Toyota Ads Vary by Ethnicity

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TempToyota's new advertising approach is to tailor Camry commercials to people based on their assumed ethnicity. If your history shows that you watch Scandal or Sunday Night Football, you'll get a particular ad.

A New York Times article shows the differences for African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American, and "Transcultural Mainstream."

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A group vice president for Toyota explains the strategy, "if a person of any group is looking for communication that is like them, that looks like them specifically, the good news is because of the breadth of something like a Camry campaign, they can find it." The NYT article explains more detailed strategies for eight ads targeted to ethnic groups.

Discussion:

  • One argument against the tailored ads is that the U.S. is quite diverse, and people expect to see different ethnicities in ads anyway. What do you think? 
  • Read the strategies for eight examples in the article. Some, of course, are built on stereotypes. Is this wrong or a good marketing approach?