiences. Hailing from over 70 different ethnicities, Asian-Americans are diverse and frequently misunderstood. Can they even be considered a single demographic for advertisers? For our recent research report Engaging Multicultural Audiences, we spoke to S. Mitra Kalita, CEO of URL Media and publisher of Epicenter NYC. Here’s what she had to say.

Q: Marketers used to think pretty much exclusively about Black and Hispanic audiences when they thought about multicultural marketing. Was there a turning point when they began to address and cater to Asian/AAPI audiences as well? What made this happen?

A: First, it’s important to understand why marketers often excluded us. Asians have been a tiny percentage of the pie chart in polls, market research, trends reports. That kept us ignored and invisible. A few things changed: one, our population has grown; two, we are overrepresented on platforms such as smart speakers and the latest technology; and three, our community got louder and more rooted in coalitions serving all people of color. There’s #StopAsianHate, sure, but we’ve also been a part of pushes to diversify Hollywood and corporate America. 

Asian-Americans are part of the growing diverse consumer purchasing power that also includes Black and Hispanic, so our inclusion is not only a sound business practice, it is important to ensure you’re reaching a growing demographic. Some suburbs – like the one I was raised in outside Princeton, NJ – are not just so-called majority minority but majority Asian.

Finally, I think the treatment of Asian-Americans at the height of Covid forever changed our community. The businesses that “get it” leaned into supporting Asian employees AND consumers. Some good examples from Peloton, for instance, are the rides they did to center Asian culture, the donations they made to #StopAsianHate, and allowing Asian instructors such as Emma Lovewell and Sam Yo to talk about their identities.

Q: There are dozens of distinct nationalities and ethnic identities encompassed by “AAPI.” How do marketers reach them authentically?

A: We have similar narratives in the Latino community, which is not a monolith. This applies for AAPI, for hyperlocal engagement, niche audiences. In my work, I try to be clear on who I am writing about and trying to serve, and how I will make efforts to reach that audience. Sometimes, when it comes to dress or food or culture or holidays, the term “Asian” can actually be committing a form of erasure; not all Asians celebrate Diwali, for example, but an organization that has an AAPI affinity group might want to think about what it’s doing for Diwali or Eid. 

The word “authentic” can be fraught because the serving of these communities cannot be afterthoughts or “over there.” The best way to be authentic is to be honest and true to the diversity and inclusion of Asians as core to your business mission and strategy. Also, it’s okay to connect consumption and community – not everything has to see DEI through the lens of charity.

Q: To what extent should marketers be segmenting even further into addressing subsets of AAPI audiences? How would you assuage concerns that this might limit scope and reach?

A: When it comes to Asian-Americans, more is more. Segmentation can help marketers achieve deeper engagement and also customize messages appropriately. When Epicenter worked with the Asian American Federation to promote a mental-health directory, we had specific and separate strategies for Bangladeshi, Nepalese, and Chinese communities, to name a few. Another time, reaching out to a Tibetan influencer opened up a brand-new segment to us; she decided to go live on Facebook and Instagram from our table and within minutes, dozens of her followers came by. In my experience, the narrower the messenger, the more trusted the messenger. 

You need to be able to meet people where they are AND be culturally relevant. This creates opportunities to provide information that some people may not know they needed or wanted. 

Q: What’s one thing about AAPI audiences that marketers tend to think is true, but isn’t?

A: I think it’s time to retire the tropes about our community being affluent, good at math, and strivers. Sure, some of that is true, but we are a diverse population of artists and creatives, rich and poor, city dwellers and suburbanites. I’d say marketers would do best to home in on whom they are trying to reach and work backward, relying on a mix of data and on-the-ground research, instead of starting with assumptions.

Interested in learning more about multicultural marketing strategies? Download our report, Engaging Multicultural Audiences. 

It was no surprise to attendees of the POSSIBLE conference in Miami that retail media networks (RMNs) were going to be one of the hottest topics at the event. Walmart Connect, Target’s Roundel network, Albertsons Media Collective, Instacart, and CVS Media Exchange were all partners and sponsors. Panels about loyalty programs, data clean rooms, and e-commerce dotted the packed agenda. 

But at a panel hosted by Infillion and moderated by CRO and CMO Laurel Rossi, a set of leaders from the retail media, CPG, and agency worlds agreed that retail media grew so quickly that it’s now imperative to set it up for long-term stability.

“It’s vast and confusing, to a degree, from the agency side because there are so many different partners with different data sets that we can source from,” said Dave Kersey, chief media officer of GSD&M. “We’re mining through all the various retail media networks trying to figure out what are the right data sets, how can we leverage them, [and] can we overlay them onto each other.” For GSD&M, an Omnicom agency, one current challenge is figuring out how to build retail media data into the holding company’s broader tech stacks.

From the CPG side, there’s a different challenge. “I don’t think we know how to media plan. That’s not a knock on agencies, that’s not a knock on anybody,” said Vinny Rinaldi, head of media and analytics at The Hershey Company. “Somebody who goes to Walmart.com or their app, or Kroger or Albertsons – regardless [of retailer], that is a reach point, that is part of their journey. How do you build that into holistic planning?”

The panel agreed that retail media marketing for CPGs is currently too split between pure brand awareness and sales-driving, lower-funnel efforts with very little in between. “A lot of companies are focused on sales for tomorrow – so anything that will drive sales quickest, even if that’s not best for the long term,” Kersey said. A CPG needs to “ensure that you’re driving brand awareness that is ultimately converting at a more efficient rate downstream.”

Looking at two possible solutions: CTV and generative AI

One company that’s rocketed to the forefront of retail media innovation has been Albertsons Media Collective – a remarkable feat for a nearly century-old grocery store brand. Representing the company on this panel was Evan Hovorka, VP of product and innovation. He said that connected TV is one of the most promising channels for retail media because, unlike linear TV where CPGs’ brand-building ads historically ran, the CTV “pipes” can be connected directly to a retailer’s owned and operated marketing channels.

“Now we’ve got authentic CRM data at the point of ad distribution, the streaming service; and at the point of audience creation, the RMN,” Hovorka explained. “Let’s tie all that together. That is the pinnacle moment for how agencies are best served to help CPG.”

Jatinder Singh, global head of data and AI at Accenture Song, echoed the problem of retail media’s distant two pillars of “brand and demand,” and said that while generative AI technology is frequently talked about as a solution to the two, it’s rarely placed in action. “90% of the C-suite are saying that they expect generative AI to revolutionize their retail media network,” Singh said. “However, research we’ve done shows that only 25% of them are actually doing so.”

Leaders in retail media are beginning to recognize that all the talk of AI to fill gaps in the customer journey needs to be accompanied by real action, especially since there are now so many retail media networks that it can be a tangle of data and touchpoints for marketers.

“The non-standardization that’s created because we’ve become so bifurcated is why you’re seeing everyone say we need to consolidate again,” Rinaldi said. “Everyone acts like there’s an infinite amount of times to convert someone to buy something, and there’s not. If you don’t think about that from a standard media principle or practice…it’s why we’ve become so messy.”

Or, as Infillion’s Laurel Rossi said, “It’s not all about media. Supply matters.”

Let’s say you’re trying to sell enterprise software to CTOs. How do you get your brand in front of them outside of cold pitches and industry conference sponsorships? Could you even run your creative during football games? Until recently, you couldn’t. But now that’s all changing.

Today’s tools for marketers were largely built for what one might call “Big Consumer,” as Infillion CMO and CRO Laurel Rossi calls it. In other words, they were designed for reaching wide demographics and large audiences – so how can B2B marketers work effectively with these same tools? In a panel at the POSSIBLE conference in Miami called “Vertical Ads: How B2B Is Bending The Ecosystem Around Its Needs,” Rossi, who moderated, asked a slate of B2B leaders what they see as the biggest challenges – as well as the most promising solutions.

The challenges, as the panelists illustrated:

Reaching narrow audiences. “You’re dealing with so many small audiences,” said Dan Rosenberg, co-founder and CEO of Octane11. “To find all those individual audiences, titles, job functions, and connect them across all the different places you find them, to make a unified picture…That, I think, is the biggest challenge.”

Dealing with long sales cycles and a disjointed purchase funnel. The sales process in B2B can take “quarters or years,” according to Rosenberg. That can make it difficult to track. Plus, historically B2B marketing has operated at opposite ends of the purchase funnel with very little in between. There’s brand awareness, and then there’s pure lead driving. Jatinder Singh, global head of data and AI at Accenture Song, called this “the bifurcation between brand and demand.”

Software that wasn’t built for them. Out of the dozens of tech tools for marketers out there, few explicitly pitch themselves to B2B marketers or even “Most of the AI solutions in advertising weren’t built with B2B in mind, and are actually sort of opposite to what B2B is trying to do,” said Adam Heimlich, CEO of Chalice.ai.

Extreme fragmentation and lack of transparency. A frustration with non-actionable data and tools that don’t talk to each other, of course, doesn’t only plague B2B marketers. But especially with the “bifurcation” that Singh mentioned, that gulf in the sales cycle can be tough to bridge with incompatible tools. “Let’s be honest, it’s really hard,” said Rich Brandolino, global media channels and ad tech leader at IBM. “The walled gardens really don’t want to share their data.”

But, Infillion’s Rossi promised, the panel would have to actually discuss solutions, too. Here’s what the panelists had to say about what B2B marketers can do in a digital marketing landscape that wasn’t necessarily developed with them in mind.

Seizing upon actionable data. “There’s an enormous wealth of data sitting out there in an unstructured form on the web that you can use to identify customers who have particular problems that they’re trying to work through,” Brandolino said. AI and machine learning can help with that audience-building and targeting, even though most tools weren’t originally built for B2B. Finding the right one can require looking at smaller, more upstart players. “To have oversight over that, and transparency into that, how well the predictions are going, and where the error is, is really a critical piece of it that B2B marketers shouldn’t expect to get from the big tech platforms unfortunately,” Heimlich commented.

Leaning into CTV. “Connected TV is a channel where we can get both the precision and the effectiveness, so we’re hitting on two things there that I think we’re all focusing on with these niche audiences,” said Singh. He added that Accenture, which primarily works with Fortune 2000 companies, successfully deployed a CTV campaign across media like Formula 1 car racing and the NFL using dynamic screens.

Continually refining your toolkit. The face of B2B advertising can transform just as quickly as consumer advertising, and marketers need to be ready. “We’re actually pretty comfortable with our overall stack, but we continue to refine it,” IBM’s Brandolino said, pointing specifically to cookie deprecation and the evolution of identity as a driver for scrutinizing the company’s marketing strategy. “I’m personally convinced that there’s not going to be one solution for all of us, it’s going to be a combination depending on where you’re at.”

B2B marketers should be willing to deploy pilot campaigns to see what works. “There’s no better way than pilots to deal with the conflict between the status quo and new technology,” Chalice.ai’s Heimlich said. “Unfortunately there’s never been a better solution than to take some of your budget and run some pilots, but I can say that in this day and age the pilots are very exciting.”

Looking for B2B solutions to reach the right audience? That precise audience-building and advanced targeting – as well as CTV creative – is right in Infillion’s toolkit. Reach out today.