Kang & Lee Advertising & Asia Link Consulting Group Share in Prestigious David Oglivy Award for Excellence in Advertising Research.

Business Editors

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 7, 2001

Award Recognizes Single Largest Multicultural Communications

Research and Planning Project Ever Undertaken

Kang & Lee Advertising and its research partner, Asia Link Consulting Group, as part of the winning Young & Rubicam Advertising Census 2000 team, shared in the top honor as the Grand Winner of the David Ogilvy Research Award for their groundbreaking multicultural research on behalf of Census 2000 by the Advertising Research Foundation at its annual awards dinner last night.

The historic Census 2000 advertising and community outreach efforts resulted in the reversal of a post-WWII trend of declining census participation by achieving a higher than expected national response rate of 67% for the mailed Census survey. The high return rate resulted in $305 million in field operations savings being returned to the US Treasury. The David Ogilvy Award is given for success in translating consumer research and planning into advertising and marketing communications campaigns which generate specific, quantifiable results. The Census 2000 team was the first place winner in the Services Category and also was the Grand Winner among all categories.

As part of the Young & Rubicam Census 2000 consortium, Kang & Lee was responsible for the research and development of culturally and linguistically relevant advertising campaigns for 14 of the 18 ethnically diverse groups reached by the Census campaign. The populations addressed by Kang & Lee's efforts included Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Asian Indian, Cambodian, Laotian, Thai, Hmong, Russian, Polish, Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and Arabic speakers. Asia Link was Kang & Lee's primary research partner, organizing complex nationwide quantitative evaluation panels and multilingual focus groups across eight of the target audiences.

Kang & Lee's research identified ways to motivate segments of American society, regardless of race and ethnicity, which would otherwise be unlikely to participate in a government sponsored information gathering initiative. Saul Gitlin, Kang & Lee's vice president of strategic planning who directed the agency's Census research team, believes that the government's approach to speaking with all segments of society will be increasingly adopted by private industry. Gitlin said, "marketers will continually challenge their agencies to get product messages out to every American to whom the product might have relevance - not just to every English-dominant White American." "This is already becoming an imperative in critical marketing regions such as California where Hispanics, Asians, and African Americans recently became the new 'majority' population in the state," Gitlin noted.

Asia Link's contribution to the campaign's success included one of the most diverse multicultural research recruitment efforts ever undertaken. Ultimately, over 700 respondents were recruited nationwide from eight different ethnic groups to participate in discussions and in the quantitative evaluation of creative options. Wanla Cheng, Principal, Asia Link Consulting Group, commented, "this project has been among the most exciting ones we have undertaken." "Not only was this the most challenging study ever conducted among Asian Americans in terms of its size and scope, but the stakes for the entire community were high," concluded Ms. Cheng.

Larry Moskowitz, Kang & Lee's director of strategic planning and the agency's lead Census 2000 planner was tasked with distilling the study's key learnings into a digestible form for Kang & Lee's creative department, which in turn produced over 125 distinct TV, print, radio, out-of-home, and internet executions. Mr. Moskowitz explained, "one of our key findings was that our groups are quite proud to participate in important civic-minded activities such as the Census but often lack a full understanding of how to participate and how their participation will ultimately benefit their community." From this insight, Kang & Lee concluded that developing messaging to counter suspicion of the government would not be as important as highlighting how Census information helps officials to provide their communities with needed services such as ESL programs and job training centers, to mention a few.

Kang & Lee and Asia Link Consulting shared the Ogilvy Research award with other agency and research partners on the Census team which were charged with developing programs to reach other multicultural segments of the US population, including Caucasians, Hispanics, African Americans, and Native Americans. These advertising agencies included Y&R Advertising, The Bravo Group, G&G Advertising and The Chisholm Mingo Group; the research companies also included The Maya Group, Market Development, and Data & Management Council among others.

Kang & Lee Advertising is the nation's leading multicultural marketing consulting and communications agency specializing in reaching Asian Americans. Kang & Lee has annual capitalized billings of $70 million and maintains offices in New York and Los Angeles. The agency's roster of clients include AT&T, Seagram Americas, Shiseido Cosmetics, Census 2000, The New York Times, Bank of America, Sears, Sina.com and others.

Asia Link Consulting Group, founded in 1992 by Wanla Cheng, is a full-service marketing research and marketing consulting company with expertise in Asian American and other multicultural market groups. Clients include Bank of America, Charles Schwab & Co., Prudential, MetLife, AT&T, Saturn, Mercedez-Benz, Johnson & Johnson, Seagrams, Chase Manhattan Bank, E*Trade, Wells Fargo, Pacific Bell, Verizon, MetLife, Citibank, PaineWebber among others.