Think Multicultural

There is a new post today on the rarely updated and often interesting blog of Dr. Felipe Korzenny. It contains his positive trends for Hispanic marketing in 2009 and the future beyond that.

Several of the points fit well with Jose’s three part series (part 1, part 2, part 3) on the US Hispanic market.

My favorite is Number 9:

9. Increased used of technology, particularly the Internet… over indexing in several categories… and this goes for all emerging minorities— Hispanics are leading in the use of social media, and social media marketing is a great vehicle for incorporating Hispanic sensitive brands in the culture

You can read Dr. Korzenny’s post here.

Adding a new chapter to our anonymously sourced and cryptically written series on the Census 2010 Hispanic advertising campaign, it seems that there is some new controversy surrounding the award of the campaign to D’Exposito & Partners.

According to sources, the RFP that was issued for the Census Hispanic campaign was reserved for small disadvantaged businesses.* This requirement was apparently included so that DraftFCB could meet subcontracting requirements under its contract with the Census Bureau.

Apparently someone who did not win the Census Hispanic business has raised a couple of problems. The first is that D’Exposito had its SDB status expire before the award of the contract. The second is that D’Exposito does not meet the federally mandated size requirements to be a “small business” for the purposes of the RFP.

I don’t know the entirety of the facts behind either of these charges, or even whether the Census Hispanic RFP was supposed to be only for small disadvantaged businesses. Nonetheless, someone seems to think that all of it is true and isn’t happy about it.

If you know anything more about this or have better facts than me, drop me a line.

*I don’t know whether it was intended to be an 8(a) contract

It seems my sources and some of my conjecture were wrong. I received this today from Angelo Falcon, Coordinator of the Latino Census Network (not part of the Census Bureau). He received it from Kendall Johnson, acting head of the Census Bureau’s C2PO (Census 2010 Publicity Office).

“Global Hue Latino (GHL), is still under contract to DRAFTfcb and their removal is not under consideration. D’exposito and Partners are a small business that has been subcontracted to augment the work being done by GHL and to ensure additional reach and coverage into the Hispanic communities. The contract amount has not been decided as it is dependent upon the final division of duties between GHL and D’exposito and Partners.”

Thanks to Angelo and and Kendall, and apologies to the Census Bureau and GlobalHue Latino.

I guess the New York Times won’t be calling with job offers any time soon.