Asian Media: Reaching the Target Reaping the Rewards
May 26, 2008
TWENTY YEARS AGO, ASIAN AMERICANS had few choices in how they got news and information from back home. Those living in major markets were able to purchase in-language newspapers made from stories cut and pasted from home-country papers. The news was a month old by the time they received it, but they were happy to get it. Revenue was generated from local Asian retail and small-business advertising. Today, the Asian media landscape is substantially different, as a result of four broad trends.
First, the size of the U.S. Asian market has grown from 7.3 million in 1980 to nearly 15 million today (according to the U.S. Census Bureau) and is projected to reach 17 million by 2010-nearly the size of the entire population of Australia today.
Second, where once there were only newspapers, now there are many more media properties catering to these growing audiences-including broadcast, cable and satellite television, radio, magazines and out of home. There are upwards of 800-plus Asian media properties, some say, compared with around 200 in 1980.
"Twenty years ago, media properties were more like family businesses," says Thomas Pyun, vp of advertising sales for multimedia company ImaginAsian Entertainment Inc., which offers TV programming in seven languages to 4.5 million households nationwide. Now, many of them "have grown into very large corporations, have a much better understanding of the American advertising industry, and are adopting more mainstream practices such as audits of print properties, Nielsen TV ratings and other tools that non-Asian media already have."
Third, as a result of this growth, these media properties are capturing the attention of national advertisers across a variety of verticals, including telecommunications, financial services, automotive, and retail, and they no longer rely entirely on mom-and-pop advertisers.
The final paradigm shift has been with the content itself, accommodating the changing needs of Asian immigrants who have become more acculturated. "When the first generation came here, they were very entrepreneurial. They didn't have the luxury or time to be entertained and they turned to newspapers for their news," explains Eric Yoon, founder and CEO of four-year-old Los Angeles-based Television Korea 24, Inc., which is currently available in nine states via Comcast and Time Warner Cable. "Now that they've been here for awhile, they're settled and are looking for information about entertainment," something television provides, he says.
Chinese daily newspaper World Journal has a strong focus on news from the greater China region, but "we've also added soft news from North America-things like sports, finance, entertainment, lifestyle, education, consumer news, health and medicine, and gardening," says executive vp Tina Lee. The daily also provides an "e-paper" version online for the younger and more digitally savvy generation.
Vivian Truonggia, CEO and publisher of the one-year-old weekly Viet Tribune, has seen similar behavioral changes among the Vietnamese audience. "This generation worries about economics and politics in the U.S. more than what's happening in Vietnam, so we write about things like following up with Hillary Clinton and John McCain." In the early years, when she and current editor-in-chief Hoang Xuan Nguyen worked for the Viet Mercury News, which was published by the San Jose Mercury News from 1988-2006, "we mainly wrote about how we missed our country, how we hated Communists and how people suffered."
Ted Fang, editor and publisher of pan-Asian newsweekly AsianWeek, concurs: "Now, a generation later, I think [Asians] are becoming more comfortable with their identity and citizenship as Americans. This in turn has allowed the community to think more globally about embracing both our Asian heritage and our American roots."
Among broadcasters tailoring content to more-acculturated Asians, LA18 TV/KSCI parent company Asian Media Group, which distributes content in four languages, also produces several hours of local programming a day, including talk shows and news. "A lot of the emphasis is the same as a general-market or Hispanic station," says CEO Peter Mathes.
Similarly, Filipino television provider ABS-CBN saw the idea of producing its own local programming as a way to grow its market and launched MYX, an Asian American music and lifestyle channel catering to youth, available on DirecTV with some program properties also on Comcast Bay On Demand.
The push for original content has also extended to advertising. "In the early days, the typical spot consisted of taking an English-language spot and either dubbing or subtitling it," says Michael Sherman, general manager of 32-year-old San Francisco-based KTSF TV. "Over the last five to six years, we've seen companies like Wells Fargo and Honda produce original spots in-language, and it's beautiful stuff. Some spots still run in English with subtitles-McDonald's, for instance. But the fact that companies are investing money in original production is significant."
Advertisers that have discovered the Asian American market do extremely well. For instance, in India, the world's largest remittance-receiving country, Western Union revenue for full year 2007 vs. 2006 grew by 52% on money transfer transaction growth of 65%. According to Achal Mehra, editor and publisher of 17-year-old Little India, a 140,000-circulation monthly magazine focused on the Asian Indian experience in North America, Western Union has long understood the value that Asian-Indian targeted media brings to the company's bottom-line results. Western Union's communications placed in Little India and other Asian Indian media outlets comprise a significant part of the company's annual marketing expenditures.
Verizon Wireless test-marketed in San Francisco two and a half years ago utilizing KTSF along with newspaper and radio. "We repeated the program a second year," says Sherman. "Now they've expanded beyond San Francisco and are doing some inlanguage work in Los Angeles and other markets." Sherman knows that Asian marketing is working for Verizon simply by the fact that "they keep coming back and spending larger budgets."
English-language opportunities are also growing. For instance, 29-year-old AsianWeek, which prints entirely in English, has been able to stretch beyond the typical diversity budget to capture some business from general-market budgets, according to Fang. For example, he says, "We are the only Asian publication to carry the preprint circular for Best Buy."
Yet for every advertiser who understands the value of the Asian American market, there are 10 more who do not.
Part of the reason is the lack of a national pan-Asian network. "We don't have major TV networks yet, and that makes it more challenging," says Karen Narasaki, president and executive director of civil rights organization Asian American Justice Center (Washington, D.C.), which focuses on media diversity to improve the presence of Asian Americans in front of and behind the camera, as well as community education. "We think that no one has come along yet with the vision to understand how fast our community is growing in this country."
Another challenge is the lack of data. Until KTSF could show Nielsen ratings, "we were often turned away at the door," says Sherman. "If you didn't have numbers, the agencies didn't want to talk to you."
Many media properties have taken steps to generate their own numbers. For instance, KTSF hired Gallup many years ago to conduct a first-of-its-kind Chinese in-language survey aiming to address grocery-retailer misperceptions that Asians shopped at mom-and-pop stores. The results showed that the majority of the Chinese population shopped at Safeway and Lucky. "That changed everything for us," says Sherman. "We've done research every year since that study, at our own expense, and others have, too."
Some advertisers understand that there's more to value than numbers. "Some of the more progressive brands look at us for the type of audience we can deliver," adds Pyun. "We're simply a niche TV network that delivers Asian and Asian-inspired content, the same way ESPN delivers sports content or Oxygen is for women. That's the biggest message we're trying to deliver. We're Americans just like anyone else and we're just another cable network."
In addition, Asian media is very cost efficient. "It's far and away the best deal of any mass medium in the country," says Sherman. "KTSF's cost per point is between $450 and $550, and we have the highest ratings in the marketplace, second only to Univision. If you did the same kind of point buy at the mainstream networks, you'd be paying $1,000 to $1,500 per point."
Then there's the multiple-language issue. "Almost ninety percent of the Asian American market is comprised of six major ethnic groups-Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Asian Indian, Filipino and Vietnamese," says Pyun, each requiring copy to be subtitled or recreated in different languages. Even so, however, the buy is not complicated, since Asians tend to be compressed in about 10 geographic markets.
The good news is, more brands and agencies are "getting it." "We're getting requests from large buying company diversity groups for information on the Asian market," says Greg Sullivan, president of Asian broadcast television sales company Asian Marketing and Media Services, which represents KTSF and other properties. "We're doing business with MPG, OMD, Wunderman and Zenith, and we've had requests for information from BBDO, Universal McCann, Starcom, Mediacom and Mediavest. Either they're saying we need to know about this so they have something to say, or their clients are asking. That's a major shift." In addition, he says, all the major Asian ad agencies are becoming much more mainstream.
Going forward, all these media executives agree that building out their online offerings is a major priority, including adding more languages, streaming video, and local and usergenerated content. "Data shows that Asian Americans spend half their time on the Internet, so that's quite important to us," says Olivia de Jesus, managing director of ABS-CBN. "Our [youth-targeted] MYX Web site is purely a marketing platform today, but we intend to develop it into a social networking site and use it to bring in other revenues."
Many Asian online properties are also pulling in viewers from other markets, giving them-and their national advertisers-a wider reach. "There's a tremendous opportunity online because if you're living in a market where there's no Asian media outlet and you want news and information in-language, you can come to our Web site," says Mathes of Asian Media Group. LA18 TV/KSCI sees 1 million to 1.5 million streams of its videos per month.
As the Asian American community continues to grow, advertiser interest and budget dollars will shift to this market, as well. While these media properties are already seeing interest from pharmaceuticals, new retail clients and some sectors of the travel industry, we can expect many other new entrants going forward.
For more Marketing to Asian Americans coverage:
Marketing to Asian Americans
Research: Uncovering the Gold Mine
Asian Media: Reaching the Target, Reaping the Rewards
Roundtable: Opportunity's Knocking
Roundtable continued
Where are the Clients?
