You’re Reaching the Right People in the Wrong Place

Why community-specific media channels deliver 12x higher engagement than Meta, YouTube, and programmatic display and what that means for how you spend your multicultural media budget. I see the same thing happen time and again. A brand wants to reach a multicultural audience in Australia, so they do what feels logical: they go to Meta or Google, apply a CALD filter, and run the campaign to whoever matches the demographic. The impressions come in. The report looks fine. And everyone moves on. But here’s what I’ve learned from working in multicultural media: reaching someone and actually connecting with them are two very different things.

Based on a variety of campaigns we have run across multicultural communities in Australia, multicultural-specific media channels deliver more than 12x higher click-through rates compared to programmatic targeting on Meta, YouTube, and display networks.

What the numbers actually show

Across those campaigns, multicultural-specific channels averaged a 6.87% click-through rate. Compare that to what we were seeing on the mainstream side:

Channel Type	Average CTR	vs Multicultural Channels
Multicultural-specific channels	6.87%	—
Meta (with CALD audience targeting)	~1.5%	4.6x lower
Programmatic display (with multicultural filters)	~0.25%	27x lower

Why community channels work differently

It comes down to trust. And trust, in multicultural media, is everything. These community channels, the Arabic-language news platforms, the Vietnamese community publications, and the Chinese media platforms have spent years earning their audience’s trust. People choose to engage with them. They rely on them. When a brand appears in that environment, the audience receives it very differently from a banner that pops up mid-scroll on a mainstream feed. Think about it from the audience’s perspective. Imagine you have arrived in a new country. You naturally gravitate toward media in your own language, media that speaks to your community, that reflects your world. The media becomes a trusted part of your daily life. Now imagine a brand showing up there, in that trusted space, speaking to you in context. The contrast with a generic programmatic ad served to you based on a data filter couldn’t be more stark.

A CALD filter tells the algorithm who to find. A community channel tells the audience you know where they are.

How to think about your media mix

I’m not saying abandon programmatic altogether. Scale has its place, and mainstream platforms are genuinely efficient at delivering broad reach. But there is a real difference between what each channel type is actually good for. Programmatic and mainstream platforms deliver impressions at scale. Community-specific channels deliver engagement in context. Running both under the same brief and measuring them the same way is where most multicultural campaigns go wrong. When you make the effort to meet a community in their own media environment, in their language, in a publication they trust, alongside editorial that is genuinely relevant to their lives, they notice. And the data shows they respond. That’s not a coincidence. It’s what happens when advertising feels like it belongs rather than like it’s intruding.

Impressions tell you how many people saw your ad. Engagement tells you how many people it was actually for.

If you want to talk through what a genuine multicultural media strategy looks like for your next campaign, get in touch. We’d love to show you what’s possible.