Targeting African American Consumers: Maximizing the Influence of Mass Media through Mainstream Agencies By Earnell La’Shaun Seay Targeting African American Consumers: Maximizing the Influence of Mass Media through Mainstream Agencies African Americans are a core group that influence trends in music, fashion, and television. Corporations are using Mainstream Agencies to target African American consumers by using African American superstars like Michael Jordan, Tyra Banks and Bill Cosby through television. Although Blacks may be reached by mainstream media, many of them respond more favorably to culturally-based communications that acknowledge their heritage and respect their culture (Armstrong, 1999). Corporations receive less results when they fail to hire African American agencies, get feed-back from the African American community, and advertise through African American owned media like radio and print. Media placement is important when influencing targeted consumers (Green, 1999). Research reported in Mediaweek stated, “ Strong evidence shows the benefits of using ethnic media to reach African Americans” (Cunningham, 1999). This research focuses on how corporations use Mainstream agencies (General Markets) to target African American consumers. Mainstream and General markets are defined as ad-speak for “White” as in general market agencies (Brandweek, 12/06/99). Also defined in Brandweek (12/06/99) is the word targeted which is ad-speak for “Ethnic/Urban” examples being Blacks, Latinos, and Asians. A majority of corporations have two main problems when targeting the African American community. First, most corporations use Mainstream agencies instead of hiring African American-owned agencies or hiring people who specialize in African American marketing. The African-American market is served by its own specialized media, and national studeis have shown that black consumers ar...
