Kim Walters has spent most of her career marketing to the both general market and niche audiences.  Most recently, she worked as the Marketing Director who launched Kevin Hart’s Laugh At My Pain (#1 independent theatrical release of 2011), a campaign which garnered tremendous transmedia success (generating over 1 billion impressions) and helped to position Kevin Hart as a bonafide international star.

Just one month ago, Walters joined Allied Integrated Advertising as director of a new African American-targeted division called Allied Moxy. “The team at Allied were getting demands from their clients (regarding reaching the AA market) long before I came to the company,” says Walters.  Having worked with motion pictures studios like Sony Pictures and A&E Networks, she’s been responsible for multi-million dollar budgets to market celluloid images for over ten years.

MN: After success with TD Jakes and Kevin Hart, why join Allied Integrated Advertising?

KW: It was the right time for me. I had worked indirectly with Allied Integrated Marketing in the past while at Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and had known of the Allied’s work for a long time when they approached me.  As the Marketing Director at Codeblack Entertainment on successful projects like Kevin Hart’s 2011 Laugh At My Pain and 2012’s T.D. Jakes’ “Women Thou Art Loosed! On the 7th Day” theatrical releases,  I was able to bring a diverse set of experiences from various aspects of my career, wearing multiple hats.

MN: What has your experiences taught you about brands spending on the black market?

KW: They simply don’t know how to speak to our audiences. African Americans have invaluable power and brands are challenged with reaching them. I believe some brands would be more successful if they figured it out. If they just included African Americans in the conversation more, they’d be more successful.

MN: How important are statistics when deciding how to reach black people?

KW: Analytic research is very important in what we do. We want to do our homework to make a promotions campaign effective. There are studies and reports that show us who has the power and leadership in that market. And there are a lot of relevant case studies that help me to make decisions on a daily basis.

MN: Why did Allied start the division?

KW: Allied is primarily an agency that handles entertainment companies. They are open to expanding to more lifestyle brands but not stepping away from their partnership with entertainment brands. They needed support in reaching the multicultural market. There were a lot of cases studies and support that it was a smart move. And their clients were asking for it.

MN:Where did you go to school? What were your networks?

KW.  I graduated from UCLA and pledged Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Incorporated as an undergraduate. While working at David & Goliath Advertising, I was also selected to take the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) Advanced Advertising Studies course at Loyola Marymount in Westchester during which time my team became the recipient of the Monty McKinney Award of Excellence.

By Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond

Socially, black people in America have been called—and called ourselves—everything from the “n” word to Negro, colored, black, black-American, and African-American—with the term du jour pretty much being a catch-all for anyone of African descent. But over the last 25 years, as corporate interests have developed a deeper stake in the African-American market, and cultural shifts have become more sensitive to the nuances in black identity—bi-racial, Latino, Caribbean, African, etc—new terms have cropped up.

“Urban,”“multicultural,” and “of color” have stretched the “black” banner to identify not only the black demographic (those of African descent), but the geography (those who share the inner city experienceof many blacks) and psychographics (those who strongly identify with aspects of black culture). Steve Stoute, CEO of hair and skincare brandCarol’s Daughter, has a newer term—“tanning”—and recently authored a book on the phenomenon called The Tanning of America. None of these monikers fully capture the breadth of diversity of blacks in America, but for Stoute, tanning better reflects recent census reports and population trends.

“If you look at a lot of the census data,” Stoute says, referring to the Pew Research Center’s report that showed 14.6% of new U.S. marriages in 2008 were interracial or interethnic, “you’ve got 1 in 7 marriages now are out of race. That’s 1 in 7. That’s not even talking about kids or dating.” Stoute is encouraged by this trend, and the migration shifts that debunk myths like blacks only live in the big inner cities, or Latinos only live in in California and Florida.

“[The Latino population is] growing in North Carolina at a higher rate,” Stoutepoints out. “If you take that, and African-Americans moving from the inner cities out more towards the suburbs, and you put all that together, what you have is a great complexion of shared experiences.”

Stoute credits hip-hop for tanning America, or changing the way Americans, and American businesses, look at race. “Hip-hop—not just the music, but the culture attached to it—has done more for racial relations than anything since Martin Luther King,” Stoute asserts. “It actually communicated a lifestyle and spoke—in a universal language—to a generation… it showed that we do have a lot of similarities.”

(Dow Jones) Even as their numbers continue to grow, African-Americans conceivably constitute one of the great untapped markets when it comes to financial services. Among those with household incomes of $250,000 or more, 58% have yet to establish an estate or a wealth-transfer plan, according to a new survey by Northern Trust. “It’s a very underserved segment,” says Darrell Jackson, an executive vice president of Northern Trust and an African-American who’s worked with his company to target this market.  It also is a population that is growing and becoming more affluent. African-Americans are expected to constitute 15% of the country (a total of 66 million individuals) by 2050, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And over the next three years, the buying power of African-Americans is expected to grow 28.4%—to $1.1 trillion from $870 billion, according to a 2010 Packaged Facts study, with the title “Black Is the New Green.”

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