Think Multicultural

I had the opportunity to attend the IAB MIXX Conference and Awards ceremony on Monday and Tuesday of this week.

First off, I’m glad that OMMA and MIXX figured out a way to hold their annual New York conferences on different days. MIXX managed to finagle having theirs during the first two days of Advertising Week which was fantastically convenient.

As with last year’s conference, I found the sessions interesting and educational. Two that really stood out were Young-Bean Song from Atlas Institute / Microsoft Advertising who spoke about moving to “engagement mapping” as a superior approach over click-tracking for online media optimization and Geoff Ramsey from eMarketer and Jeffrey Cole from USC’s Annenberg Center for the Digital Future who gave some pretty bold predictions about Facebook’s inevitable fall and the coming age of mobile.

As someone who has been in the agency side of online media and marketing for 6 years, I continue to find conferences like MIXX useful to keep up with best practices and encourage us as marketers to continue to push the envelope.

The MIXX conference ended with the MIXX Awards, which were fantastic. If you haven’t seen the winners, you should. You can check out the award winners’ gallery here. The MIXX awards personified a concept I have been talking about a lot during the last few years – that digital advertising is a deep discipline. In fact, to prove this point, the MIXX awards showcased 4 finalist campaigns in 18 different digital advertising categories, from branding Web sites to super rich media to in-game advertising. I have to believe that online media and marketing will only continue to expand… and the MIXX awards might need to add another hour to their program in the coming years!

As part of a monthly column I pen for SearchEngineLand.com, I recently wrote a piece on some tactical recommendations for developing a Hispanic-focused Paid Search (aka PPC) campaign.

We’ve been implementing these types of Hispanic SEM campaigns at Sensis for our clients for many years now, and I can honestly say they have always been very cost-effective and successful. It’s really the “lowest hanging fruit” in the Hispanic online marketing world.

Check out the article here.

TM’s own Jose Villa has a post over on MediaPost’s Engage:Hispanics titled ‘Hispanic-fluentials’ Share About Products, Brands about using blogs to reach the Hispanic market.

Jose points out:

The growth of the Hispanic blogosphere represents two very important trends. First, the growth in the number of Hispanics writing blogs represents the emergence of a new group of Hispanic influencers with a very visible footprint. These are individuals who are going online and sharing their opinions with the world, or at least their friends, family and broader community. They are talking politics, fashion and business, among other topics.

A March 2008 Burson-Marsteller study revealed that the most influential Hispanic consumers, dubbed “Hispanic-fluentials,” use the Internet to share their views about products and brands as well as to connect with friends and family. Specifically, 49% of Hispanic-fluentials used blogs to tell others about product experiences.

The second trend hinges on the fact that Hispanics are reading what bloggers (both Hispanic and non-Hispanic) are writing. They are spending more and more time reading news, commentary and opinions written by individuals and not tied to the traditional once-per-day, five-days-a-week newspaper news cycle of the old media world. This represents a marked shift in media consumption.

There’s more to it, so go to MediaPost and check it out: here.