SunRice and Identity win NSW Premier’s award for multicultural communications

SunRice and Identity win NSW Premier’s award for multicultural communications

by | Dec 6, 2019 | Chinese Marketing, Multicultural Marketing

AdNews, 6 December 2019

SunRice and Identity, a division of IPG Mediabrands, have won the Business Campaign of the Year at the 2019 NSW Premier’s Multicultural Communications Awards.

The campaign challenged stereotypes because it didn’t feature the usual cultural icons of red, gold and ‘8’.

Instead, SunRice the Rice Breaker, depicted a Chinese-Australian family sharing a meal with their local Australian neighbours.

Inclusion was a key message – as a rice brand that is universally appealing, SunRice is able to connect people of different cultures over great food.

“SunRice is thrilled our campaign has been recognised with this award,” says Andrew Jeffrey, SunRice head of marketing.

“The outstanding results demonstrate the crucial importance of audience insights in building authentic engagement with our Asian-Australian customers. The audience insight that Identity Communications brought to the table was invaluable.”

Thang Ngo, managing director at Identity: “From day one, SunRice told us they wanted to build an authentic connection with Australia’s Asian community. The client recognised the importance of developing a robust strategy and bespoke creative.”

Other winning marketing campaigns at the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Communications Awards:

Agency Campaign of the Year: Cultural Perspectives – Your Vote Will Help Shape Australia

Voting is a right for all Australians but enrolling, assessing candidates and casting a ballot is a challenge for people with low English language-speaking proficiency. The Your Vote Will Help Shape Australia campaign by Cultural Perspectives aimed to make voting easier and support increased participation by sharing voting information in 30 different languages across print, radio, and online.

AFL NSW/ACT Community Campaign of the Year – Hindu Council of Australia – Deepavali Fair
Aiming to increase Deepavali Fair attendance by 10% to 30,000, the Hindu Council advertised on Hindi satellite television channels, in Indian language newspapers, via social media and through flyers and banners around local schools and major intersections. As well as meeting attendance targets, the Council successfully increased sponsorship revenue by 15%.

Other winners of the 2019 Premier’s Multicultural Communications Awards:

Best Audio Report: Manpreet Kaur Singh, Shamsher Kainth, Avneet Arora and Maya Jamieson – SBS Punjabi
Best Audio-Visual Report: Andrea Booth – NITV, The Point
Best Print Report: Zia Ahmad – AMUST
Young Journalist of the Year: Xinrui (Rena) Li – Sydney Today
Best Use of Digital or Social Media: Sirine Demachkie and Kinderling Kids Radio – Mother Tongue
Public Interest Award: Avani Dias – triple j Hack
Alan Knight Student Award: Nadine Silva
Publication of the Year: AMUST
Lifetime Achievement Award: Antoine Kazzi OAM – El Telegraph

The right balance in multicultural marketing

The right balance in multicultural marketing

by | Mar 12, 2019 | Chinese Marketing, Multicultural Marketing

Since our SunRice campaign launched during Lunar New Year, we’ve had lots of interest from clients and prospects. They’re particularly interested about IDENTITY Communication’s view on multicultural talent in creative.

I always start with this story…

“Box Hill is a well-known Chinese suburb. There are all Chinese billboards on the street and 9 out 10 are Asian faces. You see more international (non-Chinese) people in Shanghai than here” Weibo post. 

It came up in branding work for a large retail client earlier this year. During the insight and discovery phase, this nugget unlocked a crucial insight that had us reassessing our recommendation. Surely, you’d expect Chinese in Australia to love being in an area that is predominantly Chinese, right?

Maybe not…

In higher education, particularly in courses which Chinese international students are the predominant group enrolled, these students are finding that too much of a good thing might not be good after all. Some are craving more diversity in their class and express an interest to mix outside of their group to get a more authentic experience of Australia and Australian education.

That’s lead us to this insight:

Being lumped in with people like you all the time is comforting at first, but before long, you want to explore and experience more of Australia. After all, isn’t that why migrants and international students come to a sunburnt country?

But how should we treat these audiences in multicultural creative? Is it to make sure everyone is represented, like below? 

But what if you miss one group? Awkward. And how do you avoid producing creatives that come across as tokenistic?

Take a look at NAB’s Life – More Than Money campaign above. A well told story that focuses on a universal truth. We all love and want success for our children, don’t we? So let’s tell that story from one perspective, in this case, it’s an Asian-Australian one.

The single-minded  focus makes this creative more powerful, more compelling. It’s one of my favourite ads of recent years.

Context is important, too. Instead of being a United Nations of representation, bringing it back to what’s authentic and real.

The Rice Breaker, our campaign for SunRice, depicted a uniquely migrant experience of inviting your neighbour to dinner for the first time.

It’s real, it doesn’t feel tonkenistic.

Migrants don’t live in their own bubble so we should find ways to represent that in creative.

How does that compare with multicultural creative you’ve seen lately? Where does it fit in the tokenistic/cliche to authentic scale? Think about the Chinese New Year creative you’ve seen lately… red and gold, 8’s, papercut pigs, smiling Chinese family in traditional costume, much?

Oh, and make sure this more inclusive approach is reflected in your media investment. Your media plan should use all relevant touch points; a ‘mainstream’ channel like Out of Home might be just perfect to extend your campaign reach.

I’m glad IDENTITY’s work has inspired and stirred interest. Really looking forward to seeing great creative that genuinely reflects modern Australia.

Seen any other great work lately? Share it with us in the comments. 

What creative should I use in my multicultural campaign?

What creative should I use in my multicultural campaign?

by | Jan 12, 2018 | Multicultural Marketing

What creative should I use for my multicultural campaign?

The answer is easy, and not easy. Identity Communications, the intelligent multicultural agency, has some food for thought…

When it comes to a multicultural marketing campaign, marketers and their agencies rightly devote time and resources to developing the media schedule. When it comes to creative assets, clients think it’s all too hard or costly to develop bespoke in-language creative. Overwhelmingly clients translate their existing ‘mainstream’ creative.

Take for example, Bayer’s Elevit pregnancy multivitamin (below) targeting Chinese-Australian women. The investment on Youku Chinese video social media is significant, just about every pre-roll served this week uses either Elevit or Menevit material. In this case, the audio was left in English with text copy translated into Chinese.

Elevit multicultural marketing creative

Another example is our recent work for Johnson & Johnson’s Neutrogena Ultra Sheer (below). The mainstream creative, featuring Jennifer Garner, was subtitled into Chinese.

Neutrogena Ultra Sheer - Chinese

A much rarer approach is developing bespoke in-language creative, particularly for TV. Reckitt Benckiser’s current campaign for Finish Quantum Ultimate dishwashing tablet (below) was developed and produced by Identity Communications especially for the Chinese-Australian audience. Concept and copy were developed in Chinese and translated to English for client feedback and approval. We sourced and selected local Chinese talent and shoot location. Judging by the comments across video and social media channels, the audience is resonating strongly with this bespoke creative approach.

Finish Quantum Ultimate Chinese TVC

Of course, it’s not one size fits all. Budget, timing and other factors come in to play in the real world. Here are some considerations that might help you decide:

  • Budget: if it’s a limited marketing budget, do you really want to spend 80% on creative and 20% on media?
  • Timing: in-language creative often take longer to produce, sourcing the right talent from a limited pool and translation lead time will add to your timeline
  • Creative capacity: there isn’t the breadth of creative and production talent compared to mainstream, so this may impact on quality
  • Collaboration: consider if your current creative agency could work with a cultural consultant during creative concept and development
  • Face to camera: if it’s just a voiceover, then consider revoicing the commercial
  • Customise static assets: TV production requires a larger budget, but if you’re doing a print advert which has talent, consider shooting the mainstream material with a mix of talent or shooting talent that’s from that community for your campaign
  • Product benefit: particularly in the beauty category, a well-known ‘mainstream’ talent may be the aspirational inspiration for this audience, so maybe subtitling is all that’s needed
  • People like me: then again, if the benefits of a beauty product might be better demonstrated on someone with a skin tone similar to your audience, maybe the ‘mainstream’ talent, especially if they aren’t well known, may not be appropriate
  • Your brand: if you are a major multinational, and you’re investing a significant budget in media, is there an expectation that you should develop tailored creative for the target community?
  • Brand sentiment benefits: in a world where creative is almost always translated from mainstream, consider the significant uplift in positive brand sentiment from investing in bespoke creative

We’re experienced in the creative scenarios outlined above. If you have a question about multicultural creative development please contact us.