»  Phillip Atchison

Dunno. But it's a good question. And Ogilvy has certainly jumped on the bandwagon with the launch of its new unit OgilvyCulture – which specializes in a hot new marketing trend called cross-cultural marketing. 

Cross-cultural marketing is, as the term suggests, aimed across demographic groups to appeal to consumer similarities rather than differences. By contrast, traditional multicultural marketing tends to be directed at specific demographic groups like Hispanic, African-American, Asian-American, female, or LGBT consumers.

Given the slowly emerging results of the 2010 census, the changing demographic makeup of the American consumer market is increasingly a topic of interest among advertisers and agencies. In fact, here at birdsong gregory, we often discuss how to best help our clients communicate with and market to our increasingly cross-cultural world. Given the big mash-up we now live in, does an agency's payroll need to reflect every ethnographic strata of society, or does it make more sense to hire employees based on the diversity of their worldview, not their DNA?