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You should be buying black-owned media, but there's not much left-and it's hard to find outlets with scale
THE CHIEF MARKETING officer dreads opening the survey request from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People each fall.
The request is always the same: Detailed data on where the brand this CMO manages spends its sizeable advertising budget-including black-owned media. And each year, the request for a breakdown of ad budget is politely declined by the marketing chief, who cites its proprietary nature.
And so each year, the brand winds up with an F in the area of marketing and communicationsalong with 16 others-in the NAACP annual Consumer Spending Guide. The stated goal is to measure corporate America's relationship with the AfricanAmerican community-a consumer segment that represents 13% of the U.S. population with spending power of $845 billion in 2007-a figure expected to leap to more than $1.1 trillion by 2012, according to the University of Georgia's Selig Center for Economic Growth.
"All things being equal, we'd have no problem supporting" blackowned media, said the CMO, but "a lot of the true African-American owned media companies are small and very decentralized. That doesn't fit our strategy of needing to have a national reach. We have looked at some of the options, but the delivery is so small in relation to cost it doesn't fit our strategy."
The survey's goal is to urge the black community to buy from marketers that support black media and to boost media ownership within the community, according to Richard Mclntire, a spokesman for the organization. "Brands have these huge budgets, and less than 1% is reinvested back into African-American media," Mr. Mclntire said. "The black press does not see the advertising dollars coming from major corporations who will advertise in a market with two dailies but won't in the smaller community papers."
But some marketers argue that in an ever-more-complex media environment, it's not that simple. In a world of scale-and the benefits of lower ad pricing that come with itthere are few independent, blackowned media outlets left to support, and those that exist don't have the reach to offer competitive rates.
Some of the biggest names in black media today actually are owned by corporate titans. The...