Asian-Americans Appear to Be Hot Market for the ‘90s
The only mail most AT&T; customers will get from the long-distance phone company this month is their phone bills.
But nearly 100,000 of AT&T;’s Asian-American customers will get something else: postcards that remind them to call home during the upcoming “Moon Festival” celebration--a Chinese holiday similar to Thanksgiving.
AT&T; researchers not only determine who the company’s Chinese-American customers are--but also can tell which clients are of Korean, Japanese or Filipino ancestry. To accurately target--and talk to--the Asian-American market, AT&T; employs Asian-American owned ad agencies on both coasts. While AT&T; won’t reveal what it spends to target Asian-Americans, marketing experts say AT&T; spends more--millions more--than any U.S. company.
Some marketers are just starting to figure out what AT&T; has known all along: Despite the recession, the lucrative Asian-American market is about to boom--especially in California. The state’s Asian population grew 127% between 1980 and 1990--and it is expected to continue to grow 10% annually over the next decade, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And the average household income of Asians in America is $38,450--more than $7,000 higher than white households.
As a result, a growing number of companies from McDonald’s to Bank of America are looking for new ways to reach Asian-Americans. “It’s a lot like the Hispanic market was 10 years ago,” said Eleanor N. Yu, president of San Francisco-based Adland Advertising, one of the nation’s largest Asian-American agencies with annual billings of nearly $13 million.
A decade ago there wasn’t one sizable Asian-American owned ad agency in the United States. Today there are more than a dozen. There are several publications written specifically about marketing to Asian-Americans. And one non-Asian entrepreneur has set up a West Coast firm that sells commercial space on TV stations from Los Angeles to New York that program to Asian-American audiences.
“What you really have is a clean slate,” said Greg Sullivan, president of Los Angeles-based Asian Television Sales, which represents KSCI in Los Angeles and KTSF in San Francisco. “If you can be the first in what is essentially a new marketplace, why not?”
In a recent survey of Asian-Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area, 76% of those responding couldn’t name the brand of frozen food that they had most recently purchased. That can be a marketer’s dream, since many recent Asian-American immigrants have no preconceptions about most American brands.
Still, there is some resistance from marketers. Many U.S. companies are reluctant to create ads in foreign languages that their own top executives do not understand. “They’re afraid to deal with it because they feel it’s out of their control,” said Baron C. Suen, president of San Francisco-based Time Advertising, which creates Asian-language ads for the California Lottery and AT&T.;
Others companies, such as Metropolitan Life, have simply cut back on their Asian marketing efforts during the recession. Fewer than 20 major American companies are “seriously” trying to reach Asian-American consumers right now, estimated Yu.
But AT&T--feeling; competition from MCI and Sprint--has recently increased its Asian-American marketing budget. The company began to run Asian-language print ads in the mid-1980s. Its first TV ads in Asian languages were broadcast in 1990. “It pretty simple,” said spokesman Mark Siegal. “The key is to advertise in the language that our customers prefer.”
That is certainly the philosophy at Bank of America, which started marketing to Asian-Americans with print ads in 1987, and earlier this year produced its first TV spots with Asian actors speaking in Asian languages.
“It’s a market we can’t afford to ignore,” said Eleanor Chang, vice president of market segments at Bank of America. Many of its branches in heavily Asian-populated areas have deposit and withdrawal slips written in Asian languages. Some branches also have brochures in Asian languages that explain to recent immigrants exactly what checking accounts are.
Bank of America even plans to soon offer credit card applications in Asian languages.
Bank of America--and many of the other big companies targeting Asian-Americans--often purchase ad time during nightly news broadcasts in Chinese and Korean languages. Many also place ads on live television broadcasts of the Chinese New Year celebration in San Francisco.
But despite the recent move into TV advertising, most marketers still say the best way to reach Asian-Americans is by sponsoring key events--such as the New Year’s parade.
Indeed, the parade--which attracts up to 500,000 spectators to the streets of San Francisco, has emerged as the veritable Super Bowl of marketing to Asian-Americans. “If you’re not there,” one ad executive said, “you’re not anywhere.”
Briefly . . .
A number of advertisers will debut splashy ad campaigns on the MTV Awards on Wednesday evening, including Sega of America and Nike. . . . Tandem Computer is expected to award its $8.5-million ad account this week. . . . The football season has barely kicked off and beer makers are already embracing it--with O’Douls non-alcoholic brew sponsoring a football trivia promotion. . . . The New Clio Awards, now located in Chicago, plans to soon open a New York office. . . . Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone, is reportedly interested in launching a magazine aimed at parents. . . . An outdoor ad campaign raising eyebrows--and hackles--in New York City features two strategically placed watermelons in a hot pink poster for Bamboo Lingerie.
