Accessing Culture Beyond Ethnicity: Introduction
July 08, 2019
Humans are complex beings. Our cultural identity (or feeling of belonging to a group) is part of our self-conception and self-perception. It is extremely vast, relating not only to nationality, ethnicity, religion, and/or social class – but to things like social groups, sexuality, and even style/aesthetics or food. At Acuity, we believe that all modern advertising is multicultural advertising, and in today’s context, must extend beyond ethnicity to account for the fact that a culture is defined by any group of individuals that are united by a sense of similar identity. Technology allows you to connect with any audience and take an ‘in-culture’ approach, bolstered by consideration and inclusion of critical signals discoverable online.
THE PROBLEM
For advertisers, pinpointing these multicultural cues can be daunting due to the many complexities they must consider. One pitfall associated with in-culture advertising is believing that language targeting is a comprehensive solution to capture a cultural group. Simply taking the Hispanic demographic as an example, the chart below demonstrates that 2/3’s of this group are not Spanish language-first speakers! This means language targeting to Hispanics results in missing out on roughly 1/3rd of the intended audience, and similar stats can be reported for other ethnic groups.
HOW CAN YOU SCALE AN IN-CULTURE APPROACH BEYOND LANGUAGE?
With recent breakthroughs in AI and decision science we can discover the “DNA” that makes up any culture, sub-culture or micro-culture in the consumer market today. By deciphering consumer PASSIONS, INTERESTS, INTENT, and AFFINITY – we get a clearer picture of intended audiences and access greater scale with in-culture initiatives.
Here is how we break down the primary factors to consider when identifying members of any cultural group in the digital world.
Passions – Video-viewing behaviors that signal passion points.
Interests – Social signals captured when target audiences ‘hand-raise’ to consume content.
Intent – Search behavior that signals target audiences current needs and top of mind curiosities.
Affinity – Brand associations and preferences.
Over the next few weeks, our newest blog series “Accessing Culture Beyond Ethnicity” will take you through these four key factors that can be used to decode any culture using technology. We will show you our approach, and hope you can chime in to share your own thoughts and experiences!
For questions related to in-culture advertising or ways it can benefit your next program, contact us today!
