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by Nicholas Keung
The Toronto Star
Mar 17, 2006
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Traditional "one-size-fits-all"
media advertising campaigns will no longer work in Canada with our increasingly
diverse consumer market, a new study suggests.
A multilingual survey of 3,000 people from six ethnic groups in Toronto,
Montreal and Vancouver found the Internet is the top media choice for
news and information for Canadians of Chinese, South Asian, West Asian,
Hispanic, Italian and African backgrounds.
In Greater Toronto, the Toronto Star was the top newspaper choice for
the Chinese and South Asian communities, reaching more than one in three
people in those markets, the two fastest-growing populations in Canada
— way ahead of other mainstream competitors.
According to the latest statistics, more than 1 million Chinese and
800,000 South Asians are in Canada — most of them living in the
three urban centres.
The independent telephone survey of 100 questions by Toronto-based Solutions
Research Group, released yesterday, investigated media use among ethnic
groups and found that "advertising dollars may not be going to
where it's supposed to go to activate these audiences."
"Canadian advertisers have to think cosmopolitan," said Kaan
Yigit, author of the study, titled Diversity in Canada. "We are
not talking about several thousands of people. In markets like Toronto
and Vancouver, we are talking about people in the number of millions
who advertisers may be missing out."
After the Star, Toronto's Chinese Canadians' top newspapers of choice
are Sing Tao and Ming Pao, the two top Chinese-language dailies, with
the free commuter paper Metro fourth.
Similarly, more than one in three in the GTA's South Asian community
reported reading the Star, way ahead of the Toronto Sun and Metro. The
margin of errors of the study is +/- 2.7 per cent.
Yigit said the survey was conducted in English, French, Cantonese, Mandarin,
Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, Spanish and Italian because traditional media
measurements, conducted in Canada's official languages, are becoming
inadequate in their ability to provide an accurate read of diverse audiences.
While these groups do adopt "a mix-and-match" approach by
accessing ethnic and mainstream media, the importance of ethnic television,
radio and newspapers is often overlooked.
The survey found English-language newspapers are read by half of the
Chinese respondents and 57 per cent of the South Asians. English radio
reaches 44 per cent of South Asians and 53 per cent of Chinese. English
TV is watched by 74 per cent of South Asian and 65 per cent of Chinese
audiences.
"As a market research firm, we were getting questions from clients
that we could not probably answer because of the lack of reliable information.
Traditionally, these studies are done in English. In Toronto, that means
you are not getting through the doors of 30, 40 per cent of the households,"
Yigit explained.
Eighty-eight per cent of the ethnic groups use the Internet — the
majority of them on broadband, at home; they also spend an average of
1.8 hours daily per person on the Net, ahead of the market benchmark's
1.7 hours.
Chinese and South Asians are particularly heavy consumers of ethnic
media, with three quarters of the respondents in each group reporting
having accessed one ethnic radio, TV or newspaper in the past seven
days.
Fifty-two per cent of the people surveyed said, "I rarely see advertising
messages intended for me."
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