Think Multicultural

Another day, another conference in another city!

I just got back from the 12th Annual Hispanic Marketing Midwest Conference in St. Paul, Minnesota… yes, you read that correctly, Minnesota. This is the 12th installment of what I didn’t realize is the one of the largest Hispanic marketing conferences in the Midwest. In fact, I didn’t realize what a growing Hispanic market the Twin Cities is!

Aside from the unique nature of it’s location, the Hispanic Marketing Midwest Conference was solid in both content and attendance. I was invited to speak on Hispanic Search Engine Marketing, and had a chance to enjoy the entire day’s program.

The conference started out with a very interesting overview on the Hispanic market by Sonya Suarez-Hammond from Yankelovich Multicultural. Her presentation was very insightful and provided a nice start to the conference.

This was followed by a very visual presentation by Laritza Lopez of Real Latino Images, a Hispanic stock photography house, discussing the nuances of Hispanic creative messaging and imagery.

Cristina Benitez followed with an interesting look at how Hispanics are changing the mainstream, based on her book Latinization. Ursula Mejía-Melgar completed the morning with a very interested cross-platform case study on General Mill’s “Que Rica Vida” program.

Derene Allen from Santiago Solutions Group followed my Hispanic Search Engine Marketing presentation with a very interesting study on Latina Shopping Habits and a program they helped develop for Johnson & Johnson.

All in all, kudos to Rick Aguilar and his energetic team for putting on a great conference. With the heavy concentration of large corporations based in the Twin Cities, this conference had a strong corporate presence from committed multicultural marketers such as Target, General Mills, and U.S. Bank.

I just spoke at a very interesting conference in Chicago yesterday - the 5th Annual Multicultural Marketing for the Financial Services and Insurance Industries conference.

Although the conference was small in attendance (around 60 total attendees), most of the people there were heavy hitters from the largest financial services and healthcare companies in the U.S. In fact, I would estimate that 80% of the attendees were marketers from Fortune 1000 companies.

The conference had a very effective structure, with larger group-wide presentations on broader demographic trends affecting the financial services and insurance industries, followed by break-out roundtable discussions dealing with the Hispanic, African-American, and Asian markets individually. I moderated 3 very active and interesting roundtable discussions on the Hispanic Baby Boomer market.

One thing really stood out to me after Day 1 of the conference - Financial Services, and particularly Healthcare companies, are VERY interested in figuring out the multicultural markets.

I know that historically these industries have not invested heavily in reaching multicultural audiences. However, based on the attendance, questions, and general discussion at this unique conference, I would venture to say that this will be changing very rapidly.

I know this is late, but I wanted to provide some parting thoughts on the AHAA Semiannual Conference held in San Antonio 2 weeks ago. I’ve been attending all the AHAA conferences for the last 3 years and left with the following thoughts:

- The conference had very good attendance. However, an informal straw poll during one of the general sessions revealed that over 2/3 of the attendees were media folks (ad salespeople to be exact). Like any good party, you always want to make sure that you have a nice balance - and unfortunately AHAA was a bit of a stag party.

- There was little to no discussion of digital during any of the panel discussions. This was very disappointing, considering how much Hispanic digital is growing. I think it was indicative of Hispanic ad agencies general lack of digital adoption.

- There was a very interesting panel discussion the last day about the “One Stop Shop” model and whether it was a thing of the past. This panel got very heated - focusing on Alex Lopez Negrete’s big concern about the disintegration of Hispanic advertising as it relates to media planning and buying. I found it interesting to hear how worried he and other Hispanic ad agency principals were about losing the media business and how little they were concerned about losing the Hispanic digital business. I mention this because I am pretty sure most Hispanic ad agencies are unaware that General Market ad agencies are taking most of the Hispanic digital dollars out there. This is a disconcerting trend that will have huge ramifications for the future of Hispanic advertising - and most Hispanic agencies are unaware of this.