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With our experience in the South-Asian
markets, we are poised to market your products and services
in the 'desi' domain. We started in 1995 with our committment
to provide the best creatives, marketing strategy and
tactiful product placement to maximize our advertiser's
ROI on ethnic and multicultural advertising. From cars
(Honda, Toyota), financial institutions (Citibank, Western
Union, Northwestern Mutual, Merrill Lynch, State Farm
Insurance, Allstate Insurance, Bank of America, Wells
Fargo, Chase Manhattan, Progressive Insurance), beverages
(Pakola, McDonald's), airlines (Emirates, PIA, Air India),
real-estate (Saddle Creek, KB Homes), telecommunications
(MCI, AT&T, Cingular, T-Mobile, Sprint), electronics
(Sony, Samsung), to retailers, hospitals, movies, events,
and more.
We have a strong portfolio and partnerships
with several Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi,
and Nepalese newspapers, radio, TV, online portals,
and outdoor holdings.
Be it a product, event or
service - Evershine can give you the exposure that your
business needs.
Contact
us for more information. In addition, you can also
review the articles below.
The following article in the Time
magazine reflects the power of the South-Asian (Indian
, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan) consumer.
THEIR ROOTS ARE ON THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT;
THEIR WALLETS ARE HERE. WHY COMPANIES ARE CATERING TO
A HOT MINORITY: DESIS
By BARBARA KIVIAT
Posted Wednesday, Jul. 06, 2005
Jay Sean is an hour late, but the
crowd gathered in the makeshift studio at MTV's Times
Square headquarters doesn't seem to mind. Twenty-some
twenty-somethings are sitting around the edges of the
room when the spiky-haired British R&B star finally
enters, causing more than one girl to lean forward.
Sean is miked and seated in front of an MTV logo reminiscent
of the Taj Mahal. The camera rolls, and the interview
begins. Sean talks about being a kid and starting a
band in England with his cousin, recording their first
demo tape in his bedroom and being swooned over. He
also talks about listening to bhangra music, choosing
singing over medicine as a career and picking a Bollywood
actress to star in his latest music video. The interview
wraps, but the star, who was raised in Britain by India-born
parents, stays seated to shoot a few promotional clips.
"This is your boy Jay Sean," he says, "and
you're watching MTV Desi."
 Welcome
to the next marketing frontier. For years, Western companies
have understood the potential of 1 billion consumers
in India, but now they are slowly starting to realize
the purchasing power of people in the U.S. who trace
their roots to the subcontinent--a group known as desis.
MTV India has aired overseas since 1996, but MTV Desi--a
channel for Americans of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi,
Sri Lankan, Bhutanese and Nepalese descent--is brand
new, launching this summer. And MTV isn't alone as it
chases desi dollars. South Asian marketing is still
in its infancy, but early adopters like General Motors,
Citibank and GlaxoSmithKline are advertising in ethnic
newspapers, buying airtime on satellite channels, sponsoring
cultural festivals, underwriting minority scholarships
and even creating new products, like MTV Desi.
Why the interest? It's not just America's
growing appetite for South Asian culture--movies like
Bend It Like Beckham and stars like Bollywood actress
and model Aishwarya Rai. The marketing thrust started
with the 2000 Census, which revealed that during the
1990s the number of Indians in the U.S. more than doubled--making
them the fastest-growing Asian minority. There are some
2.5 million desis in the U.S., and the vast majority
are Indian. That may not seem terribly significant compared
with, say, 40 million Hispanics, but consider how premium
a customer a South Asian is: Indians alone commanded
$76 billion worth of disposable personal income last
year, according to market-research firm Cultural Access
Group, using figures from the University of Georgia's
Selig Center for Economic Growth; median household income
is nearly $64,000--50% higher than the national average.
The U.S. has always welcomed the world's poor and working
classes. India has sent its professionals.
 And
they're not afraid to spend. Lakshmi Subrahmanian, 48,
sums up the shopping habits of her four-person, five-computer,
six-figure-income family this way: "We like to
buy the best." The mental-health counselor and
her electrical-engineer husband Jayram, 53, who own
a five-bedroom house in Coral Springs, Fla., are about
to trade in their 2002 Mercedes--it's time for something
newer. That spells opportunity for General Motors, which
has begun pushing Cadillacs in desi circles. "This
is a great market," says Jean Liu-Barnocki, GM's
manager for Asian-American marketing, "and we're
putting some very targeted resources behind reaching
it."
At first glance, that might seem
fairly simple. Unlike Hispanics and other Asian minorities,
South Asians often arrive fluent in English. The influence
may be more British than it is American--cricket is
preferred to baseball--but a desi in the U.S. can still
pick up USA Today and understand a Gap ad.
Whether that message gets through,
though, is a separate matter. "We speak English,
but we don't speak the same language," says Vivek
Sharma, senior manager of India Abroad, a U.S.-based
newspaper that, along with titles such as India Today,
India-West and New India Times, is attracting ads from
the likes of Mercedes-Benz, Lufthansa, New York Life,
GM, Western Union, AT&T and the New York Times.
Just consider that Sean, in typical eyebrow-raising
rock-star fashion, picked actress Bipasha Basu for his
music video in part because she was racy enough to have
had an onscreen kiss--a rarity for a Bollywood star.
The mores of bare-it-all Hollywood could not be further
away.
To make an advertising message culturally
relevant, says Saul Gitlin, executive vice president
at Kang & Lee Advertising, you have to do more than
toss a desi face into a commercial. Values such as education,
hierarchy and status are unshakable for desi families,
even if modified to reflect American lifestyles. "There's
a core belief in higher education and studying and saving,"
says Phil Salis, vice president of consumer marketing
at MetLife, which has created desi-specific television
advertising to run on satellite channels such as ZEE
TV, B4U, Sony TV and TV Asia. He's not kidding: 64%
of Indians in the U.S. hold a bachelor's degree, vs.
24% of the overall population. Says Salis: "That's
a great opportunity for financial services."
 Marketers
are also recognizing that in close-knit, largely immigrant
communities, familiarity with a brand plays a much more
important role than it does with the general public.
"Word of mouth is huge," says Lakshmi Bhargave,
25, a graphic artist in Chicago. "We have this
theory that between Indians, it's more like two degrees
of separation rather than the usual six." So firms
show up at desi events and subtly introduce the message:
We're a part of your community too. Wells Fargo sponsored
a Bollywood concert in Cupertino, Calif., in June, setting
up a table in the lobby and dispensing brochures touting
its new money-transfer service to India, an initiative
aimed at stealing business from Western Union. "It's
not just about advertising," says Michelle Scales,
director of the diverse growth segment at Wells Fargo.
"It's about being visible in the community."
It took Hispanic marketers 20 years
to convince media executives that there was a case for
targeting Hispanics, and today people like Vimal Verma,
chairman and CEO of American Desi, a satellite network
that launched earlier this year, are engaged in a similar
campaign for South Asians. He hopes what many in the
industry do: if the entertainment platform is built,
the advertising dollars will follow.
That's what the folks back at MTV
are banking on too. "If you wanted to reach young
South Asians, there hasn't been a branded, credible
platform," says Nusrat Durrani, senior V.P. and
general manager of MTV World. Voilà MTV Desi,
which should air nationally in July. After Jay Sean's
interview, he sticks around to pose for photographs
with fans. "To me, it's been a long time coming,"
the singer says between autographs. "There is a
massive market out there." Sean, an artist and
an entrepreneur, pauses and then continues, "We
make up one-fifth of the population of the world. Imagine
that."
--With reporting by Jeanne
DeQuine/ Miami, Noah Isackson/Chicago and Laura A. Locke/
Cupertino
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