Think Multicultural

The Marketing y Medios section of Ad Week this week had an article about how many large brands are moving their media buying duties from Hispanic ad agencies to big general market agencies. Heinekin is moving its media from Vidal to MediaVest, Wal-Mart moved its media from Lopez Negrete to MediaVest, and all of the Bravo Group’s media got moved to Mediaedge:cia (through MEC Bravo).

Advertisers are doing this, in the words of the article, to “de-silo” media planning and media buying. (Wow, unbelievable modification of an already bad cliché). Apparently the idea is to incorporate the Hispanic media in with the general market media in order to “realize efficiencies” and “increase leverage” (More clichés! Sweet!)

So in translation from cliché-speak – the brands are going to get cheaper Hispanic media because the big general market media shops can wield all that general market and Hispanic (”de-siloed”) money together like a stick to beat down the media companies (”increased leverage”) to get lower prices (”efficiencies”).

Some of this savings will be passed on to the advertisers, and some of it will be retained by the media buying agencies. Everybody wins except the media companies and the Hispanic agencies. Actually, the big media companies win too. They will be able cross-sell their general market and Hispanic content to the big media buying agencies in greater quantity but at a lower price, thus realizing the “efficiencies.”

So Heinekin and Wal-Mart figure it’s more worth it to get lower overall prices on buying huge quantities of media than it is to get a Hispanic agency to buy the Hispanic media, ostensibly with greater knowledge of the Hispanic market. And maybe it is. When you buy that much media, you can afford to throw a bunch of stuff up on the wall and see what sticks.

The Hispanic agencies aren’t out of luck though. For example, in online there will still be advertisers who can’t afford to (or just don’t want to) buy all of their media from MSN.com and Yahoo!, but rather need to pick their spots and hit their targets with a carefully crafted campaign. The Hispanic shops who are able to do that will be the ones who survive and thrive. Hispanic agencies are going to have to be true experts in their field and know Hispanic media inside and out in order to deliver meaningful and quantifiable results for the clients looking to reach the Hispanic market.

The general market agencies have arrived in the Hispanic advertising market. The barbarians are at the gate. Hispanic agencies cannot continue to rely on language as a barrier to the general market media buying shops, but are going to have to prove their value through expertise.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 6:41 pm and is filed under multicultural, advertising, marketing, hispanic, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.