Televisa

Though it was just a small news item in a recent issue of The Hollywood Reporter, the news of Televisa’s first quarter earnings report was certainly significant to those who watch the Latino media landscape. Televisa, the Mexican media giant, reported first quarter net profit in 2012 of 1.5 billion pesos, up from 780 million pesos a year ago (the first figure is about $118 million). Net sales rose 15% to 15.2 billion pesos, driven mostly by solid ad sales from TV, given that it controls an estimated 70% of the broadcast TV market in Mexico. Televisa also saw an increase in the subscriber base at Sky and its three cable TV operations.

In January, Televisa announced a programming and development partnership with Lionsgate, including plans for English-language content. Televisa’s Spanish-language content is also broadcast in the U.S. through a program license agreement with Univision. Watch virtually any telenovela on the station, and chances are it was produced by Televisa. It will be interesting to see how the company continues to expand its reach in the U.S. Hispanic market in the future.

Map

While it’s not the only factor, there is no doubt that being able to speak a local language is a key to doing business in any given country.  And while certain languages are common in large groups of countries (English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic and others) there are some that may be limited in the number of countries spoken, but have a very important reach in terms of population numbers and of course, where a company may intend to do business.

According to a recent CNBC article “Language Barriers and Miscommunications are Stifling Growth“, almost half of executives surveyed admitted that communication misunderstandings have stood in the way of major international business deals and therefore resulted in significant losses for their companies.  Additionally, 9 out of 10 expect their number of international clients to increase over the next three years, highlighting the need companies have for language competency, as well as areas that future job seekers should consider.

As a U.S. company that deals with the Hispanic market within the U.S. as well as Latin America, we have worked to put together a multilingual team.  The benefits of this have been evident from evaluating clients’ marketing efforts to doing business in Latin America. I have come to the conclusion that not only is language and cultural understanding important for the employer, but is also a considerable plus for job seekers in their evaluation of a company.

As the article states, language competency does require focus on the part of companies, and while not easy to achieve, it is imperative that companies looking to do business internationally create an environment that fosters both linguistic and cultural understanding.

Latinos and Mobile Apps

I was aware that Hispanics are a tremendous buying power in the US, but what I wasn’t aware of was that a huge chunk of their dollars was going to mobile.  A previous article in Reach Hispanic states that Hispanics will spend around $17.6 Billion in 2012, a 30% increase over the previous year. That is a big number, but I was also interested in a new article I found in eMarketer which talks specifically about Hispanics’ spending in mobile applications.

The article says that Hispanics will spend $500 million in mobile apps alone, and apparently one of the reasons is because Hispanics are early adopters of technology and are also more likely than whites to go online using mobile devices.  According to December 2011 research by advisory firm Zpryme, smartphone penetration was 51.5% among the survey group, which was comprised almost entirely of mobile owners from which only 6.1% said they didn’t have a mobile phone.

According to eMarketer, the high adoption rates for smartphones among Hispanics are likely due to the fact that they are on average a young group, and more likely to use mobile devices instead of landlines.

Add Your Mom on FaceBook

The Central Lechera Asturiana has presented a campaign that asks young people if they would accept or reject a friend request from their mothers on the popular social network.

Mother’s Day is always an excuse to create a myriad of marketing campaigns, however, few have been so original as the campaign by the Central Lechera Asturiana “Add your Mom on FaceBook.”

And the idea has not disappeared- everything started with a video on YouTube. In it, a young man named Álvaro Garrido receives a friend request from his mother, who wants to add him to her FaceBook.

During the short, Álvaro tries to explain to his mother that he is not going to add her because his friends will taunt him, however, he won’t do it in the usual way. He will carry it out with an original and catchy song that will make him a summer “hit.”

On the other hand, the video also gives us his mother’s opinion. Bernice (LeidiMama on Facebook) tries to make Álvaro add him on the social network, promising that she will not put up pictures from his childhood nor fuss over him on the net.

Help Álvaro decide if he should add his mother on FaceBook.

This curious stop directs users to a web page on which, by means of Twitter and Facebook, Álvaro asks the help of internet users in order to make the decision to accept his mother ‘s friend request.

The question is “What would you do? Would you add your mother on FaceBook?”

Glenn Llopis

Glenn Llopis, who writes “The immigrant perspective on leadership & workplace innovation” for Forbes Magazine, recently penned an opinion piece entitled “Earn the Trust of Hispanic Consumers and Your Brand Will Dominate“.  Frankly, I am a bit leery of articles that start sentences with “Hispanics believe…” (as this article does), but Llopis’ punchline is quite good.

To begin with, he notes that this moment is essentially a “time-sensitive opportunity for America’s corporations” to create a relationship with US Hispanics. He cautions companies not to believe that they will steamroll Hispanics because of how their brands have been accepted in the mainstream market. This he refers to as the ‘old way’ to do things, and he warns that this approach “hurts your brand and is a waste of time and money.” Llopis points out that Hispanics are fighting to hold on to their cultural identity in the US, and that steamrolling their voice only adds to the stress of the fight. Instead, he suggests that companies:

1. respect and empower Hispanic voices – even if only with respect to how they view/use the company’s brand.

2. help create opportunities for community advancement, “to earn our trust and vote of confidence.”

Good suggestions, I think, and again point out the need to use intelligent, dialed-in interlocutors (for me this means Hispanic agencies with deep experience, or Hispanics with deep experience at GM agencies) to help brands create a conversation with US Hispanics, and develop meaningful opportunities to help the community define itself.

]]> http://www.reachhispanic.com/2012/05/14/latinos-and-identity-why-labels-dont-fit/feed/ 0 http://www.reachhispanic.com/2012/05/14/the-value-of-a-banner-ad-impression/ http://www.reachhispanic.com/2012/05/14/the-value-of-a-banner-ad-impression/#comments Mon, 14 May 2012 18:14:45 +0000 El Cuco http://www.reachhispanic.com/?p=8910

Banner Ads

Last month comScore announced the release of a new online advertising study conducted by the digital measurement company in conjunction with Pretarget, a leading digital ad targeting company. According to the two companies, the study’s results indicate that ad ‘viewability’ and hover time correlate at a much higher rate with conversion (defined as purchases and requests for information) than total impressions or even clicks, the standard metric for many ad campaigns, do.

The research counted with 263 million ad impressions across 18 advertisers from various industries over the span of 18 months. It also made use of cookie-based conversion data and comScore’s very own ‘validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) service to account for display ads that were not just served, but viewed or hovered over. The analysis also took into account the placement of said ad impressions, adjusting for below-the-fold placements when the viewer did not scroll down and presumably, did not view the ad.

Let’s get down to numbers. The report found that at 0.49 and 0.35 correlation factors respectively, hover/interaction and viewable impressions had the highest correlation with conversion. Meanwhile, impressions and clicks came in at 0.17 and 0.01 respectively.

Think about that for a second. The all mighty click’s correlation with conversion is almost 1/50th of a hover/interaction and 1/35th that of a viewable impression. If that’s not an argument for changing how we measure conversion-focused display campaigns, I don’t know what is (the study did not seem to focus on branding goals and metrics).

I don’t expect the market to change its ways overnight by abandoning CTR. However, one thing is clear to me: as the industry continues to mature and evolve, newer and better metrics will evolve. Becoming an industry standard… Well, that takes time.

African-Americans and the Internet

In a recent investigation in the March 2012 edition of the online magazine Information, Communication and Society, it is suggested that African-Americans that are connected to the internet are more prone to blogging than their White or Hispanic counterparts. If the digital divide persists, some areas of the internet and the social media are racially more diverse than what had been expected. The author of the study was Jen Schradie, was a doctoral student.

Schradie analyzed the data of more than 40,000 surveyed Americans between 2002 and 2008 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project which tracks down the use of the internet and the tendencies of social media communication. The findings complement a study done in 2011 in which a “digital gap”  among producers of online content based on education and socioeconomic status.

According to Schradie, “while African-Americans are more likely to blog than White Americans, it does not mean that the digital gap has ended. The people with the most access and education keep being the most prone to blogging than those who only have a secondary education and internet.”

For African-Americans, the amount of blogs keep rising at 17%, in comparison to 9% of whites. During that period, free online blog platforms such as Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr became widely available.

Aside from having the longest blogs, these have been eclipsed in the past few years by micro-blogging tools like Twitter and Facebook, which keep existing in the digital panorama and which grow at a constant rate.

The study did not analyze why African Americans can blog at a higher proportion than white and hispanic bloggers -a subject that Schradie says deserves more analysis. However, she notes that: “Perhaps African-Americans, because they have been marginalized from the main means of communication, now have a participation platform and are more likely to blog.”

In accordance with the spokespeople of community and political organizations such as ColorOfChange, the means of social communication are a natural extension of the traditional “mouth to mouth” communication that is used in African-American communities.

“Ultimately, the study shows that class inequality is the perpetuation of the digital gap in social media,” said Schradie. “Race matters, but not in the way that we think.”

Source: University of California Berkley

Farma

I am currently at the AHAA conference in Miami FL.   AHAA is a great organization and “represents the best minds and resources dedicated to Hispanic-specialized marketing. Over the last two decades, AHAA has been a long-standing champion for corporate investment in Hispanic marketing and, since its inception in 1996, has increased Hispanic budget allocations by 12-fold.”

On top of bringing some of the smartest people in the industry together, this year AHAA brought in some great advertisers (Clorox and Eli Lilly) to talk about how their Hispanic ad agencies can be better partners, and some of the things they are doing to reach out to this vital market segment.

I was encouraged to hear that Eli Lilly, one of the largest pharma companies in the world, is taking big steps toward reaching out to Hispanics with diabetes.  Eli Lilly has been engaged in in-depth market research to be able to communicate to the Hispanic market about diabetes in a culturally relevant way.  Steven Rommeney acknowledged that pharma as an industry is slow-moving and often the “last one to the dance”.  There are difficult problems to be dealt with as well as rigorous regulations.  He recognizes that this community is effected by diabetes more so than its general market counterpart, and needs information and services.  I am excited to see how this plays out in the next 6 months to a year.

Wells Fargo

A recent article on Portada featured an interview with Mariela Ure, SVP of Hispanic Segment Strategy at Wells Fargo. Ms. Ure discussed how Wells Fargo is reaching out to Hispanics with four important products/services: Mortgages, Credit Cards, Small Business Lending and Remittances.

Ms. Ure notes that credit cards can be key to building a solid credit history, whereas mortgages are the logical extension of that credit-building process. With respect to Small Business Lending, Ms. Ure points out that Wells Fargo has lent over $5.6 billion to Latino-owned businesses since 1997, and has created a unique bilingual educational program –  Hands On Banking – for small businesses, which provides valuable information on how to start, manage and grow a small business. Finally, Wells Fargo’s Express Send services helps with remittances, especially to Central and South America.