Peter Blacker, vice president, international and multicultural, AOL Media Networks, highlights Ford's efforts to target Hispanics.
The following is the final segment of a transcript from a panel discussion at February's iMedia Brand Summit in Florida. Yesterday, Stacy Crespo, director of Business Development & Partnership Strategies at Motorola, described that company's partnership with Phat Farm. Today: Peter Blacker, vice president, International & Multicultural, AOL Media Networks, highlights Ford's efforts to target Hispanics.
You can follow along with some of Blacker's presentation and videos here.
Peter Blacker: We’re going to switch gears a second and go into a little bit of a look at the U.S. Hispanic market and what we’ve done. There’s going to be a dual case study kind of approach, because I’m a big fan of practicing what you preach. It would be ridiculous if we were to just be saying “Oh, all of you need to be looking at the U.S. Hispanic market” and AOL itself wasn’t investing quite heavily in getting our message out. We actually are one of the largest investors in this space and going to schools and wiring schools and trying to be part of that whole American dream. So what I’m going to share with you today is an example of A, how we’re positioning -- what’s going on in the U.S. Hispanic market; and B, how we’ve worked with Ford Motor Company and a really cool opportunity, or rather solution that we worked with them on that I think can be a good example of what you can come to expect from a partner in this space.
I’m going to launch into what we’re doing at AOL. By the way, I’ve been at AOL for about four years, worked with Stacy (Crespo) in multicultural for about 10 years. What has been exciting is how this topic has become bigger and bigger. I think that hopefully, this conference is going to take a more serious look at what multicultural means, as obviously, the marketplace becomes more and more of a multicultural place.
Our focus is basically looking at Hispanic as a cultural identity, not a linguistic choice. That’s something that’s really a major, major change in what’s happening in the U.S. Hispanic market. We’re no longer seeing, it’s Spanish language therefore it’s got to be Latino; we’re hearing it again and again. And this blend between “Where’s urban?” “Where’s Hispanic?” “Where does it blend together?” and what we’re trying to do, as you can see by some of the brands, and see what we’re doing in terms of the way we’re positioning it, we’re not looking … this is not Uni-vision. This is not sitting just talking to your Tia Abuela. This is understanding that someone begins her day as Graciella in the house and makes breakfast and then when she gets to work she’s Gracie and she talks about “Hey, did you see this movie … did you see that movie?” and then when she gets back at home she’s Graciella again. And how are you as a brand, like a Kraft, going to reach out and really talk to Gracie and Graciella at different parts in her day? And then additionally, when is it “me time” versus “we time?" When is she a mom and when is she a Latina independent woman? And so, what we’re trying to look at is how we can help brands connect with this exploding market of Hispanics online. And by Hispanic we really truly mean all the sort of variations of the mosaic of what Hispanic entails.
In this particular case study, we were approached by Ford as we’ll go into in a second. There are some of the images that we're running at our trade campaign. We’re in Ad Week this week and doing a bunch of stuff, really promoting the Hispanic market -- evangelizing it.
So Ford basically came to us with a really interesting situation. They said, "We don’t want to sell cars." I was like, "huh?" They said, "We want to connect with the community more, and specifically we want to promote ourselves and get closer to the community because we know we’ll sell more cars if we indeed are seen as a partner -- and we specifically want to focus in on small business owners and future business owners and entrepreneurs because we know this is a really … it’s not just great for our positioning, but these are the influencers for future purchasing behavior."
And so, they came to us and said, "We don’t want banners, we don’t want buttons, we don’t want anything you’ve ever done before. You’re Time Warner. Go do something and come back." I’m like, okay, great. So it was really a fun challenge because the task was to do something that had not been done before, that was out of the box, and that was really unusual but spoke specifically to that and looked into their heritage. Ford has had a great history of promoting multiculturalism both in their supplier diversity chain and in the way that they promote their dealers. And we first looked and listened to what their history was and what Ford had done in the space.
We pulled together … Ford’s objective essentially, we’re building a deeper relationship with the community. And everyone talks about it, but they actually said do something about it -- we don’t just want to say, “community outreach” with a banner.
Second thing was to say, “What are you doing in terms of reaching out to small business owners and helping them?” Have any of you guys ever had a small business? Okay, a couple people. So you know, how many people Mel, were on your board of directors when you had your small business.
Mel: [LAUGHTER]
Blacker: Exactly. So, that was our whole focus, was if you’re a small business owner the one thing that you’re missing is really great strategic advice and strategic partners. And so I said, if they really want to go after the small business owner and really touch this person let’s help people like Mel connect with people that help them; and let’s help Mel connect with other Mels so that they can come together. And that’s when it started. This whole thing took on a different life. And that’s like what we talked about this morning, putting the consumer in control, blogging, basically the consumer being in charge of the media. This is a real example of that because we said let’s move away from just being a media marketing choice and let’s actually create stuff together with the consumer in mind.
We then went into the business of both growing communities and creating a marketing opportunity for Ford. This [shows a slide] is an example of one of their first diverse suppliers, Irma Elder, who’s a Latina woman who basically Ford helped out like 35 years ago to start one of the first Hispanic and female-owned dealerships.
So we created this concept called Mi Negocio, meaning my business. And again, it’s designed to help small business owners connect with other small business owners. But it’s not just B-to-B; it’s a consumer site. And the whole time it’s basically promoting connecting, inspiring the Hispanic community. I labeled it “infotainment.” It’s a combination of providing a service as well as being something that’s entertaining. In this case, we said let’s just pull together every single Latino that we touch on a day-to-day basis. It doesn’t matter if they’re intersecting with our properties in Spanish or in English, let’s just get close to them.
This concept of “infotainment” in terms of let’s pull out content -- for God sakes we’re Time Warner -- let’s find things that maybe have been sitting on the shelf that no one ever thought we could offer out to the small business community in Spanish, for the first time ever. And that was a big project, much harder to do than one would think. We leveraged a number of our resources, Time Magazine, Fortune, Small Business, Business 2.0, CNN Money. They’d never done anything in Spanish -- ever. So we’re talking with Fortune Magazine or Time Magazine and we’re like, hey, we want to get your content in Spanish and help promote small business owners to do stuff. And they’re going, well we don’t do that. And we’re like, well, let’s try to do it. You know, let’s shake things up. And that’s where it gets really interesting and different. We created actually, a unit of our company now which is called Time Warner Hispanic Group. It’s exciting because you move outside of an existing property, “stick logo here.” And we’re actually creating things that touch consumers. We’re taking, in this case content that’s never been available before and putting it into Spanish.
And then, as you’ll see throughout this other stuff, we’re actually providing resources where we’re connecting folks like Mel with folks like Stacy so they can talk and share business ideas. And they’re in different parts of the country. They may not even speak the same level of Spanish. And you’ll see some of the examples. The Spanish grammar may be horrific, but they’ve got this common thing: they all want to achieve the American dream. And so, we’re trying to help provide that environment where the American dream is achieved, and Ford is achieving that halo.
And the American dream can be different. If you’re at Kraft it may be helping a family get through the day in a quicker, faster way, getting the kids off to school and making sure the house ticks and then having a great active social life on their own. Or it may be focusing on a business. But it’s really understanding that most Latinos in this country are in some element of this whole American dream spectrum and really represent that, and how can we as brands play on that?
So what we looked to do was we created these different content areas which are all in Spanish and basically rotate on a weekly basis. But most importantly, we connect like-minded people with each other. This stuff did not exist a year ago. We built it. It is now the leading website for small business Hispanic entrepreneurs -- amazing, I mean in itself. Now we’re getting asked can we run a -- people want to run ads in here. And we’re like, but we created this as an advertising product, but we’ll find a way.
Basically in terms of what we’re looking to do, we then also said let’s pull in streaming video; because you know, everyone is under this misconception “oh, multicultural, it’s only dial-up.” Actually, if you look at the research that we’ve done, multicultural markets actually outpace the general market in terms of high speed access, high speed gadgets, home entertainment systems. So we were like, let’s provide this on here and let’s get folks that can give advice, like a board room series, to be able to talk to people and give business advice, and share stuff interactively.
This is an example. We have a board of directors who -- this is one of them, he’s a Multicultural Director from Target giving some business advice in English and in Spanish.
[VIDEO]
Blacker: Next is Kim Casiano, who actually not only formed Casiano Communications, but she also sits on the board of Ford, she’s the only female Latina on the board of Ford Motor Company.
[VIDEO]
Blacker: Here’s what’s fascinating … is this online? Is this offline? It’s a mixture of both because guess what? We did these events in key Hispanic cities. We did one in Chicago, one in LA, one in Miami. And then we webcasted. And then we got consumers to actually ask questions in real time. And so it becomes this whole living, breathing thing. For marketers I challenge all of you to think outside the normal line item that’s online advertising. These are big concepts that actually do not require tremendous multimillion dollar commitment. They just start with an idea of saying I want to connect with my consumer; my consumer needs this; help me build a program. And that’s where we, I think, become really exciting and take this whole space to a different level.
In terms of some of the content that we’re able to get, again, the burden was on us and continues to be on us in terms of trying to pull together sexy cool things that are in this Time Warner library -- whether it’s sports, entertainment, business stuff -- pulling it up and bubbling it up for the multicultural market. The message board that we provided, the community stuff, like what I was saying about connecting the Mels to the Stacys, that’s really critical because this is almost more powerful than any story we could ever bring on from Time or Business 2.0. It’s somebody saying hey, I am in San Francisco trying to import Mexican sports league shirts, how do I do it? Do you know who to talk to, what I can do? There’s a huge opportunity for brands that want to get into that whole community area. Everyone said, "oh I don’t do community. I don’t want to put my … No ones going to … I don’t want to touch community." But the reality of it is this is where the consumer is at, be part of it. Be part of that experience and find creative ways to get involved in that.
Just to show you some examples: Here’s somebody who’s actually coming in who’s trying to connect with somebody else about business and these boards just keep building off of each other. I would love to reach out to all these people and show all the success stories now that we’re breeding. But for Ford, this was a major thing, because again, they’re connecting right with the consumer. And they’re not just trying to push cars. They’re trying to say, look, we’re relevant; we’re part of your achievement of the American dream.
Another one of these messages, again giving advice, this time on how to do marketing from a daycare center. A woman who’s … this is stuff we don’t control. We don’t write this. This is members helping other members. And then on top of that we have advice columnists who are the experts. We’re trying to bring everything together.
This is an example for business, but we can do it, again, for any category. And I say not just “we.” There are a lot of partners out there that do this, so I urge all of you to try to think creatively when you think about multicultural because it is a very different experience. There’s a real series of needs that can be met that brands just aren’t meeting yet and if you get in there, and occupy that space, you win over the consumer forever.
Offline integration for us has also been really key. How do we take these ideas and get major PR buzz and make sure that we get legs? Because just doing online, you know, multicultural budgets are usually short and small and we’re trying to max them out. So our expert panel, where we have this traveling road show going around, really helped us get a lot of PR. We did three in-market events last year. We’re doing four this year, coming up, and we're really focusing on the grass roots stuff. That also helped us tap into additional budget. So if any of you are saying, God, but my multicultural budget for interactive is so small, you can combine with grass roots stuff and community outreach programs and all of the sudden you have these very robust areas.
The media support in terms of what went on, we had this whole focus on our welcome screen to drive people into this area. We also created content areas focusing on how to build your business, how to grow your business, how to start your own business.
And then this is really the sexiest area of Hispanic marketing, and if there’s one thing you walk away with today it would be just focusing on this one area, which is understanding that a Latino or a Latina does not spend all his or her time just reading something in Spanish in a little area called AOL Latino, that actually they are real breathing -- we are real breathing, living people that do lots of different things. And so, understanding that you can, in a sense, work with Gracie or Graciella as she goes throughout her day and she’s now in Fortune Small Business reading stuff in English, but the creative here is in Spanish -- because we know she’s Latina, because she’s actually said, hey, I’m Latina, I want AOL Latino as my welcome screen, but you know, the rest of my day is going to be doing stuff in English. The same thing with our African American segment, people you know, do not just sit reading Black content all day. They are 360-degree people, so how do we understand that and get involved and understand that someone going to an MBA site might be part of either one of these segments. It doesn’t just have to be an MBA Black site or an MBA Latino site.
This is the way that we’re working. As marketers it’s really the hottest trend -- “How do we really understand the consumer wherever they go?”
This is making sure you guys are still staying awake. This is a story actually that came out two days ago -- not two days, a week ago -- about a man finding a nail in his skull six days later; a very bizarre story. You’ll have to talk with me later at lunch to find out what happens. But as you can see, the story is in English, the ads in Spanish. There’s a reason why these companies are doing it. It’s working for them. It’s actually pulling better results than it would if you were running stuff in English. And we have a series of case studies that talk about it. But it’s again, pushing the envelope. It’s a new trend of what’s going on.
So in summary, what happened in terms of the overall success, yeah, media was great -- we achieved some great media goals. But we also, really through the “infotainment” have now this living, breathing animal that just exists on its own. It has really been a phenomenal success for the entire company.
In looking at then, just some of the press, I mean some of the coverage we got from Wall Street Journal and The Post, USA Today, et cetera was worth more almost than the whole campaign itself. So, as you think about different ideas, look for those that really have some PR legs, like what Stacy had talked about because they really gain so much value for you.
In terms of the growing partnership, you know, we’re in a multiyear agreement now and it’s just been growing and growing -- and very exciting -- so you’ll be hearing probably a lot more about what we’re doing.
In terms of just some ideas of what I view in terms of successful partnerships, because I get asked all the time, “How did you do the sport thing?” and “How come you’ve got all these other things?” “What are you guys doing that makes sense?” It’s really the commitment. It’s not even as much the money as the time. It’s having the commitment from you as a marketer to sit down and say this is what’s really important to me. Like this is what’s important to Reebok and I need to know … you’ve got to get these things or else it’s not going to make sense. It’s moving away from just a simple media discussion and really understanding, as Joe [Uva] said this morning, “shared values” so that you can innovate. It’s collaboration, as I said, not just a media plan, making out-of-the-box a reality, keeping that focus -- because the other thing we happen to have is, you know you have interactive is so hot and multicultural is so hot, and before you know it you’ve got a whole room full of 50,000,000 ideas. It’s like having that focus and having those one or two wins is so critical to make sure that we grow and sustain what we’re doing.
Executive buy-in obviously has been critical, and finding, for us, those partners that really get it -- because they’re critical for us.
Broad reach, relevant assets and vision. I know we’ve got some folks here from Black Planet and some other areas. We had the reach so it’s how do we connect those people with relevant assets and a vision, to actually make something come alive because this category is really where it’s at.
And finally passion: If you don’t have passion in this space, if you don’t have passion for what you’re doing, it’s going to totally fail. This is one particular area where between the urban Latino and African American, if there’s one common thread through all of it it’s this total drive -- a drive to make it happen; a drive to make it real and keep it real. And so, I urge all of you -- in summary from all of our panelists and all of our little discussion here to really think about how you can make multicultural more a part of your marketing mix and what you’re doing because the reality of it is the multicultural bus has left the station. How do you make sure your brand is on the bus and not under it?
Thanks.
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