Special Report: AANHPI Representative Media Is A Win For Everyone and We Need More
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As far back as the silent film era, stars like Sessue Hayakawa and Anna May Wong represented the Asian community in American media, but, unfortunately, varied and proportional Asian representations was a struggle from the beginning. However, recent blockbusting series and films featuring Asian casts and crew demonstrate the great potential for Asian-centric media. Netflix’s Squid Game, for example, hit the No. 2 spot on Nielsen’s annual streaming unwrapped report for 2021. Likewise, in this past awards season, the film Everything Everywhere All At Once swept up 10 Academy Awards, including the first Best Actress award for an Asian woman.
Released this year as part of their Diverse Intelligence Series in collaboration with Gold House, Nielsen’s report entitled “Seen, heard, valued: Engaging Asian Americans through media,” uses data to look at the state of and potential growth for Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) representation in media. The report points out that, according to the U.S. Census, Asian Americans are the fastest growing population with an almost 130% growth in buying power in the last decade. Some media companies seem to be trying to tap into this growing base; for example, Netflix committed to spend $500 million on Korean content in 2021 and announced plans to release 34 Korean titles this year. However, the approximately 23,600 titles from nine Asia-Pacific countries that were available to audiences in 2021 and 2022 make up only 2.4% of the 976,000 unique video titles across linear and streaming channels as of January 2023. Thus, it logically follows that AANHPI viewers are 79% more likely than the general population to say they feel underrepresented in TV and film, the most of any ethnic group. While no direct correlation can be claimed, it is notable that Asian Americans spend less time with TV or TV connected devices than other ethnic groups or the general population.
Daily Time With TV (Q4 2022)
However, the fact that Asian American audiences spend less time with TV only means that brands must use what time they have to engage with that community wisely, because it is worth it. Last year, fashion, pet care, electronics, and travel brands allocated a significant portion of their advertising budget toward AANHPI inclusive and target content; these were the categories of products where Asian Americans outspent the general population.
Furthermore, AANHPI audiences are 46% more likely to buy from brands that advertise in inclusive content. A recent Nielsen custom Asian media consumption study found that over 62% of people who consume media in Chinese say they have a higher appreciation for brands that advertise in Asian media; 61.2% of the same group also said they pay more attention to ads in Asian media and 60.4% said they pay attention to ads that are in Chinese. In-language media presents a highly valuable method of connecting with AANHPI audiences. Nielsen conducted a survey on the importance of content in Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean — the three most prominent languages among Asian Americans — for Asian American audiences. The majority of survey respondents who took the survey in these languages, as opposed to English, reported that in-language media is the most trusted source of information. Of those who responded in Korean, 66.3% strongly agreed or agreed that being able to watch TV in their preferred language is very important, with 62% for Chinese, and 56.4% for Vietnamese. Furthermore, among those who took the survey in English, 43% said that in-language media helped them connect with their cultural roots. This means that not only representative media, but in-language media, is a strong way to connect with a range of audiences.
Streaming platforms are perhaps best tapping into these methods of engagement. Among the 462 most-watched titles on SVODs, the AANHPI community actually had a 10.3% share of screen (AANHPIs made up about 6.4% of the population in 2022). These numbers can be compared to the 4.1% and 3.3% AANHPI share of screen for broadcast and cable, respectively, in 2022. While broadcast and cable account for the most of the viewing among American audiences, Asian Americans instead spend 43% of their TV time streaming, 26.9% more time than the general population.
Where Asian Americans Spend Their TV Time
Data shows that inclusivity and representation impacts audience engagement, especially for Asian American audiences. In the Nielsen Attitudes on Representation Supplemental Study in 2022, 27% of AANHPI viewers said that content featuring geographical locations associated with their identity group(s) was more engaging, and 30% said that content featuring a cast member closely associated with their identity group(s) was more engaging (compared to 22% of the overall audience for both questions). It is also important that streaming platforms track the metadata of programs representative of the AANHPI community in order to maximize on high AANHPI engagement. Compared to 38% of the overall population, 47% of Asian American viewers consider recommendations from the platform when looking for representative programming. If streaming platforms have the data to create detailed, curated recommendations, they would have an opportunity to interact with Asian American audiences.
That being said, quality content that is representative of Asian Americans also attracts a wide variety of viewers. Nielsen’s latest Attitudes on Representation in TV study found that 87% of viewers are open to content featuring people outside their identity group. For example, Netflix’s 2022 reality dating show Love is Blind featured diverse participants and 50% Asian share of screen; it made it to the top 10 most-watched streaming program list for all American audiences. In fact, while AANHPI viewers put in 0.8 billion viewing minutes, that figure hits 1.9 billion viewing minutes for Black viewers, 2.3 billion for Hispanic viewers, and 8 billion for white viewers. Programs across traditional and streaming channels with high AANHPI share-of-screen scores also have high bingeability scores (as measured by Nielsen Gracenote, which provides a metric for how many episodes of a program viewers watch in a given day); a score of 3 or higher is considered highly bingeable. The Summer I Turned Pretty and Dollface respectively had 62.5% and 50% AANHPI share of screen and had scores of 6.2 and 5.2 for bingeability.
Bingeability of AANHPI Representative Programs
Furthermore, quality content inclusive of Asians draws in new viewers to platforms. Season 3 of Netflix’s Never Have I Ever (a coming-of-age drama about a first-generation Indian American teenager) attracted 1 million viewers who did not watch any content on Netflix the week before the episodes released and only about 10% of these viewers were Asian.
The data illustrates not only the attractiveness of AANHPI inclusive content for a wide range of audiences, but also the profitability of engaging with Asian American audiences through representative media. While recent wins of films such as Everything Everywhere All At Once and series like Never Have I Ever should be celebrated, they must also be used as examples of the potential and necessity for continuous growth in AANHPI representation.
