Media Mix: Damned If We Do

2007-12-10
By Eric Easter

A few months ago, statistics on Black television viewing habits showed the Top 10
TV shows in Black households to be remarkably similar to those of white
households. 

That chart did not take into account, however, that there are far fewer major network programs with predominantly Black casts, and that A.C. Nielsen, the ratings research company, has aggressively worked to improve its tracking of Black households. In doing so they've found what always existed -- Sesame Street, Gilligan's Island, MASH, The Beverly Hillbillies and host of TV programs past and present are as much a part of Black culture as Good Times and The Jeffersons.
 
To mainstream America all this new data on Black folks represents a new trend. And their faulty assumption? If Black people are watching the same TV shows, reading the same magazines, viewing the same websites and playing the same videogames as everyone else, why keep making a special effort to reach out to Black folks in unique ways?

The costs of that assumption came two weeks ago when General Motors (GM) caught considerable flak for a story that suggested the automaker was shifting the vast majority of its diversity advertising accounts from African American agencies to major general market firms.  After a public outcry, GM honchos clarified the move as something far less severe, but in an interview with Ken Smikle of Target Market News, GM sales and marketing exec Mark LeNeve inadvertently voiced some troubling revelations about what major corporations are thinking these days in regard to the Black consumer market.

First, that the African American market is being considered more and more as general market, and both outreach and budgets designed to reach them are being folded into a bigger, less-focused pot.  Second, that you no longer need be African American to be an African American agency.  A record of outreach to African Americans in now a good enough qualification.

Apparently, all those young white 20-somethings who grew up loving Hip Hop and having two Black friends, who have convinced themselves that affinity and proximity have made them experts on Black culture, have also succeeded in convincing corporate America.

Some of us have not helped the case, either. The increasingly vocal movement to claim ownership of middle class values and distance successful Blacks from our country, misbehaving cousins further fuels the concept We are slowly becoming Them and they us.

The simple fact is, Black consumer attitudes have not changed dramatically, it's the accuracy and technology of the measurements that have improved. It is only relatively  recently that companies have been able to put accurate and sustainable data behind the truths that Black agencies, publishers, radio and TV stations have been telling them since the 1960s. That black people do things, lots of things. And buy stuff, lots of stuff. And more often than not, the same stuff that other folks buy (and maybe more), and for the same money (when we don't get charged more). And black folks have always had universal tastes. Economics and opportunity have expanded our ability to pursue those interests, but does that represent a sea change in Black thought? The  ambitious, highly cultured, well traveled Black folk of 1920's Harlem would think not.
 
But we  are not becoming them. In expressing our appreciation of the global experience, Black or otherwise, we are simply being as we always were.

Smart marketers know the difference. The global spirits company, Diageo, recently inked a lucrative deal with Sean Combs to market Ciroc, the premium vodka. It's a real partnership that cuts him in on 50% of revenue and gives him free reign over marketing and branding decision. It's one of the smartest moves to date by a company to aggressively acknowledge the uniqueness and global selling power of Black culture.

Taken in total, it seems we may be paying a price for Black progress. The more successful and broad we become, the more we are seen as mainstream, and the more marketers beat a hasty retreat in search of the next hot niche.

But in the end, it's the marketers who flee that will ultimately pay the price where it hurts - in the wallet.

Eric Easter is Chief of Digital Strategy for Johnson Publishing Company. He writes about politics, culture and technology for ebonyjet.com.

AP Photo: Frank Mingo and Caroline Jones with advertising awards won by their agency (1982).