Are audience research systems biased against ethnic media?

Anthony Greenidge, sales and marketing director of ethnic media sales house MEMS, looks at whether current audience research systems are biased against ethnic media…

With the next UK census due to start in 2011, current projections for the size of the ethnic population are reaching 7.5 million or 12% of the total UK population, an audience equal in size to the whole of London.

Not surprisingly a market this size has considerable spending power, currently estimated at more than £300 billion. Why then is it so difficult for advertisers to discover which media different ethnic communities consume, so that they can build their marketing campaigns on solid reliable evidence that their advertising will reach its targets?

The majority of the mainstream media industry has somehow managed to sidestep the whole issue of ethnic media while still maintaining an image of being inclusive of all types of audience.

Advertisers want to attract multicultural consumers, advertising agencies work towards delivering mass, diverse, ethnically-mixed audiences and the industry feels confident of its achievement of attaining multi-level communication. However, if you try to measure the real cut-through to ethnic consumers, you can see the reality behind the façade.

Spending many a late night surfing the internet to gleam titbits of data that relate to ethnic viewers/listeners/readers in the UK is a fascinating but very taxing enterprise. Why is it that the major media research organizations and companies – BARB, TNS, RAJAR, NRS, TGI, Postar, AGB Nielsen – show no evidence of taking minorities seriously?

The current audience research structures for television, radio, print media and posters are simply not good enough to effectively accommodate the ethnic media outlets. Ethnic minority media consumers are not fully represented on the most recognised research panels, which leads to under reporting of their media consumption, and this in turn results in poor reception from media buyers. For example, only three per cent of the BARB TV audience measurement panel is ethnic.

The prevailing attitude that ethnic media are too small to bother with, coupled with the assumption that mass media communication ‘must be seen’ by minority audiences simply due to its mass scale, encapsulates the whole issue.

This means that ethnic media have to accept and work with these handicaps in order to attract blue-chip advertisers, the majority of whom are audited against BARB. None of the main research companies have acceptable ethnic samples.

The obvious question is “Why doesn’t ethnic media pull together and generate a piece of research that validates its effectiveness and therefore prove the worth of the whole concept?”

The problem is ‘currency ‘. Media today is seen primarily as a commodity and as such the ‘brokers’ of that commodity, the media agencies, need to compare and contrast existing trade agreements. Individual or collective research is simply not a currency that can be traded and thus is dismissed in favour of the industry norm.

Since specific ethnic research would be very expensive and still not be accepted by the ad industry, the only option at present is to become part of the norm and sign up with the recognised media research organisations that exist. At MEMS we are having to persuade our ethnic channels to get on to BARB, despite its inaccuracies and bias against ethnic TV.

A decade ago “fragmentation” was the buzzword – smaller audiences, more selective/effective planning and buying, less wastage and less reliance on the mass media. Unfortunately this brave new idea was never applied to ethnic media.

This has led to general disillusionment among ethnic media owners and a belief on their part that in general agencies and advertisers don’t care about the audiences they provide.

Is it surprising then that recent research commissioned by Weber Shandwick’s specialist multicultural marketing division – Multicultural Communications (MCC) – has found that ethnic minorities feel alienated by big brands? At least three-quarters of Asian and Black people and half of Chinese feel that marketing by mainstream brands has little or no relevance to them.

And 75% of Black, 63% of Asian and 54% of Chinese believe that consumer brands don’t understand how to market to people from ethnically diverse backgrounds.

The maturation of the multicultural market in the US, where ethnic advertising is experiencing huge investment from blue chip advertisers, should be our guiding light in this area. Ironically these are the same blue chip companies that refuse to accept the significance of ethnic media here in the UK.

The US is an example of how the UK market should work and demonstrates how we could all change our attitudes and start looking at ways of creating inclusive communication plans that work across all audiences in the UK.

The results would be far more effective advertising by ethnic businesses and those national advertisers that are targeting ethnic consumers now.