BHEJA BAZAAR: Canadian

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The NHL took the west coast to the Far East last week staging its first two preseason games between the Vancouver Canucks and the LA Kings in Shanghai first and then Beijing - of all places. As one commentator on LinkedIn said, that's a 1.4 billion man advantage. It certainly appears to be. But is it?

Any expansion into Asia is fraught with the danger of cultural disconnects if unaccompanied by experienced and sober local/cultural counsel. It’s not called the Wild East without reason. India and China are strewn with the carcasses of many a multibillion-dollar mistake made by well-meaning, ill-informed Western clodhopper-corporations seeking conquest.

I grew up in Asia and the formative years of my career were shaped by my time working in Bombay and Hong Kong, so I am gently skeptical of the western approach. Asians, even without being practitioners of the second oldest profession (advertising) as I am, hail from places that midwifed humanity's oldest cultures, cultures that communicate with degrees of subtlety and nuance rarely practised in the west. Eastern consumers frequently regard clumsy western overtures as one might view an attempted seduction performed by someone without the sense of touch.

Allow me to explain why I see this particular exercise as, um, unfeeling.

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.

Let’s start with the obvious. There are cultural barriers to particular sports and there are cultural affinities for particular sports. Soccer and basketball are "big in China" as the old phrase goes, but table tennis (with 300 million players) and badminton are way bigger as organized sports and are played at a grassroots level. In India, cricket dominates, followed by kabaddi a traditional Indian sport (think rugby meets wrestling), field hockey and soccer.

There is the climate and the accompanying high cost of ice rinks for countries that are in most parts far warmer than Canada. These are countries where the absence of petrodollar funding usually produces a pragmatic rejection of illusory projects such as one sees in places like Dubai (indoor ski hill anyone?), Doha or Jeddah. The ice rinks that exist in China are largely recreational and used for figure skating, a sport that has a considerable headstart over hockey in China. India has a grand total of six indoor rinks.

Then, there is the matter of income and the access that comes with it.

The average urban Chinese income is about CAD3700/yr (approx. USD3000). This is a huge amount when viewed through an in-China lens because it is a figure that has increased by a factor of 10 compared to what it once was. Yet, in the North American frame of reference, it is shockingly small.

Here in Canada, hockey is not seen as a sport exclusively for the wealthy because kitting out a minor player costs, at most, CAD1200, and that's well within reach for most Canadians. The average annual income in Canada, after all, is around CAD50,000/yr (or approx. 13.5 times the Chinese annual average). An outlay of CAD1200 for someone earning CAD3700/yr is the financial equivalent of an own goal by a penalty killer. (Surely it must be less for our Chinese Gretzky wannabes because so much hockey gear is made in China? But even if we halve that cost, it is prohibitive.) Hockey may have got a foothold in the thin air of the Indian Himalayas, but as this video shows, there are harsh practical realities. A sport like hockey is simply out of the reach of most urban Chinese or Indian citizens.

Yet, for an audience to love a game, most must harbour deep inside themselves visions of playing it - playing it heroically. Nike knew this many years ago, when it rode the crest of Linsanity, as you can see from this spot.

In short, this is not a North American sporting landscape.

But that's not all.

Missing the empty net that’s right in front of you

I am gently skeptical of the NHL's ability to get this right when they don't currently get it right, right here in Canada with visible minority immigrant Canadians, especially Chinese and South Asian Canadians. As an evangelist for and practitioner in this space, I would know.

Unlike the NBA who have managed to break through to immigrant hearts and minds thanks to Jeremy Lin and Yao Ming, the NHL isn't really paying attention.

For a start, the NHL appears to be forgetting that the sport likely to become its biggest threat here in Canada is a sport played by immigrants. Cricket, once Canada's national sport, is today one of Canada's fastest growing sports - possibly the fastest. This is largely due to grassroots work in Canadian communities by immigrants from across the Commonwealth who are united in their love for the game.

Immigrants may be behind the growing threat of cricket, but for the NHL they represent a huge opportunity in an otherwise saturated marketplace. In 2017, well over 6 million new Canadian consumers belonged to visible minorities - and South Asian and Chinese Canadians accounted for well over half of that.

Like most immigrants, they are eager to understand and embrace the culture of their new home without losing their own. Hockey is a central part of that culture and they know that. While the CBC actually built a successful bridge with HNIC in Punjabi first and later in Mandarin (before HNIC moved on to Sportsnet) the NHL in Canada seems unaware of the market growth goldmine they are sitting on, right here.

Investing in attracting immigrant fans here in North America represents a huge business upside.

Home ice advantage

For organizations like the NHL considering a market play in China or India, there’s a bonus: lessons learned locally from such an investment can be carried to the "away" game.

Winning with immigrants right here is the equivalent of having home ice advantage in the series.

Investing in the South Asian and Chinese Canadian segments is a low-cost, high-reward, learning opportunity slapshot.

What does that sound like? Here’s a taste, first via HNIC's Punjabi play-by-play of a Nick Bonino goal that went viral - in the mainstream - last year:

And this little scene (below) at the Stanley Cup victory rally in Pittsburgh gives you a sense of how completely the Pens embraced Harnarayan Singh's epic broadcast.

It's worth mentioning that Nick Bonino has even suggested his family take it up as a personal ringtone.

Unfortunately, I think the NHL is tone deaf on this one.

I see its preseason experiment in China as nothing more than a PR play at best.

It’s a one-goal wonder that will hog ethnocentric headlines at home in North America and barely appear on the Chinese cultural radar in China.

Moral of the story: grab the bird in hand. It's a win-win.

Gavin Barrett is Chief Creative Officer and Ideawallah at Barrett and Welsh, an award-winning multicultural advertising Toronto agency that specializes in the new Canada, a magical place where the cricket is meh, the beer is good and the curry and noodles are shared with all.

This week we celebrate Eid-ul-Adha - the Feast of The Sacrifice - also known Bakri Eid where I come from. (Bakri is the word for goat in several South Asian languages.)

It is a celebration with ancient Abrahamic roots and commemorates the scriptural episode known as The Sacrifice of Ibrahim/Abraham.

Typically a family with sufficient means leads a fatted goat or ram to the slaughter. For those who observe the tradition, the meat is ideally then shared: a 3rd for one's own family, a third for friends and relatives and a 3rd for the poor. The mood of this year's celebration will no doubt be tempered by the tragic Haj stampede on the outskirts of Mecca, and our thoughts go out to those who have lost someone dear to them.

Still, for the vast majority of Muslims around the world, the celebration will take place as it always does. Families will gather for the traditional prayers, followed by the traditional feasting. As with most celebrations, food is at the centre of it all, and the food at the centre is likely to be goat.

Food is at the centre of it all, and the food at the centre is likely to be goat.

It's a very big deal if you're in the grocery business, like our client, Sobeys. Billions of dollars are spent globally at this time. In Pakistan, an estimated US$3bn is spent each Bakri Eid on some 10 million livestock.

What of Canada? Well, Canada's Muslim population grew some 82% over the last decade. The Value Chain Management Centre, in a 2011 paper examining the challenges and opportunities for Canada's specialty food market, reported an extraordinary concentration: 59% of Canada's Muslims live in Toronto and Mississauga. A 2009 study estimated the Canadian domestic halal meat market at C$214 million annually. Muslims households were found to spend C$31 per week on (halal) meat products, almost double the non-Muslim Canadian household weekly average of C$17. In 2014, the Ministry of Agriculture noted that the size of the Canadian halal food market had reached $1bn in an amendment to the Food and Drug Regulations that promoted clearer halal labelling.

This is big business. This is big business for the foreseeable future.

This is big business. This is big business for the foreseeable future. It's my hope that Chalo FreshCo, the store we helped Sobeys brand and launch, will achieve record-breaking sales over these days.

Which is why our multicultural wish for Eid-ul-Adha comes with smile included - a smile for all but the unfortunate goat.

A small sacrifice for a great biryani.

Eid Mubarak to those celebrating.

Gavin Barrett is Ideawallah at Barrett and Welsh, a Toronto agency that specializes in the new Canada, a magical place where all cultures are understood, shared and enjoyed and the ideas are delicious, meaty and aromatic with spices.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Canada License.

The Yellow Pages campaign makes it onto CBC. But for all the wrong reasons. Bibimbap is a rice dish. And the visual shows noodles. As tweeter @edwaan points out. Another commenter on Facebook helpfully explained: "Think about having the copy about the best pasta in town and the icon is pizza. It's that weird."

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This post is a slightly expanded version of the opinion piece I wrote for New Canadian Media in May 2015.

There are inherent dangers and risks in launching an ethnic channel or publication. In recent times we have seen both new players and well established ones ride into the sunset.

Mehndi TV made a comet-like appearance, flashed across our airwaves for a year, only to fade to black. That was a couple of years ago. It has since appeared in another constellation – on the website for Channel Zero.

Multimedia Nova, a publishing group whose newspapers included the 59-year-old Corriere Canadese shut its presses in 2013.

The 53-year-old Canadian Jewish News shut down its print edition and went all-digital in 2013.

But the Omni announcement makes me wonder if something else is at play here.

I wonder, for instance, if Omni was “too ethnic”? In other words, did Omni take an oversimplified content strategy with the ethnic consumer?

Allow me to explain. There is too often a rush to dumb down our understanding of Canada’s multicultural markets. Too often, ethnic consumer targets are rendered into shapeless homogenized blobs that bear no resemblance to what is actually a much more finely nuanced, multi-faceted cultural reality. A content or advertising strategy created for these fictional language-centric monoliths produces fuzzy, undefined work that has little appeal or relevance.

It is tempting to limit or define foreign cultures by language just because it makes it more convenient to sell airtime or diapers or haircuts or oranges but this is both facile and dangerous. After all, there are cultures united by language and separated by geography and, equally, cultures separated by language and united by geography. Add religion and history and we start to see an incredibly complex mosaic. There is rich irony in the mental visual of senior Omni TV executives closing their eyes to this.

Worse, this oversimplification is often combined with an attempt to keep new Canadians in their ethnic boxes. To do this is to deny the powerful narrative contained in the immigrant journey and to forget the impact that becoming Canadian has on the immigrant life. A Chinese citizen in China is not the same person as a Chinese Canadian citizen in Canada.

The words over the Queen Street viaduct remind us “the river I step in is not the river I stand in.” As we make our way in Canada, Canada changes us. And we change Canada. This is powerful stuff that is rich territory for original content.

In fact I think Omni could have significantly helped its cause by taking a leaf out of CBC’s book by using original Canadian content in the official languages to target the multicultural Canadian viewer. And, by that, I mean the Canadian viewer.

I look at CBC’s HNIC play-by-play sportscasts in Punjabi and Mandarin and shows like Little Mosque – very diverse programming that reflects a very diverse reality – and I ask, why couldn’t we see more of that?

We have an amazing talent pool in multicultural Canada. There’s a multicultural renaissance going on. Right now, the Tarragon Theatre is staging an Indo-Canadian version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado and it’s been getting rave reviews. We have writers like MG Vassanji, Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, Vincent Lam. We have comics like Russell Peters, Mikey Bustos, Ron Josol and Sugar Sammy. Bands like Delhi 2 Dublin, artists like Ritesh Das. This is not a country with a shortage of multicultural content.

Rogers is a sophisticated media-and-message convergence advocate and a successful player in that game, so I find it difficult to accept that it is allowing its investment to fail so easily.

I feel Omni really had a good thing going with its newscasts, but was shocked when they dropped the South Asian news in English a couple of years ago. Almost every South Asian I knew watched it.

I felt then, that it had stepped off an edge and was suspended momentarily in mid-air. Now it plummets.

An interesting pair of developments have happened in the political multicultural space since the beginning of this week.

On one hand, Canada's federal Minister for (the word "for" has rarely been so loaded with irony) Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, was discovered to have stealthily slashed visas to skilled workers by 20% and made it more difficult for elderly parents to join their adult children in Canada - it could take as long as 13 years now. Here's a link to the article as it appeared on CBC.ca.

On the other hand, he issues a cleverly crafted, very public statement that purports to show how much he loves cricket and immigrants and Canada's World Cup cricket team - and boasts of the high volume of immigrants that came to Canada from cricket-playing countries last year.

In a surprisingly common phenomenon, pro-conservative ethnic media outlets have simply run Minister Kenney's release as is - without any reporting, no questions asked. Click here for the original.

Judge for yourself - compare the original with a quick scan of ethnic media websites next.

On the media coverage front, is this a case of the Progressive Conservatives' substantial "say the right thing while doing the opposite" policy paying heavy dividends or a mere case of printing the silly, mid-on, by sympathetic ethnic media? I leave it to you to decide, dear reader.

The deployment of cricket politics by the federal Conservatives may represent part of their new strategy for new Canadians. It's an entertaining notion. Ladies and gentlemen, next on stage Prime Minister Stephen Harper will shimmy Bollywood-style - possibly to "jhooth bole kauwa kaate..." (trans: "if you lie, crows will peck at you"). Watch for something like it at the IIFAs.

Yes, this is another case of Progressive Conservatives talking out of both sides of their mouth, but one thing's for sure: they have pursued a disciplined, sustained strategy of engaging new Canadians. They have looked for a fit in the area of Asian-style social conservatism, combined it with high-visibility opportunistic PR like the cricket world cup, while neatly skating around their anti-immigration policies. The PCs still lag behind the Liberals as the natural party of new Canadians but they have been working hard to change this. Watch this space for more.

I am fond of saying that in today's Canadian market, if it ain't multicultural it ain't mainstream. But the more multicultural our markets are, surely the more fragmented they become? Not so.

The way I see it, it's not our new multicultural society that's fractured - it's old mainstream that is fracturing.

But wait, there's no reason to panic. It's not as bad as it seems. All this fracture business sounds painfully like we're talking about a bone breaking when in reality we're talking about an egg, hatching.

After all, we never really had a homogenous culture in bilingual Canada - and perhaps bilingualism and the distinct identities of Quebec and the First Nations were always a sign that this idealized (by some) homogenization would never come to pass.

Our changing demographics tell us that this is now a matter of fact, not opinion, borne out by the 2006 census (the fruits of the sainted "long form"). 6.1 million Canadians were born elsewhere and that population is growing 4 times faster than the Canadian born. The 1.1 million new Canadians who arrived between 2001 and 2006 accounted for 69% of all the population growth.

If advertising and marketing courses don't begin teaching multicultural marketing and advertising now, they'll be turning out students who will see markets that don't resemble their textbook markets in the slightest way. At the very least, they need to begin changing their syllabi now. Multicultural advertising and marketing needs to be taught, at least as a module in established courses.

In about five years, the mainstream as we know it today will have changed - by 2017 it will be an entirely different marketing reality and by 2030 it will be a brave new world for the bright, smart marketers and universities who took what their stats and research departments told them and applied it to their strategies and syllabi.

The fundamentals aren't changing because the new mainstream is a different colour. It's changing because the new mainstream is fundamentally different in every way - culture, conservatism, language, religion, cultural habits around money (saving it and spending it) and cultural habits around food. And the most fundamental thing about advertising/marketing is that it is about how people work. This is not an old "us" vs. a new "them". This is just a new "us."

One of the cool things about Canadian immigrants is that they want to be Canadian and they are proud to be Canadian, but they also discover very early that it is really difficult to define what "Canadian" is. Ultimately however, they come to realize in a single, empowering, incredibly Canadian moment that being Canadian is... being themselves.

And that is why I believe we need the Canadian marketing industry to invest in understanding this new emerging mainstream better - it's not going away. It's going to get stronger, richer, more vibrant and more challenging to deal with. Preparing for it is simply good business.

In fact, in our multicultural, polyglot, many-hued future, our local need for hybrid minds is going to serve us well globally - a rare instance where Canada is destined to be uniquely competitive. This is a time to learn how to spread our wings. One day we're going to have to fly. If we don't, we're going to have egg on our face.

Sunrise by the Ocean by Vladmir Kush via www.vladimirkush.com © 2008 Kush Fine Art. All Rights Reserved.

TD Canada Trust continues to make Canadian South Asians feel welcome, as our latest spot for them shows.

The premise here is equally simple and incredibly relevant - i.e. TD makes mortgages comfortable, desi style. Instead of the anxiety of negotiating your first Canadian mortgage in a completely unfamiliar setting, TD's mortgage process makes you feel at home. With mortgage specialists who come to you, who get you, who speak the same language as you figuratively and literally.

It's one reason why the majority of desis bank with TD: TD makes mortgages comfortable, desi style.

This idea is demonstrative - TD is not just saying "we get you" it is showing it, in the ad.
(Desi = a person of Indian extraction)

The team:
Client: TD Canada Trust
Agency: Barrett and Welsh

Creative Directors: Mike Welsh and Gavin Barrett
Writer: Gavin Barrett
Art Director: Bhupesh Luther/Gavin Barrett

Directed by: Richard Picton
Executive Producer: Augusta Brook

Editor: Chris Brook
DOP/Colour: Johnny Askwith
Motion graphics: Alwyn Pereira

Music: Night in Lenasia by Deepak Ram, Golden Horn Productions
Sound design: WantedSP, Toronto

I am going to break an longstanding rule of mine and post 2 commercials made by Barrett and Welsh - in a row. The reason? They're good. And they represent a substantial commitment to the South Asian community in Canada by TD Canada Trust. The first spot is called A Longer Hours People.

What's the idea here? Well, everything is longer for South Asians.
Weddings last a week. Festivals are celebrated over several days.
Bollywood movies last three hours.
Even our favourite sport, cricket, is played over five days.
Since time immemorial, our customs, traditions, passions, work ethics, faith and values have driven us to rise earlier and to stay awake later.

South Asians are a longer hours people. And the longer banking hours that TD keeps are a perfect fit, as this commercial demonstrates.

The team:
Client: TD Canada Trust
Agency: Barrett and Welsh

Creative Directors: Mike Welsh and Gavin Barrett
Writer: Gavin Barrett
Art Director: Bhupesh Luther

Produced by Barrett and Welsh, freelance producer: Munaf Husain/Dancing Light Pictures

Editor: Chris Brook
Music: Night in Lenasia by Deepak Ram, Golden Horn Productions
Sound design: Mark Dwyer, Zoo Music, Toronto
DOP/Colour: Pasha Patriki
Motion graphics: Alwyn Pereira
Stock: Getty Images

A CBC is a somewhat less than complimentary acronym for Canadian Born Chinese. CBCs themselves often refer to more recent Chinese with the pejorative FOB (Fresh Off the Boat). Many CBCs do not speak Chinese and are often in conflict with their roots as they try to define their own place in the Canadian multicultural landscape. Some CBCs may even be bananas but not all bananas are CBCs. A large portion of Gen2 Chinese are CBCs. From an ethnographic perspective, CBCs have a great deal in common with ABCs - their cousins south of the border - than just a couple of initials.

The CBC logo shown above is a trademark of the CBC (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)

Article: Creative Commons License 2008 Gavin Barrett

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Canada License.

Click on the title of this post to read a great article by Nicholas Keung that appeared in The Toronto Star.
The piece reviews the findings of an important new study into the media consumption habits of Canada's largest minority groups and whether the country's major advertisers are actually reaching this gigantic market. It's worth noting that fifty-two per cent of the people surveyed said, "I rarely see advertising messages intended for me."

copyright 2006 Gavin Barrett All rights reserved

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.

But that's not all.

Missing the empty net that’s right in front of you

Home ice advantage

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