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The Melting Blog

Musings on the Intersection of Marketing, Culture, and Research

Wednesay, March 31, 2004

Happy Birthday, Cesar Chavez

Read An American Hero from the Cesar E. Chavez Foundation website. New York is rainy, dank, and cold. The Melting Blog returns to sunshiny California tomorrow.

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 3:15 pm EST

Monday, March 29, 2004

Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?

TMB is in New York for bizness this week. Actually, Jamaica, Queens near JFK to be exact. Don't ask me why. This whole town is one big Internet-less purgatory. The high speed connection is down in my hotel and there isn't a wireless hotspot within a 10 mile circumference of this place. When I asked the young lady behind the hotel counter if there was a nearby Starbucks, she deadpanned "This is Queens, there are no Starbucks."

Nevertheless, I was able to coax a sympathetic fellow traveller who passed over a tip. It wasn't easy. I had to make an 11 mile journey north to a Forest Hills' Barnes & Noble, which is where i currently sit -- at last tapped into my T-mobile Wi-Fi account, with the world wide web at my fingertips. If anything, I've learned: there is indeed a digital divide in this country, and it's very evident depending on which New York borough (or which neighborhood) you're in.

All of this is a set up for a very pertinent article about today's young male media habits in today's New York Times which also serves to followup my blog entry from last Monday:

The television industry was shaken last October when the ratings from Nielsen Media Research showed that a huge part of a highly prized slice of the American population was watching less television. As the fall TV season began, viewership among men from 18 to 34 fell 12 percent compared with the year before, Nielsen reported. And for the youngest group of adult men, those 18 to 24, the decline was a steeper 20 percent.

In a world where fortunes are made and lost over the evanescent jitterings of fractions of audience share, the Nielsen announcement was the equivalent of a nuclear strike, a smallpox outbreak and a bad hair day all rolled into one.

But those who track the uses of technology say that the underlying shift in viewership made perfect sense. The so-called missing men might be more aptly called the missing guys, and they are doing what guys do: playing games, obsessing over sports and girls, and hanging out with buddies - often online.
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That is understandable, experts say, given that nearly 75 percent of males 18 to 34 have Internet access, according to the latest figures from comScore Media Metrix, making them the most wired segment of the population. By comparison, 57 percent of men from 35 to 44 are online, comScore found in research for the Online Publishers Association, which is releasing the results today.

Between the allure of high-speed Internet services, computer games and other activities, "you begin to have the ability to get entertained and distracted in a million ways, and not just television," said Rishad Tobaccowala, an executive with the Starcom MediaVest Group, a company that advises advertisers on where to put their money.

More to follow later. That is, if I can find a way to maintain some consistent connectivity myself this week!

P.S. Here's more info on the OPA study referenced in the article. Spotted at Adrants.

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 10:26 am EST

Re-Mixing Youth Culture

On the plane yesterday, I read this article about Sprite's ReMix product -- a beverage brand that is set to change flavors with each single year, which seemingly runs counter to all textbook brand loyalty strategies. Yet, targeted at today's young, fickle po-mo consumer, the strategy may end up an innovative, viral marketing approach if it really works. Read on:

The ReMix idea came out of Sprite's weekly talks with ''teenagers and young people'' about the drink and ''society and popular culture,'' Carroll said. Sprite has for some years courted hip-hop artists and fans, seeing the music as a kind of lingua franca of youth culture. But last year, Sprite's share of the carbonated soft-drink market fell slightly, partly because of competition from newcomers like Sierra Mist. So Sprite tuned into its teen feedback crew's interest in musical remixing. Taking a familiar song and ''adding a different and unique spin to it,'' as Carroll put it, sounded like a useful notion in a novelty-thirsty cultural moment. Sprite envisioned a soft drink that would riff off the familiar lemon-lime flavor and cultivate loyalty not to a consistent taste but to a consistent idea about taste.

Grabbing a trendy word like ''remix'' and slapping it onto an existing brand can backfire; so one way Sprite has tried to avoid alienating the subculture it has long cultivated has been to hire hip-hop professionals. Sprite retained Cornerstone Promotion, which was founded by two record-industry veterans to push music and entertainment properties, largely through a network of D.J.'s and other taste-maker types called ''the Cornerstone 1200 squad.'' Over time, the co-founders, Jon Cohen and Rob Stone, decided their contacts could be leveraged to promote other kinds of products.

Among other things, Cornerstone (which had worked with Sprite before) distributed actual remixes -- on clear vinyl, with a Sprite ReMix label -- of new and classic hip-hop tracks to its D.J. contacts. They and other grass-roots ''lifestyle influencers'' also received early samples of the drink. The point was part buzz-making and part show of respect to the culture that invented remixing, on the theory that this trust-built network could help overcome skepticism about the product. ''It's the same mind-set behind the launch of a great new fashion brand, a new pair of sneakers, a new record, a new film,'' Cornerstone's Cohen says. ''A lot of these influencers, they live to turn people on to what's next.''

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 10:49 am EST

Friday, March 26, 2004

Black America's Changing Political Identity

In our post-Civil Rights era, how salient is Black identity in predicting voting behavior? The Notorious P.H.D. -- aka University of Southern California's hip hop scholar, Todd Boyd -- pens this commentary in today's L.A. Times:

And this is part of what's going on now in black politics, 40 years after the civil rights movement. As more and more African Americans move into the middle, upper-middle and wealthiest classes of society, the use of race as the sole defining factor in one's identity is an increasingly fractured concept.

It could be argued that much of what defines the large underclass of black people in this society has to do with class as much as it does with race these days, though the two issues are not mutually exclusive. Further, issues like gender, sexual orientation, age and geographic location are increasingly playing into one's overall sense of identity as well.

It is for this reason that I find myself cringing at blanket statements like the "black community" and the "black vote" — these phrases continue to minimize the broad scope of contemporary black identity.

Sure, many black Americans continue to register as Democrats, but not as they used to. Today there is no more a monolithic "black vote" than there is a "white vote," and this is another reason we haven't heard anything about it lately — because it no longer truly exists, at least not the way we have understood it in the past.

The real issue is that black people are becoming more "American" by the hour, moving from a defined group identity to a more individualized sense of being. If anything, Sept. 11 prompted questions of national identity, and African Americans passed with flying colors. Blacks, in many ways, have become mainstream.

Boyd is a colorful, not to mention controversial, character. His own book is a polemic about the deepening generational rifts in the African American community between the civil rights-era establishment and what he calls the New H.N.I.C. He makes strange bedfellows with UC Berkeley linguisitics prof. John McWhorter -- whose own book decries what he sees as the corrosive aspects of hip hop culture, particularly in language. Why do I compare them? Well, McWhorter himself just authored an editorial a little over a week ago covering the same terrain as Boyd (that also appeared in the L.A. Times). Peep this:

It is difficult to see "apartheid" in a country in which the secretary of State, the national security advisor, the CEOs of Time Warner, American Express and Merrill Lynch, the presidents of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the American Bar Assn. and even the last James Bond and Austin Powers girls are African American.

Blacks before the 1960s could barely have imagined racial preferences ardently defended by white administrators or that there would be black studies departments in universities nationwide. Black politics in the United States are reflecting this changing reality. Increasingly, the African American grimly convinced that the only difference in American race relations between 1964 and 2004 is in window dressing and etiquette is less an archetype than a personality type.

There are no indications that voting Republican will become the norm among blacks any time soon — and a good thing, too, because being a slam-dunk voting bloc for a single party means that neither party has any reason to court your vote with meaningful proposals. But more and more, black politics are moving to a constructive center, wary of sad realities but open to the fact that change does happen.

In a poll conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in 2000, for example, 74% of blacks were registered as Democrats. By 2002, that number had fallen to 63%, with about one in four blacks — many of them younger voters — registered as independents.

These guys come from radically different perspectives and presuppositions. But isn't it interesting how close they are in their analysis of contemporary Black political identity?

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 10:38 am

New American Programming

Fire up the TiVo kids! This one's worth viewing I think -- a three part series that closely follows the story of Nigerian refugees, a group of Dominican baseball players, a Mexican meatpacker, an Indian engineering couple, and a Palestinian bride. I mean, the name of the documentary alone is worth the price of admission. ;-)

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 1:19 am

Thursday, March 25, 2004

The Spanish-Language Print Wars

If you haven't checked it out already, Latino Pundit has created a nifty newsfeed section on his site that offers the latest in Latino-themed news. It's still in a state of flux, but it looks to be an invaluable clearinghouse for blogging fodder. It's also where I found this item about the Spanish-paper wars from the AP. Here are some highlights:

As many American newspapers struggle to hold on to readers, the industry's Spanish-language segment is expanding circulation and seeing competition increase. An influx of Hispanic immigrants and the growing buying power of those who have been in this country for years have motivated major media companies to revamp or launch Spanish-language dailies in about half a dozen major cities.

The competition was heightened in January when major dailies in Los Angeles and New York merged into a single company, Impremedia LLC. The company's goal is to build the country's first independent group of nationwide Spanish-language newspapers.
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Impremedia and Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, are waging one of the highest-profile battles, competing in New York and Los Angeles.

Impremedia owns La Opinion , which has a weekday circulation 125,862, and New York's 53,000-circulation El Diario, the nation's oldest operating Spanish-language newspaper. The privately held company wants to create a nationwide group of newspapers that shares advertisers and other resources but allows each one to retain local editorial control. It plans to buy existing weekly and daily papers and eventually create new ones in communities with sizable Hispanic populations.
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Unlike Impremedia, Tribune Co. is banking on name recognition, with one title for all its newspapers.

It opened Hoy -- "Today" in Spanish -- five years ago in New York. It has a circulation of 94,000, nearly twice that of El Diario/La Prensa. A Chicago version opened in September 2003 and has a circulation of 18,000. The company's Los Angeles version debuted earlier this month.
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Some analysts wonder whether the growing number of Spanish-language papers can remain profitable, but Lozano, publisher of La Opinion, said she is not worried.

"When my dad took over in the 1950s, everyone said ... that we were all going to assimilate and newspapers like ours would go the way of the Yiddish papers of New York," she said. "We're still here because there is a constant refreshing of new readers, because of our proximity with Mexico and because we cover issues that the mainstream media doesn't cover."

I'm not the target audience, but as a casual observer it's hard not to notice that La Opinion is virtually ubiquitous in this town. Not just because their logo is emblazoned on newsstands across the city, but also due to their highly visible and prominent civic presence -- sponsoring public events, civic forums, the United Way's Latino Scorecard, etc.

I have yet to see Hoy displayed prominently anywhere, but I'm sure the upstart is still scaling up. I think their biggest challenge will be gaining the level of credibility and community stature that La Opinion has already built up over the years. I'm not certain their affiliation with the L.A. Times (via Tribune's ownership) will transfer in that area. We'll track these movements closely.

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 9:19 am

Wednesday, March 24, 2004

Supermodel Spotting

Taken from www.hollywoodthing.com

TMB's Gratuitously Off-Topic Celebrity Blog Entry:

David and I were having a business lunch in Westwood this afternoon when this tall, stunningly beautiful Nubian queen strolled into the restaurant and walked past our table before getting seated near us. Wow. After wiping the drool off the side of my mouth, I snapped out of my trance and attempted to re-engage our table conversation. It took some effort.

Celebrity sightings aren't that big a deal here in Los Angeles, and I'm normally pretty oblivious to such things. But this one was none other than super-hot uber-model Tyra Banks of Sports Illustrated and Victoria's Secret fame. I love L.A.

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 3:42 pm

The Inevitability of Immigration Reform

By all accounts now, the Bush immigration bill is stalled and isn't set to move anywhere in the near future. But now that immigration reform has been placed on the national agenda by the President (not garnering the reception he hoped for obviously), can opponents of immigration ever hope to prevent it? Tamar Jacoby says no in this L.A. Times editorial:

Ten weeks after President Bush unveiled his historic immigration reform package, the word is out on the street that it is already dead. But in fact, the battle over the plan is far from over — and even if no law is passed soon, the initiative has forever changed the immigration debate, making an overhaul of the kind the White House has proposed all but inevitable in a few years, if not earlier.
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But even if no bill is passed in the foreseeable future, the Bush initiative still marks a critical step forward in the effort to make our immigration code rational, bringing it more into line with the realities of the global labor market.
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For more than a hundred years now, Americans have tolerated — and worse, all but deliberately maintained — a vast underclass of disenfranchised and exploitable foreign laborers. In California, they included Chinese, then Filipinos and then mostly, since the 1920s, Mexicans. Wherever they came from, they've done our dirtiest work, mainly though not only in the fields. But because they came as temporary workers or without papers — though often with a wink from ineffective immigration authorities — they were easily taken advantage of and could be deported at will. They are the last century's dirtiest secret. Yet now, led by, of all people, a conservative Republican president, the nation is moving toward abolishing this shameful institution.

The restrictionist flurry of the last few months has stalled that progress temporarily. But it's hard to imagine, now that the issue is on the table — now that Bush has highlighted this underground economy and the hypocritical immigration code that sustains it — that the American public will turn a blind eye.

I mentioned last Friday that the immigration platform at least serves as a wedge issue for Bush's re-election prospects among Latino voters. My take on the bill itself hasn't changed. The temporary legal status granted in the "plan" still lacks in real substance and leaves too many holes wide-open. If previously undocumented immigrants enlist in the program only to learn they'll face deportation later on, then we'll be back to square one: workers returning to the shadows.

However, as Jacoby suggests, the Rubicon has been crossed. How immigration reform is eventually enacted will be determined greatly by the ensuing tenor of the debate. Let's hope it's nothing like the rankling currently engulfing the Sierra Club. Ugly.

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 10:34 am

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

The Little Clothing Company That Couldn't

And the hits keep coming for embattled clothier Abercrombie & Fitch -- can they do anything right? According to this latest episode, as reported in the NY Times, the apparel company has now managed to piss off an entire state:

Gov. Bob Wise, a Democrat, contends that the shirt is a not-so-subtle play on the stereotype of West Virginia as a haven for incest. In a letter sent Monday to Abercrombie & Fitch's chairman, Michael Jeffries, Mr. Wise demanded that the company stop selling the shirt and destroy its entire stock of it.

"By selling and marketing this offensive item, your company is perpetuating an inaccurate portrayal of the people of this great state," Mr. Wise wrote. "Indeed, such a depiction of West Virginians undermines our collective efforts to communicate a positive representation of the spirit and values of our citizens."

Thomas D. Lennox, the company's director of communications, said it had no plans to stop selling the shirt, calling it a popular product. He issued a statement that said, "We love West Virginia."

"We love California, Florida, Connecticut, Hawaii and Nebraska, too," the statement said. "Abercrombie & Fitch was born and raised in the U.S.A., and we honor all 50 states of the union."

Right. Let's do a quick rundown of the company's brief history, shall we? In the past several years, they've managed to offend Asian Americans, their own minority employees in general, women, and parent groups. That's quite a feat if you ask me. Who's next before someone sics Jesse Jackson or Pat Robertson all over their ass?

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 12:03 am

Monday, March 22, 2004

Geek Marketing

Meet the future of Youth Marketing -- the gaming enterprise. Confused? If you're not between the ages of 18-34, you're probably bewildered at how this niche subculture has grown into a multibillion dollar enterprise that now casts a shadow even over Hollywood movies. Ad Age has the details:

Mr. Barkan isn't the only one waxing poetic about video games these days. In fact, judging by the demographics, we're living in a joystick nation. Video games are a $9.4 billion business in the U.S., bigger than the movie box office. Marketers in the category spent $414.1 million on advertising in the first 11 months of 2003, according to TNS/Competitive Media Reporting.

There are 100 million gaming consoles in households, 60 million hand-held games and growing numbers of game-enabled cellphones. Video gaming is the fastest-growing form of entertainment, and one-third of gamers are women. The average gamer is 29 years old, and young audiences consistently rank the Internet and video games above TV on the importance scale.

"People have started to realize that it's a major industry, it's not just some lonely 16-year-old playing in his room because he can't get a date," said David Comtois, executive producer of the documentary Video Game Invasion, airing this week on GSN, recently rebranded from Game Show Network. "It's become part of a language that we all speak."

When it comes to advertising and marketing tie-ins, this is increasingly the medium to reach youngsters. Especially as broadcast television continues its triage in figuring out where it's much ballyhooed 18-34 male demographic has disappeared to. Hint: they're here, here, and here.

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 5:28 pm

Verizon's Double Crossover Creative

If I had to wager, I think the future of American advertising will eventually reflect more families like the one depicted in Verizon's new "Meet the Elliotts" campaign. Here's a description of it from today's Brandweek:

Verizon this week is rolling out a TV campaign featuring the Elliotts, a multicultural family from "Anywhere, USA" and with African-American and Hispanic neighbors.

The fictional family of six headed by Tom and Marta, will star in a series of seven TV spots, some of which will include the Davis and Sandoval familes, who are meant to appeal to the African-American and Hispanic markets, respectively.

The ads, which aim for a humorous tone, spotlight DSL and various bundled services deals.

The campaign was handled by Verizon's lead agency, McGarry Bowen, New York; as well as Burrell Communications, Atlanta; and La Agencia de Orci & Asociados, Los Angeles, which handle multicultural ads. Spending was not disclosed.

Discarding my personal opinion over the campaign's creative details, the ad works on multiple levels: it aims at speaking to a general U.S. market that increasingly looks like the Elliotts (or is at least moving in that direction), while also possessing crossover elements to hit the Hispanic and African American markets.

I blogged about the crossover creative trend shaping new corporate marketing endeavors back on January 28 (scroll down to Salma Hayek), and the fact that this campaign was jointly developed by three of Verizon's agencies -- a general marketing group, an African American agency, and a Hispanic agency -- speaks volumes about how firmly the concept has taken hold over the corporate marketing imagination (for some brands at least).

Check out the spot yourself on the Verizon website (click on "Watch the TV ad" -- Quicktime required).

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 5:06 pm

The Big Apple's Declining Puerto Rican Population

Is there a growing Pan-Latino movement afoot in New York? Read here:

Many groups with the term "Puerto Rican" in their name have quietly started to change it to the more inclusive "Latino."

Other groups are adding "Latino" to the existing name but keeping the "Puerto Rican" - a nod to the ethnic group that paved the way for the 2.2 million Hispanics who now live in the city.
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Community leaders said the semantic shift reflects the unavoidable reality that the city's Puerto Rican population has started to shrink as other Latino groups are surging.

The 2000 Census recorded a 12% drop in Puerto Ricans from 1990, to 789,200 - the first decline for the city's largest Latino group since Puerto Ricans became a force in the city in the late 1940s.

Other Hispanic groups are quickly gaining. At least one study predicts the Dominican population, estimated at 554,100 in 2000, will tie or topple Puerto Ricans by the end of this decade.

But some leaders take issue with the renaming trend, saying it rewrites history - and that there are clear social, economic and cultural differences among the city's Latinos, no matter how much people want to lump them together.

More about this later -- if I ever get through this morass of work piling up on my desk!

Spotted by Latino Pundit.

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 10:24 am

Friday, March 19, 2004

The End of Whiteness

I'm sure this might cause Samuel Huntington to lose some sleep, but this isn't new news, is it?

(AP) For as long as the United States has been in existence, whites have been a clear majority. But according to Census Bureau projections, that's a story that is changing: by the year 2050, minority groups are expected to account for 49.9 percent of the population.

Projections from the Census has been telling us this for sometime now, but now the Bureau puts out a press release and the story is blowin' up all over the place. The Morse Code's take is here.

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 4:34 pm

The Immigration Plan That Never Was

Wondering why there has been virtually no new news about Bush's immigration reform plan? Here's an update from Diversity Inc. (subscription only):

A White House plan, described in January as the most sweeping immigration reform in nearly 20 years, won't see Congressional action anytime soon.

"It is an extremely touchy issue. There's a lot of disagreement and most people are afraid to bring it up," said Carlos Espinosa, spokesperson for U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., a conservative Republican who heads an immigration-reform caucus.

"You have the GOP angling for cheap labor, but it is only cheap to employers, not to taxpayers. You have Democrats looking for a source of increasing their voters and labor unions looking at (illegal immigrants) as a new source of membership. Then you have the White House trying to use it a wedge issue," Espinosa said.

"It is cynical, but it's politics. That's the deal," he added.

Isn't it always about politics? I mean, Bush's proposal always lacked in the really fundamental, important details. For instance, will the plan lead towards eventual deportation for illegal immigrants after three years of employer sponsorship, or would it serve as a viable path towards gaining citizenship? Those provisions were never made clear (though it seemed more like the former) and the White House announcement of the bill never cared to make such a distinction.

Despite that, the White House always knew that the passage of this immigration reform bill would not reach Congressional approval this year. But it does accomplish one Bush agenda: election year campaign fodder for galvanizing Hispanic voters. So even if the bill never sees the light of day, it may end up garnering enough of the Latino electorate who are sympathetic to immigration issues, thereby diffusing a base of Democratic support. Will it work? We'll see...

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 4:11 pm

D'OH! We're Back Up...

We had a little problem with our server today -- our apologies! Too much traffic? But everything's fixed now and our regularly scheduled blogging will now continue...

Let me direct you now to Whitmore's Wisdom, part of the New American Blogs family. Peep it.

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 2:30 pm

Thursday, March 18, 2004

Lost in Translation

Thanks to you folks who continue to send me interesting articles and links to articles. I may not blog about it all (it's a spontaneous thing when the inspiration hits), but keep 'em coming. Today's daily chalk talk comes from the New York Times contrasting the wide cultural differences between Japan and China:

TOKYO — Of all languages in the world, Japanese is the only one that has an entirely different set of written characters to express foreign words and names. Just seeing these characters automatically tells the Japanese that they are dealing with something or someone non-Japanese.
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By contrast, in Chinese, no such distinction is made. There, non-Chinese names are depicted, sometimes with great difficulty, entirely in Chinese characters. Foreigners are, in effect, made Chinese.

At bottom, the differences reflect each country's diverging worldview. In contrast to the inner-looking island nation of Japan, China has traditionally viewed itself as the Middle Kingdom of its name, the center of the world. If it is natural for Japan to identify things or people as foreign, viewing them with some degree of caution, it may be equally natural for China to take "Coca-Cola" or "George Bush," and find the most suitable Chinese characters to express them.
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Children of Japanese business families stationed overseas for a few years invariably encounter problems returning here. Schoolmates often pick on them and call them gaijin, meaning foreigner or outsider. That problem has decreased in recent years, as more and more Japanese have spent time abroad. But those children are still considered to have suffered from their years overseas, in contrast to, say, an American child whose experience living abroad would usually be considered a plus.

Chinese identity is a different matter. Whether you are a fourth-generation Chinese-American student at Berkeley, or the children of Chinese operating a restaurant in Lagos, Nigeria, you are considered Chinese, or an insider, upon returning to China. Your name will be written in the same way as everybody else's. Unlike Japan's, Chinese identity transcends borders.

I can personally vouch for this kind of cultural ethnocentrism among Chinese. "You can take the Chinese out of China, but..." my Dad used to tell me, as a way of instilling some sense of cultural pride he felt I was losing. Not that it helped. By the time I finally visited China in my late-twenties, I was regarded a curiosity by mainland natives. Not because of my American cultural bearings, or that people there viewed me as a foreigner, but due to the fact my barely-there, 2nd-grade hackneyed Mandarin was so lacking. In other words "How can this Chinese person not speak Chinese?" For shame, their incredulous glances told me.

I blame my parents. Four years of forced Chinese-classes during grade school (when all I wanted to do was watch Saturday morning cartoons) and another few years of attempted home-schooling in Chinese did me in. That experience forever made me allergic to any formal language training. I'm not unique in this respect. Most second-generation Chinese Americans I know fall in the same category: English only, Chinese barely.

My girlfriend, on the other hand, is "hafu," or half-Japanese -- born in Bogota, Colombia but spent most of her formative years in Japan. She can speak Japanese like a native, and in fact worked as a professional Japanese translator when we first met. Nevertheless, she will always be considered gaijin in Japan because of her mixed background.

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 12:20 am

Tuesday, March 16, 2004

"American Masala"

Wow. Read this article in the upcoming edition of Newsweek. It's a feature on the growing impact of the South Asian population in the U.S. -- a population that, in our experience, tends to get short-shrifted in targeted ethnic marketing expenditures. Maybe it's about time Corporate America rethinks that approach? Read on:

The timing couldn't be better. "Bombay Dreams," which has been playing in London since 2002, tells the story of a young man from the slums who rises to film stardom. It's an apt metaphor for the growing visibility of a new generation of South Asians in the United States—some immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, and others born here—who are making their mark everywhere from Hollywood to Wall Street. Politicians here may be in an uproar about outsourcing jobs to India, but India has also been exporting tremendous talent to this country. Young South Asians are transforming America's cultural landscape, setting the pace in business, the arts and media as well as the traditional fields favored by their parents' generation, medicine and technology. Many have spent time on several continents; they're multilingual, and comfortable mixing cultures. They're also often children of affluence; the 2 million South Asians here are wealthier and better educated than almost any other immigrant group.
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These high achievers are only part of a much larger phenomenon. "Since I've been here, I've never seen so much attention to my culture," says Sreenath Sreenivasan, 33, an associate professor at Columbia Journalism School and cofounder of the South Asian Journalists Association. From Los Angeles to Miami, partygoers of all ethnicities are shaking their hips to the beat of bhangra, which is based on Punjabi folk music. (In the season premiere of "The Sopranos," Meadow jammed to Indian rhythms as she cruised in her car.) Video stores across America stock selections like "Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India" from Bollywood, India's prolific film industry, along with hits by South Asian filmmakers working in the West like "Monsoon Wedding" and "Bend It Like Beckham." Designers like Donatella Versace are crafting saris. And in a true test of acceptance, suburban supermarkets are stocking frozen saag panir (spinach and cheese) next to pizza and chili.

Read it all -- it's worth your time. I never thought I'd see an article like this in a mainstream, general interest news weekly. First BusinessWeek comes out with their cover story "Hispanic Nation" (Message to the editors: What took you so long fellas? You still have much to learn!), and now this. What's next -- an piece in ESPN Magazine on why Asia as the NEXT sports powerhouse? My bad, they already did that...

Maybe that Contexts journal is really onto something.

(Spotted by Angry Asian Man - no, not me)

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 10:23 pm

Everyone Loves An Asian Girl

I know I do. Get yours here.

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 7:08 pm

Dimensions

Very, very busy, busy, busy today. Good busy. New project work busy. So in the meantime, chew on this: Dimensions -- our new quarterly newsletter where you'll find articles by me, David, and an interview I conducted with Bill Frey (which I dropped hints about in this space a few weeks back). Enjoy!

Posted by Thomas Tseng, 2:08 pm