In its review of the AdAge Hispanic Fact Pack, eMarketer noted that “[t]argeting online ads at Hispanic Americans makes sense” and that in the future ads will be “dynamically generated in the user’s language of choice, based on his or her past online behavior.”

My first reaction was “Well duh. Wake up! That’s not the future, that’s now.” But then I realized that it was actually me who needs to wake up. Not everybody knows that the Hispanic market is an attractive market, and not everybody knows that Hispanics are online or what’s going on to target them.

I was having lunch the other day with a friend of mine and explaining to him what I do for a living. I had sent him a slide deck about the business a few days before, but as we spoke, it became clear that he did not see how we anticipated succeeding in these little niche markets. So I used the Hispanic market to explain that “these little niche markets” were actually quite large and growing quickly.

Working in online multicultural media every day, I know the value of the market and I hang out with and do business with people who work in the market and know its value as well.

The other day I read this on FH Hispania Plaza:

For example, do I really need to hear Hispanic demographic information at every event? I know there are more than 44 million Hispanics, I know the purchasing power of Latinos, and the estimated growth in the next few years. And trust me, everyone in that audience has also heard the same data and knows how important Latinos are for Corporate America.

Everyone in that audience may have known the data on multicultural markets and how important they are, but those of us who work in these markets can’t forget that the rest of the world doesn’t know these things. Just as with other businesses, those of us on the inside forget that we have specialized knowledge and that not everyone knows the value of our markets.

The word isn’t completely out to Corporate America that there are over 16 million Hispanics online or that African-Americans are creeping up on a trillion dollars in spending power. Sometimes it isn’t our products or our companies that need selling, it’s our markets.

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