Think Multicultural

Those of you who follow the Hispanic advertising trades have probably already read about Zubi Advertising’s $80 million multi-platform, multi-client media buy on Univision.com.

I think this is a fantastic example of what a lot of forward-thinking professionals in Hispanic advertising have been pushing for many years - truly integrated marketing programs to reach the Hispanic consumer. For too many years, and at too many agencies, Hispanic media strategies have been staid and flat - 360 advertising all too often has meant doing a TV buy coupled with radio and maybe some out-of-home.

Kudos to Zubi and their media team for developing an integrated media buy (albeit only one network/publisher) that includes both traditional (TV, radio) and new media such as online and mobile. I imagine the cost savings they are generating for their clients (such as Ford and American Airlines) will be significant. Hopefully they will continue to pursue additional integrated buys across other media properties.

These types of deals show that the future of Hispanic advertising is bright for agencies and clients willing to push the envelope and the accepted best practices. I hope everyone is taking notes.

I just finshed reading Hispanic Market Weekly’s lead story on Internet marketing in the U.S. Hispanic market titled “An Online Connection.”

While I am thrilled that leading industry publications like HMW are writing more and more about the Internet and digital advertising to the U.S. Hispanic market, I was more than a little disappointed with the report.

The entire article focused on how many large brands are embracing building Hispanic-focused branded Web sites. This is great… but my goodness, is building a branded Web site considered news in 2008? As a person who works primarily in digital advertising, I find such vanilla pieces a disservice to our broad and deep industry. With the breadth of disciplines and vehicles - such as social media, email marketing, search engine marketing, and mobile to name a few - currently being utilized by brands in both the general and Hispanic markets, why are we still talking about microsites?

Come on - let’s elevate the conversation. Let’s find some brands and agencies that are pushing the new media envelope. They are out there.

Once we do that, we’ll help move our industry forward, as opposed to holding it back with circa-2000 discussions of inane online tactics.

I just left Miami Beach and the 2nd annual ad:tech Miami conference. Per Danny’s earlier post, there was a noticeable drop in attendance from last year (I didn’t attend, but I also heard the same comments from past attendees). However, I was found most of the panel discussions insightful and interesting - particularly the ones pertaining to Latin America.

There was one topic that was discussed in a few panels and kept coming up in my conversations at the various networking breaks and parties - what will the ad agency of the future look like?

This is a question that I think about all the time - I guess you could call it the “thing that keeps me up at night” (although my 16 month old daughter Maya holds that title most nights). I run a multicultural interactive agency - a niche within a niche. There were panelists at ad:tech from a handful of Hispanic-focused interactive agencies… another niche within a niche. One of the principals at one of these Hispanic interactive agencies made the case that interactive will be integrated within traditional ad agency capabilities in the future.

I had a similar conversation with the CEO of a large general market interactive agency who asked me “do we have to expand into traditional in the future?”

Someone even brought up the question of whether multicultural advertising will inevitably have to be integrated into general advertising as the U.S. population becomes more and more diverse (we already see this happening in places like Los Angeles where “minority majorities” are causing clients to hire multicultural ad agencies as their lead agencies).

This is a big question that I making some bets on. I am very curious what some of you out there think? Here are some interesting thought starters?

1. Will there room for specialists interactive agencies like Hispanic interactive agencies?
2. Will traditional agencies need to have specialty digital capabilties like SEO and mobile?
3. Will traditional agencies continue buying interactive shops or will the opposite start to happen?