Here I am in Chicago for the AHAA conference. What is it with me and marketing conferences? I am told that last weekend Chicago was 70 and sunny, and now it’s 45 and raining. At least it’s not snowing like it was in Austin.
This is the 22nd Semi Annual AHAA conference. What does that mean? Have there been 11 years of conferences or 22 or how many? Either way, that’s some shady accounting.
MySpace has launched two new sites aimed at the Hispanic audience: latino.myspace.com, a site aimed at Spanish speaker in the US, and la.myspace.com, which is aimed at Spanish speakers in Latin America.
This move by such an online giant provides great validation of the importance of Spanish speakers online. Just the metrics that they will release (e.g. “10 million people registered at latino.myspace.com!”) will continue to show advertisers and marketers that there are Latinos online that they need to reach.
On the other hand, it has to make other Spanish language social networking sites nervous. hi5.com has had a Spanish speaking section for a while, and other sites such as LatinosConnected, ElHood, VivaMiGente and the like also have to be a little nervous at the entry into their market of the 500-pound gorilla of social networking.
It will be interesting to see the effect of this move on advertising in the Hispanic online market.
Google buying Doubleclick is interesting because of everything that’s been written and said about how Google’s display advertising offerings were lacking and that nobody wanted to use Google’s ad hosting. Now almost everyone uses Google’s ad hosting whether they like it or not.
Google really seems determined to own all the advertising in the world. At some point there is likely to be a very real backlash from advertisers and ad firms, but at that point will Google have disintermediated the ad firms out of the business? It’s unlikely, but agencies have to be thinking about it.