Getting The Message Across
August 28, 2005
By Karen Florin, Day Staff Writer

Vincent Tam is not insulted when somebody suggests Asians, as in all Asians everywhere, love to gamble. "Most of us do," he says with a smile.

Asian make up about 10 percent of the customer base at the region's two casinos, many of them arriving on bus from New York and Boston. The casino goes to great lengths to reach out to them through special events, such as concerts and holiday celebrations, and advertising

As an employee of the New York-based advertising agency Admerasia, Tam was at Foxwoods Resort Casino earlier this month supervising the shooting of two Asian-market TV spots. He says it is his firm's job to ensure mainstream companies use "culturally relevant" marketing to reach people of Asian descent.

"Culturally relevant," in the two 30-second commercials in production at Foxwoods, means using images and ideas that have been ingrained in Asian culture for centuries along with familiar contemporary themes, such as the ever-present "Wonder of it All" jingle.

The "Exciting Paradise" spots will contain colors that appeal to the Asian sensibility, such as red, a symbol of happiness and joy. Round objects also are positive images, and that fits in handily with the opening shots of a spinning roulette wheel. Good numbers, like 3 -a symbol of life- will appear, and the ad's creator will take pains to leave out figures considered taboo, such as the number four, which is associated with death.

"The are certain numbers you would always use in ads, and never use in ads, in Chinese," says Marty Kramer, Foxwoods director of advertising

Kramer willingly admits he need help understanding the different cultures the casino targets, including Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean and Russian-speaking groups.

"Because I'm not from those cultures they need to be explained to me,” he says. "I need to make sure we have people on our staff that can explain them to me."

Steve Karoul, Foxwoods' vice president of player development, has more than a quarter century of experience in marketing to Asians. He learned some things about "cultural relevance" the hard way. On one of his first trips to Hong Kong to woo a high roller 25 years ago, he learned that one of his biggest customers was celebrating a birthday.

"I said, 'What do you buy a billionaire?'" Karoul remembers. The hotel concierge suggested antiques, so Karoul found an ornate clock.

"When he opened it, if you saw the look in his face," said Karoul. "Culturally, you never give someone a clock. It's sign of death, that time is running out."

Foxwoods occasionally receives calls from companies that want advice as they begin marketing to Asians. With 10.5 million people of Asian descent in the United States and a growth rate of about 20 percent a year, American companies are increasingly seeking out agencies like Admerasia and Mohegan Sun's Asian market advertisers, Manhattan-based L3 Inc., for "ethnicity-specific" promotions.

The casinos advertise heavily in Asian-language newspapers, weekly publications that tend to be kept around longer than U.S. dailies and are passed from person to person. They do some radio and TV advertising on stations that broadcast in Chinese, buying air time during the news shows, when people are tuning in for information from their homeland. Chinese ads often are produced in both the Mandarin and Cantonese dialects.

One of the new "Exciting Paradise" spots focuses primary on gaming, interspersing segments in which Asian actors play and win with colorful kaleidoscope images that will be created using special effects. The ad features games popular to Asians, including roulette, craps, baccarat, pai gow and slots.

The various players will celebrate their wins "very naturally," says Tam, Admerasia's director of client services. "We don't want to over-promise."

When a female actor throws a hard six on the craps table - meaning each die shows a three - the audience will pick up automatically on the use of the favorable threes, Tam says. They'll also recognize that two cards totaling 21 is a winning blackjack hand and a King, 9 is a natural in baccarat. A winning slot machine will culminate with a dealer pushing forward a stack of chips arranged to look like the exterior profile of Foxwoods. The chips will "morph" into an actual image of the casino's exterior

The second commercial spotlights other Foxwoods amenities, including golf, shops and restaurants

"We found troughs focus groups that dining is important, and especially culturally relevant food," Tam says. Chef Pang, who oversees all of the Asian restaurants, had lovingly and artfully arranged several dishes of those shots the previous day. In the Wampum Superstore, television were arranged prominently because "electronics are very important," Tam says.

On this day, the crew is shooting gaming segments in a private salon attached to the exclusive Club Newport casino. A diverse group of Foxwoods dealers, including an Asian woman, a black man and a white man, turn out in their tuxedo-like uniforms to play themselves on the TV commercial. Casino officials watch to ensure nobody messes with the gaming equipment being used. Partipants submit to take after take as the director tries to nail each scene

Like most TV advertising done by the two casinos recently, the spots are a montage of various amenities, from gaming tables and slot machines to shops, restaurants and entertainment venues. Both of Connecticut's casinos spend about $25 million a year on television, radio and print advertising. The casinos would not divulge what percentage of their advertising budgets are devoted to multicultural advertising.

A recent Mohegan Sun spot for Asian markets features Richie Jen, a superstar singer/actor from Taiwan. Jen appears in the kitchen of a young couple who are having a mundane dinner and evening at home. Suddenly, they are at Mohegan Sun, Where Jen woos a crowd of adoring fans and people are enjoying themselves. The other spot commercial features a karaoke singer. The anyone-can-be-a-star entertainment is wildly popular among Asians, and Foxwoods also used karaoke in recent ads.

"It might seem hokey to us, but it's not about us," said Kramer, the casino's advertising director.