Think Multicultural

***THIS IS A RESPONSE FROM HMW TO OUR RECENT POST It’s 2008 and we’re still talking about building branded Web sites?***

Thank you very much for your comments on the Special Report I researched, reported on and authored for Hispanic Market Weekly. I invite other industry leaders, movers and shakers to read the piece for themselves.

While I’m pleased to say that we are moving in the right direction in terms of our digital and internet coverage, I was saddened to read that you were “more than a little disappointed with the report.” I was even more disappointed that your note about our special report was not send via e-mail to our editorial team but was posted in a public Blog. The link was dutifully sent to my email address by an astute reader.

The truth of the matter is large brands embracing the internet by creating their own websites is still underreported by the mainstream media and, with all due respect to my editorial team, was the *first* time Hispanic Market Weekly devoted an entire report to the subject. Previous years’ internet special reports offered the same-old, same-old with respect to portals. So again, I think we are certainly moving in the right direction with our editorial coverage of Hispanic media initiatives.

Frankly, I see no other trade publication devoted to the Hispanic market (subtracting, of course, those that post press releases or simply offer links to other news organizations’ work) that has covered Hispanic internet development in a similarly detailed way.

“Is building a branded Web site considered news in 2008?” You ask.

Well, to any company that simply translates their site into Spanish without doing any research into making it relevant to Hispanics, I’d argue the answer is YES.

While you say our report is vanilla, I can tell you that there are still many, many categories that are behind the curve when it comes to online activity. Only some are catching up right now. And to call the piece “a disservice” is something I can’t quite understand - wouldn’t this send the message to a CMO at a company considering a jump into internet branding and advertising that maybe such an initiative makes sense?

Aside from the consumer-focused website and microsite, there are indeed initiatives with respect to social media, e-mail marketing, search engine marketing, and mobile. But that wasn’t the focus of this report. And with MySpace Español still ramping up, the traditional English-language MySpace a bit overambitious with its advertising goals and real results and such things as e-mail marketing and search engine marketing still on the periphery of our industry, the discussion will be there in the months and years to come.

In the case of this special report, we simply couldn’t devote focus on the subject we decided was indeed relevant … and not “inane.”

“Inane” is the small piece of the advertising pie that goes to Hispanic media and, of that, how many of the ad dollars go to the four Spanish-language broadcast networks. “Inane” is the fact that Hispanic internet gets a percentage of a percentage of ad dollars as it is.

So perhaps telling the CMOs, media buyers and ad planners to invest more money by starting big and going from there still is a relevant conversation.

It’s as simple as thinking multicultural.

Adam Jacobson
Associate CMO Editor
Hispanic Market Weekly

For those of you that do a lot of online advertising, you know how effective A-B testing can be.

Online Creative A/B testing is based on the classic model of testing against a control. For example, one basic element in a banner ad creative is changed to enable an apples-to-apples test. Alternate versions of the same creative with that one element changed are produced and tested to determine which performs best under normal circumstances. The most effective creative then becomes the control to insert back into the cycle.

While it is common to do A/B testing for refining online creative, I don’t think a lot of agencies or advertisers are using this methodology for testing overall campaign creative before going offline into more expensive media.

Online media, particularly SEM (Paid Search) and CPM display advertising, is very inexpensive. What better way to test creative before going out to more expensive traditional media such as TV, radio or OOH? You can test copy, art/visuals, and overall concepts without burning through a lot of media budget.

I just finshed reading Hispanic Market Weekly’s lead story on Internet marketing in the U.S. Hispanic market titled “An Online Connection.”

While I am thrilled that leading industry publications like HMW are writing more and more about the Internet and digital advertising to the U.S. Hispanic market, I was more than a little disappointed with the report.

The entire article focused on how many large brands are embracing building Hispanic-focused branded Web sites. This is great… but my goodness, is building a branded Web site considered news in 2008? As a person who works primarily in digital advertising, I find such vanilla pieces a disservice to our broad and deep industry. With the breadth of disciplines and vehicles - such as social media, email marketing, search engine marketing, and mobile to name a few - currently being utilized by brands in both the general and Hispanic markets, why are we still talking about microsites?

Come on - let’s elevate the conversation. Let’s find some brands and agencies that are pushing the new media envelope. They are out there.

Once we do that, we’ll help move our industry forward, as opposed to holding it back with circa-2000 discussions of inane online tactics.