The Multicultural Marketing Conference, which is actually now the Multicultural Marketing and Diversity Conference, always features one of the most profound levels of energy that we have among our 100 meetings per year. And the reason is that there’s a level of passion among a community that has often never been given its appropriate recognition, is always fighting for its next dollar, and is always fighting for its rightful place within an organization. Every year I come to this, and this is the eleventh year, the conference has a distinctive flavor about it of a very unique caliber.

What impressed me both from last night at our ADCOLOR Awards, as well as today’s session, is that the level of professionalism taking place among the multicultural marketing community is as good as I’ve seen it. First, last night the conversation around diversity and the need for essentially socializing the diversity argument has moved up a notch to, I think, a most intelligent way of attempting to be able to attack the issues of diversity — and that is to engage the entire marketing community in a conversation to ensure that all of our respective lessons learned can be appropriately understood and socialized among a broader community. We’ve never done that before, other than in fragmented kinds of ways.

Today we heard both discussions about diversity and how various companies and organizations approach multicultural marketing in the most sophisticated ways possible. The individuals, across the board, displayed a level of indepthness and savvy because they are dealing with budgets that have been cut and audiences that are largely not necessarily general market mainstream. The creativity that has to go into these marketing efforts is such that they have to continue to work to justify those budgets in the future.

Our closing speaker was MC Hammer. He was engaging and entertaining, an extraordinarily impressive man who has embraced social media and is leveraging social media in probably a very dynamic and personal kind of way to take advantage of information that now travels at the speed of light. And that is extraordinarily distinctive in its approach because in today’s marketing community there is no time to step back, reset, rethink, and then redo. It’s just one red after the other. Fortunately, we are learning that social media and different approaches toward marketing are become certainly less expensive, they are giving us opportunities to experiment in ways that we never had the opportunity to do before, and I think closing the gap in terms of its effectiveness with respect to their target constituencies. We’re becoming as advanced as we’ve ever become in this arena.