What you need to know:

• Streaming service provider, Stan, has just wound up a multichannel campaign to raise awareness and conversion of multicultural Australian audiences to subscribe to its platform by utilising the power of the Olympic Games and eight new dedicated international channels providing coverage.
• According to Stan CMO, Diana Ilinkovski, the work, with included hundreds of assets in six languages, was part of a broader multisegment play to attract new and regain lapsed customers to sign-up.
• With one in 10 viewers initially tuning into these eight international channels, Stan saw this rise to one in seven over the tournament, a result that arguably exceeded the marketing team’s expectations. Stan also generated a 50 per cent uptick in subscribers during the Olympics period.
• For the CEO of Stan’s agency partner CulturalPulse, Reg Raghavan, the campaign is a great example of the power of word-of-mouth, community engagement, and connecting with multicultural consumers in a way that invites them into a dialogue with brands.
• It’s this engagement over reach brands need to harness if they are to make the most of the CALD growth opportunity, says Raghavan: “Communities are waiting for an invite from brands to be engaged and until then, they won’t be. That’s why this reach and effectiveness conversation is so critical with CALD audiences. You can put as much advertising out there as you like, but if you haven’t actually got an invite as a consumer, then you don’t feel like it’s for you.”

More than 50 per cent of Australia’s population can be classified as multicultural – either born overseas, or having a parent from overseas. So when Stan confirmed it was going to have eight dedicated international, in-language channels available as part of its 2024 Paris Olympics coverage, the marketing team knew tapping into the country’s culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities with a dedicated campaign approach was going to be required.

As Stan CMO Diana Ilinkovski explains, CALD was a key segment of new and lapsed customers the streaming service provider was hoping to gain as subscribers through the globally significant sporting and cultural event. The eight fresh channels on offer – UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Greece, India and New Zealand – came as the result of partnerships with Eurosport, Warner Bros Discovery, Sky NZ and Viacom18 India and included live and on-demand coverage of the Olympic Games.  

In focusing on CALD audiences, the objective was to raise awareness of these channels on Stan, drive subscriptions, and improve retention post-Games.

“That CALD segment formed one core component of the new audiences we were looking to get to subscribe to Stan over the Olympics,” Ilinkovski tells Mi3. “We had a broader campaign that sat behind this, but worked with CulturalPulse on a very dedicated and tailored approach for how we were going to connect with these audiences.

“We knew a traditional marketing approach wasn’t going to be enough on its own. We needed to go to those audiences rather than relying on them to come to us. And we needed to do so in a manner that would be trusted and culturally appropriate, and tailored in the language they speak.”

Stan’s first dedicated foray into targeting multicultural Australians was during the Rugby World Cup.

“Where we had a unique point of differentiation was the fact we could cater to communities that wanted to cheer on other teams from other countries such as England, France, Fiji, New Zealand. We saw a whole host of customers coming in for these particular teams and audiences and we were able to deliver as part of that experience a couple of additional channels by partnering with international distributors. That was our toe in the water and was incredibly successful,” says Ilinkovski.

Typically, Stan doesn’t go out to every single sports lover, it goes after fans of those sports.

“The opportunity presented itself with the Olympics to go after that broader sports audience, but then families as well because again, the Olympics appeals to every Australian at every age,” Ilinkovski says. “Our approach was incredibly multi-faceted, and each one of our core new segments had its own campaign plan and strategy to activate. And we were juggling those simultaneously.”

The CALD campaign brief

The brief to CulturalPulse in terms of customer journey was as follows: Help CALD consumers become aware Stan has international Olympics coverage; understand why they should subscribe; and ensure they know when and how to do so.

Stan’s major audience targets included the affluent and die-hard sports fans, international fans and expat communities, and lapsed subscribers across both sports and entertainment. There was also intent to upsell existing subscribers who hadn’t previously signed up to Stan’s sports services.

A three-pronged campaign approach was adopted: Campaign one was awareness; campaign two was awareness, engagement and action; and campaign three was games promotion. Across each phase, CulturalPulse helped tailor creative and content assets across six languages, video campaign materials, static banner and social video. It also undertook media outreach and focused on ambassador amplification.

While brand messaging was relatively consistent, there were nuances in social-oriented creative and posts across organic and paid channels, as well as video, based on cultural insights and sports / athlete affinities by country.

An important element in the mix CulturalPulse CEO Reg Raghavan highlights is a community ambassador event for 50 people including Stan and agency staff. These events brought together community media such as the Greek Herald, business, sport and a range of influential individuals including country consulates.

“We hosted an event in a French restaurant with the French Consulate and it was almost like a diplomatic event – it had that kind of formality,” he comments. “If Stan had approached and said we want to go to the French Embassy, they’d have said it’s government, we don’t deal with brands. I think this is actually a way to build some cache around your brand by tapping into these key cultural moments.”

Raghavan calls this “diaspora diplomacy”. “By engaging our local diaspora in key moments, you actually forge stronger relationships at home,” he says.

“I think if we’d just gone out on socials and people didn’t see that, there would not have been the same impact. We invited the different cultural media so they’re reporting that out. It’s no different to how you launch a new product – the same principles apply.”

CulturalPulse also drew on a range of insights and data assets across first- and second-party datasets. These revealed the best narrative approach was a “patriotism play”. It’s a similar theme the agency tapped during last year’s FIFA World Cup when it was asked to help attract CALD audiences to games outside those featuring the Australian Matildas.

“We knew there was a lot going for these channels and that many would already be familiar with those [media] services… they are also aware of their own athletes and sports from their own home countries,” Raghavan continues. “For example, the Greek community in Australia was really excited about watching Giannis Sina Ugo Antetokounmpo, who’s this awesome Greek / Nigerian NBA player and star who was leading Greece. We knew then with our other data around word-of-mouth and referrals that it was going to be important to share some of those existing pieces in the subscriber journey to answer that question: ‘Why should I subscribe?’.”

Results

In all, activity between July 18 and August 14 generated 2.5 million community targeted impressions, with more than 1.2 million unique community members reached and over 59,000 direct clicks through to the Stan platform.

Ilinkovski says the right framework, templates and processes leading in were vital to ensure Stan could achieve results, and speed to market was an imperative.

“That ensured we could react to anything or adjust based on the nature of live sport and being in real time, as well as results coming in overnight because of the time differences,” she says. “We were able to do that and in a way that was relevant for each community.”

Notably, one in 10 Olympics viewers on the Stan platform were tuning into the eight international channels initially. But the figure rose to one in seven over the three-week period.

“As the Olympics progressed, we were able to grow that segment in particular and keep building word-of-mouth as these communities were starting to see the experience, have an amazing experience, and tell their friends and family about it,” Ilinkovski says. “That absolutely aided the campaign as days went on and we saw that only continue to build. The sentiment we saw in social and trade around it was absolutely fantastic. So there was this groundswell which happened which we were incredibly pleased with.”

More broadly, Stan chalked up a 50 per cent uptick in sports subscribers overall during the Games window as well as material uplift in entertainment subscribers. According to the FY24 full-year Nine results, Stan’s revenues were up 5 per cent year-on-year to $447.7 million, with 2.3 million paying subscribers.  It also noted strong subscriber performance in Q1 of this year off the back of the Olympic games and an expectation of average revenue per user growth in FY25.

Given how pleased the team is with the results and what it was able to achieve, Ilinkovski says it’ll look to build on that with what Stan does around its wider programming offer and including the next Olympic Games in two years’ time.

Invitation to brand engagement: Collectivism versus individualism

Stan’s CALD effort isn’t a mainstream one, and many brands continue to struggle with how to effectively engage multicultural consumers. This is despite the fact numbers show how significant a cohort multicultural is for marketers to be addressing: 30 per cent of Australians were born overseas. As part of the scoping process, CulturalPulse had identified 2.5 million households as potential audiences across the six CALD communities.

One of the key distinctive points about engaging with multicultural communities Raghavan says brands fall short on is the concept of “collective hospitality”.

“It’s like waiting for an invite; I often describe CALD engagement this way,” Raghavan says. “Communities are waiting for an invite from brands to be engaged and until then, they won’t be. That’s why this reach and effectiveness conversation is so critical with CALD audiences. You can put as much advertising out there as you like, but if you haven’t actually got an invite as a consumer, then you don’t feel like it’s for you.

“When you’re a migrant and come into a country, you get bombarded with lots of different information. How do you know what to get involved in? What is secret Aussie business? What’s not? There’s still that little bit of standoff in general. It also links into the concept of identity and if I’m Australian; it’s a tough question for people to answer. But when brands invite communities, they can then feel part of it. That’s why part of this work was doing some of the basics, and also why word-of-mouth and referral is so strong with multicultural audiences – it’s essentially someone of influence say hey, it’s OK, this is for us.”

The distinction between individualism and collectivism is one of six cultural dimensions CulturalPulse subscribes to as outlined by the Hofstede Index. The others are: Power distance; seniority or hierarchy; masculinity versus femininity; uncertainty avoidance; and long-term versus short-term orientation.

Yet even while there’s opportunity in this difference, Raghavan says he’s keen to debunk the idea that every type of multicultural community cohort requires a completely different approach when marketing and engaging with them as brands.

“The first thing people say is oh, gen pop is CALD and CALD does not behave differently. The second place they go is saying CALD is different and there’s 200 countries in that mix, so they think they’re all very separate. The third place to go, which is where I’m trying to move thinking – and it sounds counterintuitive and backward – but it’s that there’s CALD and there’s non-CALD,” he explains.

“Why? We go back to collective and individual thinking. Some of these broader dimensions in terms of how communities cluster means there’s a lot of commonality. Our whole blueprint for delivery is about nailing that commonality – that’s why we can plug-and-play with any product and any number of communities.”

Yes, creative through to media executions may require languages and a different hue in a multicultural context. Even so, there’s commonly a channel that community is familiar with, and word-of-mouth is powerful from a collective.

“There are a bunch of common elements we execute and that takes away the different – that’s the way we’re able to jump between hundreds of communities because these common elements are the same,” Raghavan adds.