Below is the response to the ad of The Young Turks in the US:

“These black folks are so unrruly and uncivilized, so rowdy, jumping up and down, they just can’t sit down unless you give them some damn fried chicken, this is so racist.”

And here follows the response to it from Australia:

“Young Turks, you are more ignorant that the people who made this ad, you are saying that all black people are African-American, that is what in effect you are saying. Not all black people are African-Americans, there are other countries in the world besides the United States of America, and yes, there are other black people in the world besides African-Americans, I know, it’s shocking for you, I just found out the other day man.”

Check You Tube for many more comments on the above discussion.

Above is an impactful tv ad in the Netherlands, developed from the insights of one specific ethnic cultural community. This commercial, made by FHV BBDO, is a hit in the Surinam community in the Netherlands as well as in Surinam.

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: The New York Times (Picture Jessica Kourkounis)

Ethnic Marketing can be relevant in all fields of marketing and communications, and for all products and services, including health insurance.

Recently, the New York Times reported on the higher risk of Alzheimer for Hispanics.

Antonio Vasquez, as the New York Times reports, was just 60 when Alzheimer’s disease derailed him. He lost his job at a Queens bakery because he kept burning chocolate chip cookies, forgetting he had put them in the oven. Then he got lost going to job interviews, walking his neighborhood in circles.

Teresa Mojica of Philadelphia was 59 when she got Alzheimer’s, making her so argumentative and delusional that she sometimes hits her husband. And Ida J. Lawrence was 57 when she started misplacing things and making mistakes in her Boston dental school job.

Click here to read the full article on the New York Times website

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

Above are two examples of TV ads targeting Hispanic voters in the United States. Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain actively target potential voters with ethnic minority backgrounds, whether they are Asian Americans, Arab Americans, Hispanic Americans, African Americans or whatever background voters may have.

Today, in many European countries, these kind of of campaign ads are quite uncommon. In the Netherlands, for example, the ‘new rule’ for many politicians and governmental communication is: be careful with targeting people with ethnic minority backgrounds in their own mother tongue.

Six years ago, the views on this were still very different, as we can see below… for the times they are a-changin’.

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