MEDIA AND MARKETING:MOBILE PHONE company Meteor has been showing very strong growth recently, with the number of subscribers growing 20 per cent in the second half of 2007 to 962,000.
Maybe it is no coincidence that Meteor is one of the few big companies that targets foreign nationals in their own language.
Meteor is the only one of Ireland's four mobile phone operators with its website available in Polish, Latvian, Mandarin and Lithuanian versions.
Amanda Carroll, marketing manager at Meteor, says: "Our research told us that foreign nationals needed some key questions answered in their own language in order to avoid confusion. In order to compete, an operator needs to provide for all its customers and potential customers, not just Irish people."
Foreign nationals make up an estimated 400,000 of the population, and 16 per cent of these are from eastern Europe, while an estimated 5 per cent are Chinese. It is estimated that there are the same number of French, German, Italian and Spanish people in Ireland as there are from eastern Europe. So marketers who really want to go down the multilingual route online face big challenges if they want to be all things to all people.
After securing a mobile phone, the priority service needed by most foreign nationals arriving to work in Ireland is a bank account. None of the banks have a multilingual website offering, though new research from daily newspaper Metro indicates why this is so.
According to Metro, 60 per cent of foreign nationals approach a bank less than a week after arriving in the country. Four out of five select a bank as a result of a word-of-mouth recommendation either from a friend, family member, their boss or a work colleague.
So banks have very little time to make a marketing impression on these customers. For financial institutions who wish to stand out, a high-profile advertising presence at Dublin airport would seem to be a good idea.
About one-third of foreign nationals also buy car insurance and health insurance when they settle down. Again, the main players in these sectors don't have multilingual websites.
Ethnic Media is a company that sells advertising on behalf of 16 foreign-language publications available in Ireland, as well as online and ambient media. Managing director Niall Kehoe says that while Vodafone and Meteor publish regular ads in foreign-language newspapers, O2 does very little. He adds: "It would seem odd for companies to go to the trouble of designing press and digital ads directed at foreign nationals and then not have at least a portion of their website available in the foreign language."
Dave Harvey, managing director of cable TV station City Channel, believes Irish advertisers have tired of targeting foreign nationals. For the past two years, the channel has been broadcasting programmes targeting the Polish and Filipino communities.
But with the exception of Eircom and Meteor, big-brand advertisers have been slow to place ads around these two shows.
"Advertisers' views about foreign nationals have changed dramatically in the last six months," says Harvey. "I notice the banks in particular are drawing back on their ad plans because they believe a lot of foreign nationals are leaving Ireland to go back home. Creating ads targeting foreign nationals is not the priority it was."
Paper profits
Of all "old" media, it is said that newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. But in Ireland at least, newspapers are still delivering huge audiences for advertisers. According to the latest Joint National Readership Survey, almost 3.1 million adults, 88 per cent of the population, read a newspaper during the week. Two million people read a daily newspaper.
And those numbers are delivering more advertising revenue for publishers this year than a year ago, according to the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland. It estimates that advertising spend in newspapers came in at €79 million in January 2007, rising to €84 million in January 2008, an increase of 6 per cent.
Broadsheet newspaper readership 2007
Sunday Independent1,019,000
Irish Independent570,000
Sunday Times363,000
The Irish Times325,000
Irish Examiner267,000
Sunday Tribune218,000
Sunday Business Post159,000
Source: JNRS/Lansdowne
