ADMAN TELLS HOW TO TARGET AFRICAN-AMERICAN CONSUMERS

With a combined annual income of $576 billion, African-Americans are becoming the most targeted consumers in the country, with companies eager to sell them everything from fast food to fashion.

The key, however, is in the delivery, said an successful African-American advertising executive who spoke to students at Southeast Missouri State University Sunday night.

Alvin Styles, vice president and director of research at Burrell Advertising, the world's largest minority-owned advertising agency, was speaker for the university's annual Michael Davis Lecture. Michael Davis died in 1994 from a hazing incident while at Southeast.

The lecture took place in conjunction with the school's Black History Month festivities. Styles addressed a standing-room-only crowd of more than 250 students about targeting the African-American consumer market.

"When African-Americans watch commercials, they want to see themselves, but they want to see you, too," Styles said about problems with targeted marketing. "The problem has been in the delivery, not necessarily in the messages themselves."

African-Americans make up the single largest minority segment in the United States -- a segment that is expected to grow another 14 percent by 2010, Styles said.

In its research, Burrell determined that the profile of the African-American consumer market depicts a segment that, compared to the general population, is younger, largely single, a social group that values family, education and religion. Its middle class is growing, its families are slightly larger and it has a high proportion of women as head of the household.

"One of the basic misconceptions about the African-American consumer market is that there is no family structure," Styles said. "That's not true. There is a family structure. It's just different."

Styles said Burrell has done television commercials for companies including McDonald's, Verizon, Sears, Sprite and Adidas. He showed some of the commercials to the audience and then talked about the marketing strategies involved in each.

A commercial for McDonald's showed a young African-American girl mischievously dividing a box of french fries between her and her younger brother.

"What I try to do is find something everybody can relate to," Styles said. "Can I try to make french fries culturally relevant? No. But I can try to serve it up in a fresh way."