New York digital brand marketing company The Cipher Group has launched a programmatic trading desk dedicated to reaching multicultural audiences in the U.S. and Canada.
The company says its new desk will aggregate inventory from publishers like Univision, Terra, ESPN and Moguldom, and will leverage Cipher’s data and know-how to help brands more cost-efficiently reach ethnic and cultural groups online.
Although The Cipher Group doesn’t position itself as a multicultural agency, CEO David Jones says that over the past four years it has spent much of its time working with agencies like Carat and Mediacom on a variety of ethnically-targeted campaigns for Ford, MacDonald’s, AARP, Diageo, and others. Many of those advertisers will be coming on as clients of the new trading desk.
“We’re focusing on being thought leaders in the [multicultural] space when it comes to digital. We’re consistently doing the campaigns, compiling the data, and compiling the expertise,” Jones said. He said he expects multicultural advertising to take off over the next decade as immigration alters North American demographics.
Cipher is licensing technology from Huddled Masses (owned by DSP MediaMath) to collect multicultural inventory. Jones said Cipher uses its own data and information from comScore to identify inventory sources that over-index on Asians, African-Americans, Hispanics and other groups. They’ll also be working closely with launch partner The Northstar Group, which publishes magazines The Source and Jones.
“We have chosen an invite-only group of publishers specific to the multicultural audience,” Jones said. “We know where the multicultural audience lives, not just based on data, but expertise.”
Jones was enthusiastic about connecting with Canadian publishers. He says he sees a large multicultural audience in Canada, and hopes to begin working directly with Canadian publishers soon.
