Whenever I see someone who I’ve had the pleasure of knowing for years get an opportunity to be featured prominently on a popular platform, it attracts both my attention and yes, my one-off investment. I’m always interested in what auspiced people have to say.
So when I saw Linda Ong listed as the co-author of a series of “special reports” for THE ANKLER this week on OPPORTUNITY AUDIENCES, I delved into what they were saying. I’ve known Linda for decades; she’d regularly find a way into numerous companies I’ve worked for and with to pitch her services. From 2000-2016, fresh off a corporate stint at a pre-NBC watered down version of Oxygen Media, Linda headed her own firm, TruthCo, which her LinkedIn page describes in gushing detail:
(I)nnovator and pioneer of in-depth, actionable cultural insights and brand strategy for forward-looking entertainment and media companies looking to future-proof their products and brands. Complimenting traditional research and marketing teams, TruthCo. provides the missing cultural context and clarity that provides your brand with the cultural fluency and language you need to create passionate and sustainable connections with your customers.
Instead of looking at the who, what and the when, TruthCo. explores the why. Why do people engage with content? Why does some content resonate more than others? Why will one show become a hit while another show falls flat?
All excellent questions. All with very complicated answers. And as I’d often remind my marketing colleagues who Linda had often reached out to at conferences with her effervescent personality and some attractive handouts teasing her array of services, many were questions my departments were already answering. Maybe we were doing it with less sexy graphics and data where you’d have to digest the basics in order to arrive at the conclusions she’d proffer. Believe me, I know how dull raw Nielsen data and tracking study updates can appear when someone’s too busy to digest it.
This week, Linda and her partner in their new company, CULTIQUE, an equally game cultural anthropologist named Sarah Unger, delved into three timely and existential questions on behalf of a publication that caters to Hollywood elites, all with the intention, as the intro headlined, to highlight three growth audiences that offer major new opportunities for Hollywood. All of them attempt to deliver 20-20 hindsight to attempt to explain some of the surprises behind this summer’s rare success stories. In the one focusing on AMERICA’S HEARTLAND, Unger attempts to shed light on how and why a film as critically reviled as TWISTERS has somehow found a way to being a box office success:
(Y)ou don’t have to be a cartographer or a data scientist to know that this huge swath of the U.S. represents a significant market opportunity. Although it’s rooted in geography, the heartland is also a mindset and a movement. Driving (and moving) cross-country several years ago taught me that the U.S. is vast in landscape and psyche — full of vibrant cities, sweeping natural phenomena and endless miles of farmland — and too many people making decisions in media and entertainment have not seen or felt the half of it.
And in their piece on BICULTURAL LATINOS, seen as the secret sauce behind the wave of family-appeal films such as INSIDE OUT 2 and DESPICABLE ME 4, they tantalizingly offer up an array of “unique” insights they’ve curated to address this timely issue:
- Why Hollywood fundamentally misunderstands the Latino audience
- How a growing group of influential Bicultural Latinos can unlock both larger Latino and mainstream audiences
- The eight things you need to know about Bicultural Latinos and their cultural influence
- How Bicultural Latinos embody and embrace traditional American values
- How Hollywood is currently telling the wrong Latin American stories
- Four essential storytelling strategies to reach Bicultural Latinos
In an emotional piece Ong authored in 2021 for MSNBC called SILENT NO MORE, she drew upon her own childhood growing up in Texas, where people of Asian descent were rare. She would seem to at least have some familiarity with this audience. But a lot less, say, than less popular competitors such as HOROWITZ RESEARCH’s Adriana Waterston, who actually grew up as what she calls a proud “Nooyarican” and whose company has authored an annually updated survey on this group for decades and has spearheaded annual conferences where multicultural audience insights are discussed by hundreds of attendees.
And in the third installment released yesterday, Ong and Unger again draw from their own lives to offer up their views on CROSS-GEN VIEWERS:
(W)ith life expectancy currently hovering around 78 and rising, Boomers’ life spans are cresting to a century: Take Linda’s own 96-year old “firecracker” mom, or how an 80-year-old Mick Jagger pranced miles around SoFi stadium this month…Even in our own work, we see the power of cross-generational thinking firsthand. Linda, who’s on the Boomer/Gen X cusp, complements the elder Millennial perspective of Sarah, and we both get the benefit of mentoring (and reverse mentoring), our mimetic desires reflecting learnings from our age gap. We’ve seen up close how much generational upbringing impacts — and sometimes limits — the thinking of our clients, partners, families and friends.
Those are lovely stories, and more power to Mom Ong. But I would humbly ask anyone already budgeting for more of the likes of Ong and Unger: What have YOU experienced lately? What about your colleagues? When was the last time you actually sat down and shared a pizza with your staff, your co-workers, or even conducted a decently recruited focus group to discuss these very issues?
I don’t want to sound overly cocky, but the staffs I ran regularly did that, if for no other reason than the price tags of consultants like Ong were ones that my bosses would never consider. And I suppose with the reality check that many companies have severly cut back on or even eliminated researchers capable of doing something more than downloading data and spin-doctoring sales pitches for account executives and publicists, one can’t blame firms like CULTIQUE for aggressively hawking their services. But unless they are based upon something more foundational than a one-off survey that might not pass muster in sample size credibility or an aggregation of links that, frankly, a good college intern could (or should) be already doing, I truly wonder what’s going through the minds of those who find themselves seriously considering this sort of consult.
If you happen to work for the likes of NBCUniversal’s movie division, or a media company like Hallmark or Telemundo that has successfully tapped into these cohort segments as a part of their regular course of business, you likely already know a lot of this. And as already noted, you very likely might already have access to folks in your camp who are just as capable of providing insights, and even conducting credible research or finding less well-known competitors at a fraction of the cost of a firm like CULTIQUE.
Needless to say, I never hired Ong’s former company, and I wouldn’t support hiring her current one, especially in such dire financial times. But if reading a few pieces in THE ANKLER can inspire someone in a position of power to at least want to answer these sort of burning questions by bringing into their camp folks like myself and dozens of others who have worked in this area and have lived long enough for our own life experiences to be at least as credible as the principles of CULTIQUE, I’ll consider this effort of cultural anthropologists a noble and positive one on behalf of research as a whole.
As Ong stated, they’re COMPLIMENTS–not REPLACEMENTS–for traditional research and marketing teams. Noodle on that one, please.
Until next time…