From left to right: Cheryl Pearson-McNeil, senior vice president of U.S. Strategic Community Alliances and Consumer Engagement at Nielsen; Dawnie Walton, deputy managing editor at Essence Magazine; Lauren Wilson, features editor at Essence.
At Nielsen, cultural inclusion is a business imperative, and client and industry response to our Diverse Insights reports further proves just how much opportunity there is in understanding the needs of diverse communities. This February, we held a #PowerLunch Twitter Chat with ESSENCE magazine at our headquarters in New York. More than 300 online participants from inside and outside of the U.S. participated, yielding more than 10 million social media views.
Dawnie Walton, deputy managing editor at ESSENCE and Cheryl Pearson-McNeil, Nielsen’s senior vice president of U.S. Strategic Community Alliances and Consumer Engagement, discussed African-Americans’ influence, consumption habits and estimated $1.1 trillion in spending power.
Attendees included employees from Nielsen and ESSENCE, members of Nielsen’s African-American Advisory Council and journalists from 14 media outlets, such as Black Enterprise, Black Press of America and NBC Black. The chat included insights from the recent African-American consumer report, which we collaborated with ESSENCE to produce, and was fueled by questions directly from consumers on Twitter using the #PowerLunch and #ConsciousConsumer hashtags.
This was the first in a series of #PowerLunch Twitter Chats that we will host around our series of Diverse Insights reports. Previous reports in this series have included: The Multicultural Edge: Rising Super Consumers, Significant, Sophisticated And Savvy: The Asian American Consumer, and The Latina Power Shift.
Nielsen’s U.S. Community Alliances and Consumer Engagement group also produced four video vignettes for the Nielsen Knows YouTube channel for a series called “The Conversation.” The videos feature four African-American Millennial consumers discussing the importance of their ethnic heritage, being represented in advertisements and supporting businesses in their communities. The vignettes were shared with media and throughout the digital community via Nielsen’s multicultural social media platforms, resulting in almost 1,000 views.
