Think Multicultural

I got an email recently from AT&T asking if I knew all of the cool things that they do in the Hispanic market. I knew that they do Hispanic marketing because they run ads on the Admixture Hispanic channel, but I didn’t know much else, really. So they sent me a fact sheet.

According to the fact sheet:

AT&T has a lot of Hispanic employees, as well as lots of employees from other diverse ethnicities. They’ve been recognized as a top employer for minorities by the likes of DiversityInc, Hispanic Business Magazine, Fortune, and Latina Style Magazine. That seems pretty good.

AT&T actively pursues supplier diversity, including spending over $5 billion on procurement from diverse suppliers. That’s a lot of money.

AT&T gives money to Hispanic and other diversity initiatives. A whole lot of money. That also seems like a good thing.

Finally, AT&T actively pursues Spanish-speaking consumers by producing information including websites and brochures in Spanish. Right on.

So that does in fact seem like a lot of Hispanic outreach.

However – I suspect that AT&T has more than one motivation. On the one hand, they probably do want to be a good corporate citizen. In a climate where there are strong anti-immigrant voices, AT&T is reaching out to Hispanics as a welcome part of their corporate ecosystem, from suppliers to employees to customers. On the other hand, reaching out to Hispanics makes good business sense. AT&T is based in San Antonio, so it would be impossible for them not to see the changing face of America’s demographics. Hispanics are a large (almost $1 trillion) part of the US consumer base and the fastest growing part too.

For AT&T to sit there in San Antonio watching the new America develop before their eyes and not evolve with it would be terrible strategic thinking on their part.

So kudos to AT&T, not only for being a good corporate citizen, but for being smart enough to see which way the wind blows.

A report released yesterday from The Nielsen Company announced the findings of a study on Hispanic consumer shopping behavior. We haven’t seen the entire report yet, but here are some of the highlights:

- As Hispanics become more acculturated, they become less brand loyal.
- Hispanics prefer to shop at stores that resonate with the sights, sounds, smells and sensibilities of their homeland (assumedly this is for first generation Hispanics, as later generations would consider Wal-Mart their homeland just like all other Americans).
- Hispanics tend to shop in families.
- Hispanics spend a lot of time and money staying connected (this is consistent with the Yahoo! Telemundo report).

We’ll take a look at the report and send along any more interesting parts.

While I understand that research regarding Hispanics online is a bit of an overworked topic, I still don’t feel like there’s consensus out there or at least I am not aware of it. As an active professional in Hispanic online advertising I feel that there isn’t a single product that really tells us the truth of what’s going on with Hispanics online (or at least a version that feels right).

For this discussion I particularly want to focus on ComsCore’s General and Hispanic market panels. I find some publisher’s tend to be in favor of one or the other, yet it seems to be the topic nobody really talks about. I’ve come to the conclusion that if I’m looking purely at Hispanic Web sites (e.g. Univision), the general market panel is better. Does anyone disagree? There are plenty of arguments out there against the Hispanic panel, does anyone differ from that?

If we want to go even deeper, then there’s the topic of audience composition. Here we find ComsCore, Nielsen and Hitwise each telling their own story. Once again, who’s right? I would like to take the opportunity to invite experts in Hispanic online media to share their point of view.