I’d like to wish all our friends, family, and readers a very Merry Christmas!
May the force be with you this Christmas!
We’ll be back to posting next week as we get ready for an exciting 2009!
Feliz Navidad,
Jose
If you haven’t seen it, BusinessWeek published a piece on the growth and opportunity in multicultural online marketing.
While the article quotes some new data from eMarketer (based on some not-so-new data from sources like Pew and the ANA), it’s a nice affirmation of the growing importance of digital advertising in the multicultural markets.
There are a couple of examples cited, including an effort by Microsoft targeting Hispanics, a push by Toyota to connect with Asians online, and Absolut creating programs for the Gay and Lesbian market online.
They did quote some interesting Hispanic online penetration numbers, specifically a 79% Internet penetration rate from Pew Internet. I think this one might be a little off, as it probably doesn’t count Spanish-speakers.
In another sign that the economic downturn is concentrated in particular sectors of the economy, the unemployment rate among Hispanics declined last month.
Contacto magazine reports that according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, while nonfarm payroll employment fell sharply (-533,000) in November, and the unemployment rate rose from 6.5 to 6.7 percent in the overall economy, among Hispanics, the unemployment rate declined from 8.8% in October to 8.6% in November.
While this is interesting news in light of the overall economic backdrop, it is particularly noteworthy considering that there has been a prevailing notion that the Hispanic job market has been particularly hard hit by the severe downturn in the housing market and the dependent construction market.
It’s always dangerous to extrapolate too much meaning from one month’s data, especially for a segment of the economy that is notoriously hard to accurately track (due to undocumented immigrants).
Yet this data, however flawed and limited, does point to the resiliency of the Hispanic market. As I’ve argued before, I think this downturn has spurred a dispersion of Hispanics from traditional Hispanic population centers in the southwest to other parts of the country such as the south, southeast, and Midwest. And as Juan Tornoe adeptly noted in a post on Anderson Cooper’s 360 blog on CNN, Hispanics are well prepared for economic downturns, understand how to weather them, and are generally optimistic about their economic futures.