BC Dairy, Alberta Milk, and SaskMilk, not-for-profit provincial organizations representing dairy farmers, are celebrating Canada’s diverse multicultural community with a new Diwali campaign.

The 360-degree multicultural media and marketing plan illustrates how cultural culinary holiday food recipes can be made with local ingredients. Diwali, the South Asian Festival of Lights, takes place on November 12 and is recognized by roughly 2.5 million Canadians of South Asian descent.

The campaign is part of the Our Milk. Our Way. creative initiative developed by Toronto-based Ethnicity Matters, an agency specializing in reaching ethnically diverse Canadians. The media plan includes South Asian TV channels, online video on South Asian networks, YouTube and Meta. The plan was complemented by local South Asian programmatic display ads and direct buys with South Asian digital publishers.

Bobby Sahni, partner and co-founder of Ethnicity Matters, says it’s important for the dairy farmer organizations and other marketers to reach more diverse audiences because the face of Canada is changing. All Canadian corporations need to understand the implications for their businesses with this increasing ethnic and religious diversity,” he advises.

“In the case of dairy farmers, research found that over half of ethnic consumers are drinking dairy milk, white or flavoured, outside of main meal occasions: South Asian 67%, Chinese 53% and Filipino 66%. The new campaign is a year-round platform meant to engage ethnic consumers on milk consumption on their terms, their way. Research also shows that while dairy consumption is rising in immigrant source countries, it tends to dip amongst newly immigrated Canadians. This new strategy and creative platform is in response to this business challenge.”

The Diwali campaign started on October 30 and is running for approximately four weeks, but the platform will be used throughout the year with modifications and other versions to celebrate additional cultural days of significance. It is being monitored by Intensions, a research house that will track performance within the targeted groups in British Columbia and Alberta, including marketing recall, campaign positivity, dairy product sentiment, and farmer positive sentiment.

The targets of the Diwali campaign are newly immigrated, tenured and second-generation South Asian Canadians, a large majority of whom have positive opinions about the taste, health, and functional benefits of milk-based products, according to an ethnic benchmarking study conducted by Ethnicity Matters. The study revealed that multicultural Canadians have a “waving two flags” mindset, meaning that they happily celebrate both North American and traditional ethnic festivals and events. The Western dairy organizations want to help them do that by promoting the milk-based ingredients necessary to create the kinds of cultural foods prepared and consumed by Diwali celebrants.

Diwali festivities include traditional food and drinks, many of which use the products and ingredients that dairy farmers produce, including milk, cheese, and yogurt. The ad creative highlights these foods such as Chai, a tea style favoured by people throughout South Asia made by brewing black tea and spices in milk and water, and Dahi Bhalley/Vada, a savory yogurt-based snack enjoyed by North Indians. These foods and others like them appear in the video spots and presented to families in a family atmosphere that should feel familiar to the target audience. Simple messages appear in appropriate languages, including Punjabi and Hindi, alongside modern sounding melodies.

In addition to the Diwali marketing campaign, Ethnicity Matters will run a series of ethnic festival campaigns through 2024 designed to target Chinese and Filipino Canadians to help connect Western dairy farmers with other key cultural communities.