Business
Cable looking to tap into the African-American market
According to Horowitz and Associates vice president of marketing and business development Adriana Waterston, 37 percent of African-Americans believe TV is doing a good job representing the races properly, with 25 percent saying that TV is doing a poor job. The numbers get worse when asked if TV is representing races accurately: only 33 percent of this surveyed by Horowitz believe TV is doing a good job, with 27 percent giving TV poor marks.
Advertisers are beginning to respond. Butler said that ASPiRE signed on three advertisers for its launch – L’Oreal, Nationwide Insurance and Chrysler Corp. – and hopefully more will follow.
“We’re meeting with a number of key advertisers in all of the segments that matter,” Butler said.
Waterston said that African-Americans have been largely ignored by programmers who believe they are targeted sufficiently through mainstream media. But according to Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau (CAB) vice president, multicultural and emerging markets Cynthia Perkins-Roberts, African-Americans are a huge untapped market.
The African-American population at 43 million has been growing at double the rate of non-Hispanic Whites since 1990 and is expected to reach 45.5 million by 2017, said Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau vice president, multicultural and emerging markets Cynthia Perkins-Roberts. The segment also has enormous buying power, spending about US$946.6 billion in 2010 and estimated to rise to US$1.3 trillion by 2017.
African-Americans are also becoming increasingly more educated – the number of college graduates (bachelor’s degrees or higher) has risen 148 percent since 1990.
That has led to higher paying jobs and the rise of the black middle class. CAB estimates that there were about 5 million African American households with annual incomes of US$50,000 or more in 2010 (a 358 percent increase since 1990) and 1.5 million African-American homes with annual incomes of US$100,000 or more (a 128 percent increase since 1990).
