Think Multicultural

As a member of the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies, I have been tracking the controversy regarding Arbitron’s new Portable People Meter (PPM) tracking service for radio for the last few months. This whole PPM thing appears to be a real threat to Hispanic advertising.

While I have only casually been following the controversy, and arguably less affected by it’s ramifications (most of our media and creative work is digitally-focused), today’s decision by Arbitron to roll-out PPM early caught my attention.

Why? Well, in reading one of the articles on Arbitron’s point-of-view I noticed that Arbitron is claiming that the new PPM measurement system will show across-the-board reductions in radio listenership numbers (including mainstream, Urban, and Spanish-language stations). While I understand that the big issue is how much more PPM will affect Urban and Spanish-language stations and their ratings vs. their general market counterparts (and I have no clue what the answer to that question is), an ancillary result of this new system might be a boost to online advertising.

What with radio rating numbers going down across the board, and now a new system sharpening that decline, added to increasing Internet penetration and time spent figures, you would think that PPM’s rollout would accelerate ad budgets shifting to online (from radio in this case). We’ll see what happens.

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.