TransCity

TransCity Diversity Marketing & Communications, in cooperation with MCA Communicatie and EtnoMedia, is responsible for the very successful introduction campaign of Telesur in the Netherlands.

Telesur is the national Telecom company of Suriname. They have launched a unique simcard in the Netherlands. The simcard can be used in two countries, the Netherlands and Suriname, it has two local mobile phone numbers (a Dutch and a Surinamese number), and it uses one low local rate, so that calling from the Netherlands to Suriname or from Suriname to the Netherlands can be done against the same low local rate.

The introduction campaign was build around the theme ‘Two countries, one feeling’ which does not only match the instrumental elements of the physical product, but also the emotional values: the Surinamese community in the Netherlands is among the largest single ethnic minority communities in the country.

Below is the image of the teaser campaign (which ran in the two weeks before the launch) as well as short Dutch language movie that was made with stand-up comedian Roué Verveer. This movie was also done in the teaser phase of the campaign, a phase in which only the campaign theme was launched. In this short movie Roué Verveer gives his interpretation of ‘Two countries, one feeling’.

Source: NRC Handelsblad

Ahmed Aboutaleb, a prominent Labour politician who was born in Morocco, will be the new mayor of Rotterdam. Aboutaleb (47) is currently the deputy minister of social affairs. He will start his new job on January 1, 2009, after the home affairs ministry confirms his appointment.

Before becoming a deputy minister in February 2007, Aboutaleb made a name for himself in Amsterdam, where he was the city council’s executive for social affairs.

Aboutaleb is the first mayor of Moroccan descent to be appointed in the Netherlands. Rotterdam is the country’s second biggest city (population 584,000) and has substantial social and poverty issues.

Click here to read the full article on the NRC Handelsblad website

(Source: the Guardian)

Cricket, a game most Italians find baffling, is becoming one of the country’s fastest-growing sports thanks to a wave of immigration from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Around 20,000 people from the Indian subcontinent are regularly putting down stumps and padding up in Italy’s parks, creating a groundswell of cricket which now sustains 33 teams in a three-division national league.

In a summer punctuated by inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric from prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s ministers, a generation of foreign-born cricketers are now playing under the Italian flag to propel the national team to greater success.

With a few hundred thousand people from the Indian subcontinent now in Italy, there are real quality players moving up from the parks into the league and national side, said Simone Gambino, an Italian who caught the cricket bug while visiting England in the 1970s and who now heads the Italian Cricket Federation.

Click here to read the full article on the guardian.co.uk website

The ethnic and cross cultural media landscape in Europe continues to grow. It varies from local ethnic media to pan-European media for specific ethnic communities throughout Europe.

In the Netherlands, TransCity can provide advertisers and media agencies with a media plan based on net reach reach within your target audience as well as years of experiences on effectiveness.

Through it’s European network, TransCity can draw up effective media plans in other European countries as well, including the UK, Germany, France and Italy.

If you wish to learn how to use ethnic and cross cultural media in an effective way as an integral part of your media mix, please get in touch with TransCity on +31 10 414 04 64 or info@transcity.com

New figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau, project whites will comprise less than half of the population before the middle of this century.

The U.S. Census Bureau calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites.

So-called minorities, the Census Bureau projects, will already constitute a majority of American children under 18 by 2023 and of working-age Americans by 2039.

The main causes for this rapid racial and ethnic changes are higher birth rates among immigrants, increasing immigration and an ageing white population.

By 2050, the number of Hispanic people will nearly triple, to 133 million from 47 million, to account for 30 percent of Americans, compared with 15 percent today. People who say they are Asian, with their ranks soaring to 41 million from 16 million, will make up more than 9 percent of the population, up from 5 percent.

More than three times as many people are expected to identify themselves as multiracial - 16 million, accounting for nearly 4 percent of the population. The population of people who define themselves as black is projected to rise to 66 million from 41 million, but increase its overall share by barely 2 percentage points, to 15 percent.

“What’s happening now in terms of increasing diversity probably is unprecedented,” says retired census demographer Campbell Gibson in the International Herald Tribune. Already today, several states, including California and Texas, have already reached the point where members of minorities are in the majority.