COMMENTARY

Zeta Offers Advanced Multicultural Audience Targeting, With 78M U.S. Adult Consumers

• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, Yesterday

Zeta, the cloud-based marketing tech company co-founded by former Apple CEO John Sculley, this week will announce an advanced way to identify and target ads to many cultures, including Asian, Black, and Hispanic.

The company supports a data cloud with more than 220 identities. It took a portion of the data with 78 million consumers age 18 and older in the U.S. identified as multicultural and combined this with artificial intelligence (AI) to create “a more authentic connection,” said Imani Laners, vice president of multicultural advertising at Zeta Global.

“A lot of executives at agencies have trouble identifying those audiences,” she said. “They also want scale. … It’s done through an insight report.”

The features will enable brands to differentiate targeting across multicultural audiences that include people of color, such as Black, Asian and Hispanic. The idea is to create stronger connections and provide a growing need to support these market segments.

The 2020 US Census, recently released, reveals that the U.S. population is comprised of 57.8% white, 18.7% Hispanic, 12.4% Black and 6% Asian populations.

Through opt-in data, the company identified millions of multicultural individuals in the U.S. through location, native language preferences, and content consumption patterns, providing the insights needed to impact business outcomes.

Zeta works with several categories and markets such as pharmaceutical, consumer product goods, retail, and automotive. Brands in these industries come to Zeta asking for these audiences to target consumers in a language other than English.

During campaigns, Zeta also can identify the ethnicity of the audiences.

In some cases, the groups are identified as African American or Hispanic. The insights are pulled on those groups, and data is given to the advertisers so they can better target those audiences.

Consumers who perceive ads as culturally relevant compared to those who do not are 2.6 times more likely to find the brand relevant to them, 2.8 times more likely to recommend the brand to others, 3 times more likely to find the ad relevant to them, and 2.7 times more likely to purchase a brand for the first time, according to the Association of National Advertisers’ 2019 study, the Cultural Insights Impact Measure.

This is not entirely new. The company has targeted multiple cultures for years, but now it has the capability to pull niche data to support targeting, such as identifying the Hispanic U.S. citizens who travel back and forth from California to Mexico. 

“Traditionally, people targeted these audiences based on content, but now we can understand their transactional behavior, location, and many other data points,” Laners says.

Engaging with multicultural audiences and creating authentic connections and personalizing experiences has historically been a challenge for marketers.

The traditional approach leverages siloed data from disparate sources, which provides an incomplete view of individuals and hinders marketing campaigns from personalizing consumer experiences to achieve desired outcomes.

Zeta improves on targeting by providing brands with a cohesive view of all identity-based data, including deterministic behavior, transactional signals, location, country of origin, language preferences, and forward-looking intent data.

These data sources are then validated to accurately score multicultural identity and activate campaigns with speed and precision.

The Zeta Marketing platform’s multicultural data, AI and activation capabilities include more than 36 million Hispanic Americans, 30 million Black Americans, and 12 million Asian Americans.

Customized segments include Travelers, Auto Intenders, Food and Wine enthusiasts, Social Justice Advocates; and Cultural Interests such as holidays.