Growth Depends On Marketing To Multicultural Audiences

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While the federal government may be primed to force its sale or ban it outright, TikTok isn’t dead yet. It’s still an app on which roughly 170 million Americans click daily to be entertained, enraged and informed (or misinformed, depending on who made the post). TikTok is still setting trends with quirky songs and silly dances. Trending videos are shaping the conversation. And more than 500,000 merchants are using the short video app to sell products.

Offline, things look a little different for the app. On behalf of parent company ByteDance, top First Amendment law firms are reportedly recruiting creators to sue the U.S. government over the law President Joe Biden signed last week, Forbes senior writer Alexandra Levine wrote. Meanwhile, ByteDance has denied reports that it’s exploring options to sell the app—even without its sophisticated and proprietary recommendation algorithm. And Forbes has learned that more than 30 Chinese TikTok employees have faced additional questioning at the U.S. border, reports senior writer Emily Baker-White.

For creators and marketers, many continue to work hard on TikTok, hoping to capitalize on the platform, its audience and its money-making opportunities while it’s still active, writes Forbes contributor Katie Salcius. There’s a lot of money to be made on TikTok between now and the day in roughly nine months it may eventually go offline, creator Koosha Nouri told Salcius. According to statistics on TikTok’s page promoting sales, three in four TikTok users are likely to buy something when using the app, and 83% say it plays a role in their purchasing decisions.

It’s a safe bet that TikTok will remain a vibrant online hub until its (possible) end. And it makes sense for marketers to stay focused on the leads and sales that the app can bring for now. But a contingency plan for the next big promotion engine needs to be fleshed out and utilized. TikTok could even be used to lead customers to the next online social platform that captures user attention and engagement. While it seems that TikTok has a central and irreplaceable spot in today’s social discourse, the same thing was once true of social networks including MySpace and Twitter. Geopolitics, technical challenges, regime changes or rampant disinformation drove users—and marketers—to migrate to other platforms.

Regardless of platform, brands should be doing targeted outreach to multicultural audiences. These audiences have $5.6 trillion of spending power, and are the largest growth area in the U.S., said Sheila Marmon, founder and CEO of Mirror Digital. Marmon’s business focuses on connecting brands with these audiences in an authentic way. and I recently spoke to her about her strategy. A portion of our interview can be found later in this newsletter.

SOCIAL MEDIA

After Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022 and quickly laid off the bulk of its content moderation team, many worried about the platform’s magnified potential to be a megaphone for disinformation. Musk’s answer was a feature called Community Notes, which allows volunteer contributors to annotate posts, adding context or correcting misinformation. And while Community Notes may not be as robust as a full-time moderation team, a new research letter in JAMA found Community Notes accurately corrected Covid-19 vaccine misinformation 97% of the time in 2023. Between December 2022 and December 2023, 45,783 notes mentioned terms related to vaccines or Covid, and 657 were specific to Covid vaccines, with many about side effects, effectiveness and conspiracy theories. The study said that accurate corrections to such posts were viewed between 500 million and 1 billion times.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, the EU will investigate disinformation on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms. The European Commission said it believes Meta has violated the Digital Services Act by failing to implement safeguards that would address deceptive advertisements, disinformation campaigns and “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The probe will focus on the pro-Russia “Doppelganger” network, which has spread content favoring Russian President Vladimir Putin, people familiar with the investigation told Bloomberg. The EC is especially concerned about the disinformation’s impact on elections: European Parliament President Roberta Metsola told Reuters she expects heavy social media disinformation when EU member states vote for a new parliament next month.

NOW TRENDING

Americans are not touching that dial. A new Nielsen study on listening habits shows that adults listen to the radio more than podcasts, music streaming or satellite radio. Two-thirds of all listening of ad-supported content is traditionally broadcast radio, with those over 35 dedicating 74% of their listening time to the radio. While people in the 18 to 34 age range listen to less radio—just 45% of their total listening time—it still takes up the largest chunk of their listening. Not surprisingly, most radio consumption happens when people are driving. About 80% of all car listening is the radio, the study found.

BRANDS + MESSAGING

A new star-studded conglomerate linking AI, music, marketing, personalized messaging and media launched last week. Uproxx Studios, created by media veterans Jarret Myer and Rich Antoniello, and recording artist will.i.am, is a new company that focuses on brand messaging, content creation and publishing for music superfan communities, writes Forbes contributor Ime Ekpo. The conglomerate emerged from the strategic acquisition of Uproxx, HipHopDX, Dime Magazine and other media assets from Warner Music Group. It includes the license for media sales on WMG’s YouTube inventory, and integrates will.i.am’s FYI AI technology and FYI radio. The new conglomerate also features the new AI StoryLabs, a unit using advanced conversational AI for brand communication. Even without such heavy hitters leading the venture—Myer founded Uproxx and Antoniello founded Complex Networks—the content it commands is huge. Through all of its channels, Uproxx Studios reaches more than 170 million U.S. visitors each month, and receives more than 12 billion monthly video views.

ON MESSAGE

Mirror Digital’s Sheila Marmon On Authentically Speaking To A Multicultural Audience

In the last decade, the racial social justice movement has shifted cultural norms, perceptions of race and culture and messaging. Mirror Digital founder and CEO Sheila Marmon likens multicultural Americans to the third-largest global economy—behind the United States as a whole and China. Multicultural people control $5.6 trillion of buying power and are the demographic showing the most growth, she said, and marketers need better crafted messages to speak to them. I spoke to Marmon about effective strategies to speak to the multicultural consumer. This interview has been edited for length, clarity and continuity.

How can a CMO check their messaging strategy to ensure they are providing relevant messages to a multicultural audience?

Marmon: I would remind CMOs that multicultural media partners and multicultural marketing was around before [George Floyd’s murder by police officers brought diversity more into the spotlight in] 2020. There were a bunch of people that jumped in chasing the opportunity, but there are people who have dedicated their life to this practice, including me. People who care deeply about these communities, who have expertise that is deep and that is specific, related to the various communities that we work with. I think that’s thing number one. I heard anecdotally that a brand was looking to reach out to [historically Black colleges and universities], and they hired a firm not run by a person of color, and had no one on the staff that had attended an HBCU. But they just felt like HBCUs are hot, so everybody’s doing HBCUs. That makes no sense. A lot of the decision makers don’t look like me, don’t look like multicultural audiences. They have to be mindful of bringing the right expertise to the table. And it just can’t be the same people that they’ve been working with who now are saying, ‘Oh, I can do multicultural, too’ because they see a market opportunity.

What are some other common pitfalls you’ve seen from brands and marketers who are trying to do better with this community, but are making mistakes?

You have to choose partners with a demonstrated track record, and people who don’t just have learned experience, but also lived experience. That combination is really the win-win, because multicultural culture moves fast. Being able to tap into the community and have a conversation that is real and relevant, that’s going to resonate with your audience. You kind of need a sherpa to help you get there.

These growth audiences, these multicultural audiences, are grossly under-invested in. It’s 40% of the U.S. population, and a little over 2% of the advertising spend. So 40% of the population, 25% of every dollar spent, and 2% of the advertising spend.

The challenge is it’s hard. You have organizations that haven’t built up this muscle, and they don’t have people on their teams and they don’t know who to call. And so you continue to do what you’ve always done, but you’re missing out on this massive opportunity to move your business.

Where do you see marketing for the multicultural community going in the next five years?

I think that we are going to have to be very deliberate about being inclusive. That often starts at the top, with large brands. When you have leadership that is really talking the talk and walking the walk, that is when you start to see systemic change in their organizations, and they then have the proof points to help other brands be brave enough to start to do this work. It is hard because you’re changing process, and it is always hard.

And then a lot of people don’t want to get it wrong. As a community, it always makes a better headline to call someone out: ‘Oh, they totally missed it. They look so crazy.’ But we have to change that mindset: To call people in, and really take it as a learning opportunity and help people help brands do better the next time.

FACTS + COMMENTS

Chinese online retailer Temu has extended the kind of censorship mandated in its home country to the United States. The platform returns no search results for election-related terms including “Trump,” “Biden,” “MAGA” and “president,” despite its sale of hundreds of relevant products, Forbes’ Cyrus Farivrar writes.

More than 1,000: Number of items Walmart’s website pulls up in a search for “Trump” or “Biden”

20 million: Average monthly U.S. Temu users in Q1, according to Sensor Tower

‘Temu seems to be trying to preemptively avoid embarrassment or bad PR’: Marketplace Pulse CEO Juozas Kaziukėnas said

STRATEGIES + ADVICE

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It’s always a good idea to reevaluate your processes and make changes when necessary, but change can be hard on your organization. Here are some common myths about change, and ways to implement new ideas and policies successfully.

VIDEO

QUIZ

Saturday will be the 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, and 150,000 spectators are expected to watch the race live at Churchill Downs. How much mint is the venue’s culinary team expecting to use to make the race’s signature cocktail, the mint julep?

A. 150 pounds

B. 700 pounds

C. 1,000 pounds

D. 1,500 pounds

See if you got the answer right here.