• by John Gaffney , July 11, 2003

If you want some attention in this business, get some business from Procter & Gamble. That's exactly what happened at African-American specialist Carol H. Williams advertising in mid-June as P&G expanded its relationship with the agency to work on several key products.

The announcement, which was part of P&Gs shift toward working with William and another specialist agency, Burrell, was actually an expansion of an existing relationship. P&G has been utilizing Williams as a conduit to the African-American audience, and rewarded that expertise with more work on Cover Girl, Pantene, Pringles and new Texture and Tone brands. According to Patrick Buchanan, SVP and managing director of the Detroit-based agency, the use of emotion in creative and strategic planning separates its offering from the pack.

"We focus a significant amount of our energies on strategic planning and the factor of how our advertising relates to the conscience of the consumer," Buchanan said. "We want to figure out where our ad contributes to some kind of passion with the consumer. If we do a 30 second spot, we're not going to waste anything that doesn't go to the heart of that spot."

Williams is on something of a roll lately. Not only has it won more P&G business, but account wins over the past six months have included GM, Cingular and Bank America. Buchanan attributes some of that success to a repositioning and restructuring of the shop earlier this year. Before that effort, Buchanan and his team talked to current and prospective clients about what their needs were from an agency in this marketplace. What they found was that they needed to understand the consumer better and understand where advertising could be placed that seamlessly integrates into those consumer's lives.

He also surmised from that mission that strategic account planning functions were critical to the agency's success. Now, he feels the agency is in a great position to provide the consumer insight brands like P&G hire them for.

"In any kind of advertising, you're inviting consumers to the table," he said. "One of the key things in multicultural advertising is the issue of invitations. Do I feel you're going out of the way to invite me to this table? In some marketing you're inviting everyone. But with us it's kind of like the line outside an exclusive club. We're trying to help but our brands on the VIP list."

Multicultural marketing has certainly been a hot marketing area of late, as Williams success will attest to. Buchanan, however thinks there's a few more levels to achieve before it is truly effective. For example, he believes that many marketers currently pick a multicultural group, such as Hispanics - and believe they can market to them without addressing specific subsets. Just as the general mass market has demographic subsets, so does the African-American market. He also believes multicultural marketing needs to lose its status as the hot trend and move to a status as a smart business practice.

"A lot of multicultural agencies present information that stresses the spending power of each specific group," he said. "But the most important thing is the reality of business. Think market share. There are not a lot of ways to increase market share these days. Multicultural marketing moves products off shelves."