By Rachel Lu
Toyota recently released two episodes of its five-part original anime series GRIP, featuring Toyota’s Gazoo Racing (GR) series of cars as the hero in an adrenaline filled alternate metropolis. The car company is venturing into anime in collaboration with Intertrend, a multicultural advertising agency based in California, for its newest advertising campaign to reach young Asian consumers.
Toyota is not alone in their hopes for tapping into the Asian American consumer market. A promotion inspired by the fictional WcDonalds as seen in numerous anime movies has come into its restaurants in 30 markets. The campaign includes a new WcNuggets sauce, manga-inspired packaging episodic shorts and more.
Increasingly, corporations like Toyota and McDonald’s are concentrating their marketing efforts on Asian American communities. Patricia Ratulangi, a media spokesperson for Nielsen, said marketers are recognizing that culturally inclusive advertising increases brand affinity and reach. Nielsen’s 2023 Asian American Diverse Intelligence Series Report found that AAPI audiences are 46% more likely to buy from brands that advertise in inclusive content.
Genny Hom-Franzen, executive director of the Asian American Advertising Federation (3AF), said the anti-Asian Hate movement in 2020 gave the community a stronger voice. However, there is an overall lack of understanding about the Asian American consumer segment.
“Asian insights need to be included in the creative process, otherwise marketers lose the opportunity to genuinely connect and drive further interest and brand loyalty,” said Hom-Franzen.
Language plays an important role for targeting the diversity within the AAPI community. “Recognizing that the AAPI community is not monolithic is critical. What’s significant and important to South Asians isn’t going to be the same for Southeast Asians,” said Ratulangi.
The Report for Asian Language and Media Preferences, jointly published by Nielsen and 3AF, looked at Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese audiences to show that there is a higher level of trust for in-language media among these groups.
Matthew Choy, the Executive Director of Strategy and Creative at Intertrend and the creative mastermind behind the Toyota anime series, said they are reaching young people in the AAPI consumer market by being truthful and authentic with anime as the conduit.
“I think our primary goal here was to make some really good content that people would want to watch, more so than necessarily selling cars or having it be a car ad, we just want it to be all about the story,” Choy told AsAmNews.
He said the campaign started with a group of anime fans at Intertrend. With a passion for anime, the team began looking for animation studios that resemble the styles of their beloved anime series. “Not something too polished,” Choy added. Eventually, they landed on the Korean animation studio DR Movies and created GRIP using mostly hand-drawn colors.
“It really gives a flavor to our anime work that is like no other in the commercial space,” Choy said. “I think what makes this interesting as an anime series is that it really blurs the line between what is an ad and what is just content, what is a great show to watch. We see it as a great show to watch. You’ll see Toyota’s value in supporting this work and we hope our audience will see the value too, but we’re prioritizing storytelling versus just advertising.”
The anime series is an effort for Toyota to engage with a younger age demographic, Choy said the brand is recognizing young Asian buyers as an influential audience group with huge spending potential. However, they also demand high quality content.
For Choy, the marketing strategy here is all about good content, “The way we even talk about marketing this campaign is a lot along the lines of how Netflix would release a piece of content.”
This strategy follows the recent Nielsen Diversity Intelligence Series in 2023, which found that streaming dominates Asian Americans’ time spent with TV, who watch 27% more streaming content than the general population. On the other hand, Asian Americans lag behind on time spent watching television, requiring brands like Toyota to go beyond traditional TV car ads to reach this audience.
While there is an overall increase in advertising towards Asian Americans, Hom-Franzen said more can be done to achieve full equity for the AAPI community. “We have seen some increased recognition of the Asian segment and engagement in the beauty, retail, financial services, automotive, and entertainment sectors, but overall, corporate efforts to reach Asian Americans have been sporadic and inconsistent,” she said.
The Nielsen Report also found that shows like Love is Blind, Physical 100, or Extraordinary Attorney Woo demonstrate that representation and inclusion are key components of compelling content for all audiences– beyond AAPI. For Ratulangi, this represents opportunities for corporations to engage with the community using selective content.
“Since AANHPI audiences are more likely to purchase when inclusivity is considered, there’s a tremendous opportunity to engage Asian Americans through the content where ads are placed,” said Ratulangi.
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