TransCity

We all know Indian telephonists are helping consumers in countries like the United States and United Kingdom with questions on a wide range of products and services, from mortgages to vacuum cleaners. Some 350,000 people are employed by the Indian call and contact center industry.

However, outsourcing in the call and contact center industry is not only limited to the English language areas. Dutch language call and contact centers have now started operations in the Turkish city of Istanbul and in the Surinamese capitol of Paramaribo.

Turkish families from the Netherlands who have resettled in Turkey, often have children who have grown up in ‘Orange country’. Many children of these families are fluent in Dutch and are qualified to serve clients in the Dutch language areas.

Since Istanbul is only a 3 hours flight from Amsterdam, meetings with the management in the Netherlands can be organised easily.

Among organisations with call centers in Istanbul are HCN and Agis. Health insurer Agis partly uses its Istanbul call center to serve its Turkish Dutch clients as part of its ethnic marketing strategy.

In Suriname, Unamic has opened a call center to serve clients in the Netherlands. In this former Netherlands colony in South America, Dutch is a language widely spoken.

Although both in European countries and in America there is an ongoing discussion on immigration, there’s a big difference between the debates.

‘The difference in the way Europeans and Americans look at immigration’, argues Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., ‘springs from the fact that America protects its welfare system from immigrants but leaves its labour markets open, while the EU protects its labour markets and leaves its welfare system open’.

Immigrants to Europe are welcomed with welfare benefits, but cannot get jobs. America makes it easy even for illegal immigrants to get jobs, but stops even legal immigrants claiming means-tested welfare benefits.

The result is that in America political debate centres on illegal immigration, where as in Europe, even legal immigrants are often seen as spongeing on others through welfare receipts.

In Europe, says Danny Sriskandarajah of Britain’s Institute for Public Research, it’s harder to talk about immigration as an economic issue.

Europe’s black economy is large: that makes it much harder for immigrants to integrate through normal (legal) employment channels. And none of the other usual engines of integration work well in Europe, like churches, the military and school. Secular Europeans barely comprehend devout Muslims. With some exceptions, the armed forces are not an avenue of advancement.

Over the next quarter-century, European countries will face huge pressure to import more immigrant workers to mitigate demographic decline. They will not be able to take them unless there is public support for immigration. Gregory Maniatis, a migration adviser to several European governments, says therefore Europe needs the equivalent of America’s civil-rights movement for its own immigrants.

Source: The Economist

The 2000 Census found that 12.5% of the U.S. population of more than 280 million was Hispanic - a bigger market than all of Canada - and projects the share to be nearly 18% by 2020. Last year, Spanish-language TV’s ad sales rose 16.9%, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus, making it No. 2 in ad market growth after the Internet.

And there’s still plenty of running room. Spanish-language media accounted for just 4% of the $106.5 billion advertisers spent on TV, local newspapers and national magazines last year. That’s one reason Kagan Research forecasts spending on Hispanic broadcast and cable networks will grow 16.4% a year through 2009, surpassing English-language counterparts’ forecast of 9.4% a year.

Such numbers have pushed companies that have successfully appealed to Hispanic audiences to look for opportunities to reach other ethnic groups. Cable and satellite companies in particular are scrambling for deals to retransmit shows from China, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, Russia, Poland, Greece, Israel, Italy, Vietnam and elsewhere.

Among other factors that could make this ethnic media’s breakout year, ad and audience surges in ethnic media are expected this month during football’s quadrennial World Cup championship. And Wall Street’s estimation of ethnic media could rocket depending on the outcome of Univision’s current search for a buyer. Investors already value the USA’s largest Spanish-language broadcaster - with 62 TV stations on the mainland and in Puerto Rico along with other networks and media properties - at more than $10 billion.

“Despite all of the activity in this market, we’re just in the top of the second inning, maybe the bottom of the first,” says John Paton, CEO of ImpreMedia, the largest Spanish-language newspaper publisher.

Source: USA Today

Is football gaining ground in the US thanks to marketers tapping into the diverse market place? The growing number of advertisers linking themselves to the 2006 FIFA World Cup certainly suggests just that. Appartantly, the 40 Million strong Latino population in the US are making it well worth for advertisers to link their brand to football and the World Cup.

Univision, the leading Spanish-language TV network in the United States, is cooperating with advertisers like Verizon Wireless and Home Depot. Starting at today’s opening match between Germany and Costa Rica, Home Depot is sponsor in each of the 64 matches being televised live on Univision and its sister networks TeleFutura and GalaVision. Video highlights of all televised matches will be offered by Verizon Wireless to its cellphone subscribers.

Other brands linking themselves to the World Cup in Germany include Wal-Mart, Motorola and the Bimbo bread company. Bimbo has made a TV ad placing a well-known Mexican football player in the middle of a wheat field which, through special effects, is transferred into a football field.

It’s interesting to discover that the growing importance of ethnic marketing in the US might have a catalyzing effect on the popularity of football in the nation as a whole.

The Hispanic online population and Hispanic Internet advertising in the U.S. are growing faster than the general market, and Hispanic portals and sites are beginning to get into fast-growing areas like user-generated content, behavioral targeting and search.

Spanish-language online ad spending is forecast to grow by 32 % in 2006, compared to 25% in the general market, and the number of Hispanic Internet users will grow from 15.7 million last year to 16.7 million in 2006, and increase by 33% over the next five years, according to eMarketer’s new Hispanic Youth Online report.

Hispanics account for 14 % of the U.S. population, but just 9 % of Internet users. The online Latino population is a youth market, with a median age nearly ten years younger than the online general population. By some breakdowns, about 40 % of Hispanic Internet users identified themselves as English-dominant, 40 % as bilingual and 20 % as Spanish-dominant.

As Spanish-language content grows, advertisers follow. Yahoo en Español, for instance, has signed up four major marketers – Motorola, General Motors Corp.’s GMC division, DirecTV and State Farm – to sponsor its World Cup fan site. The site is full of World Cup news, blogs, message boards and football-themed ads.

Hispanics who don’t spend much time on Spanish-language sites can be difficult to pinpoint, a sign that behavorial targeting may be one of the next trends. With behavioral targeting, Latinos can be identified and served relevant ads based on anonymous tracking of their previous online activities, which could include visits to Hispanic sites.

Source: Advertising Age