Think Multicultural

In its review of the AdAge Hispanic Fact Pack, eMarketer noted that “[t]argeting online ads at Hispanic Americans makes sense” and that in the future ads will be “dynamically generated in the user’s language of choice, based on his or her past online behavior.”

My first reaction was “Well duh. Wake up! That’s not the future, that’s now.” But then I realized that it was actually me who needs to wake up. Not everybody knows that the Hispanic market is an attractive market, and not everybody knows that Hispanics are online or what’s going on to target them.

I was having lunch the other day with a friend of mine and explaining to him what I do for a living. I had sent him a slide deck about the business a few days before, but as we spoke, it became clear that he did not see how we anticipated succeeding in these little niche markets. So I used the Hispanic market to explain that “these little niche markets” were actually quite large and growing quickly.

Working in online multicultural media every day, I know the value of the market and I hang out with and do business with people who work in the market and know its value as well.

The other day I read this on FH Hispania Plaza:

For example, do I really need to hear Hispanic demographic information at every event? I know there are more than 44 million Hispanics, I know the purchasing power of Latinos, and the estimated growth in the next few years. And trust me, everyone in that audience has also heard the same data and knows how important Latinos are for Corporate America.

Everyone in that audience may have known the data on multicultural markets and how important they are, but those of us who work in these markets can’t forget that the rest of the world doesn’t know these things. Just as with other businesses, those of us on the inside forget that we have specialized knowledge and that not everyone knows the value of our markets.

The word isn’t completely out to Corporate America that there are over 16 million Hispanics online or that African-Americans are creeping up on a trillion dollars in spending power. Sometimes it isn’t our products or our companies that need selling, it’s our markets.

It seems like there is at least a weekly report or article on the rapid growth of Internet ad spending. However, today a report by private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson took it a step further - claiming that by 2011 spending on Internet advertising will reach $62 billion and “become the nation’s leading ad medium.”

The leading ad medium in 4 years? That is a truly “a major shift in the media landscape” as the MediaPost article notes.

My immediate thoughts turned to multicultural advertising and what that market will look like in 2011? While history has shown that it lags behind the general market in adopting to changes in the media landscape, the reality is that if you buy half of what Veronis Suhler Stevenson’s report is projecting, multicultural marketing will be rapidly moving digital in the next 4-8 years. Considering where multicultural digital ad spend is today (does anyone really even track it? - Hispanic digital is in the $100-200 million range according to various small reports here and there), one has to believe that a things will be changing very quickly, and causing a lot of disruptions.

Should be an interesting ride…

The Equality Forum released a study that “suggests that gay and lesbian voters voted as a block in the recent mayoral primary election in Philadelphia and that gay and lesbian voters were markedly more likely to support their candidate than their neighbors.”

The study doesn’t try find the causes of the gay voting block, only notes the effect. I suppose two theories could be that either the gay community found one candidate more “gay friendly” than the others or simply that members of the gay community had similar political interests in mind that were more strongly supported by one candidate than the others. A third explanation might be that the study used “gay neighborhoods” as the source of their voting data, and the issues in the Philly mayor’s election may have had a particularly strong effect on those neighborhoods.

Regardless of the cause, the effect remains that the gay neighborhoods all voted very strongly for one candidate. Bear in mind this was a Democratic primary – this wasn’t a liberal Democrat against a conservative Republican. These were all Democrats.

This is an isolated study done with some very high level data, but it would probably do politicians and their strategic advisors some good to dig a little deeper to find the cause.

The study can be found here:

http://www.equalityforum.com/press/GLvoters-FinalReport.pdf