It’s fair to say language preference is probably the most commonly used of these macro segmentation models considering most Hispanic marketing is focused on individuals who speak Spanish. Language has separated Hispanics – a population that would otherwise not be reached in English using English media – and created the scale that made the population so appealing to companies, politicians, and anyone else looking to “tap” into the growing market. It is a disparate group of immigrants from 21 different countries.

From a marketer’s perspective, language is big, serving as the clear and understandable “firewall” between so-called “general market” advertising programs reaching general consumers and niche/targeted “Hispanic” programs designed specifically to resonate with them. Language has driven how most marketers have crafted their marketing messages to the Hispanic market, typically in Spanish.

As with any segmentation model, a core assumption of this language macro segmentation model is most Hispanics fit into one of the following three “language” subgroups:
• Spanish-dominant – prefer to speak Spanish and consume almost exclusively Spanish media. They speak, read and write Spanish well.
• English-dominant – prefer to speak English and consumer English-language media. They speak, read, and write English well.
• Bilingual – go back and forth between English and Spanish easily and naturally and consume English and Spanish language media interchangeably. They speak, read and write English and Spanish well.

I’ve always considered this model to be an accurate representation of an otherwise complex world of U.S. Hispanics – not perfect, but a sound, basic framework to use in any critical analysis of how to approach the market. That is, until recently, when I began working with a new client. A client in the education industry.

As we’ve been digging into the data on their target Hispanic audience, we’ve all been essentially forced to call into question this basic, simple language segmentation model. Specifically, we see growing evidence of the existence of a potentially large segment of Hispanics who don’t fit into any of aforementioned three language groups.

A group of Hispanics without proficient command of English or Spanish. A predominantly younger group – ages 18-44 – born to first generation immigrants mostly from Mexico and Central America. Some are foreign-born and moved to the U.S. as children. Others, however, were born in the U.S., and raised in all Spanish households and neighborhoods, rendering their U.S. upbringing functionally identical to their foreign-born counterparts. They are not second generation but are not first generation in the traditional sense. They are a group functionally, culturally and linguistically in the middle.

A quick academic literature review uncovers that this group of Hispanics has been a topic of debate in the higher education community for five years. We can’t take credit for having discovered this missing “language” segment. There has been a fair amount of scholarly research done on this transition group by the educational community – commonly dubbed “Generation 1.5”

As defined by Oudenhoven (2006), “Generation 1.5 students are immigrant students who move to the United States at the age of 12 or older and enroll in middle school or high school in this country.” Their Generation 1.5 label comes from their special place as first-generation Americans who migrated to the U.S. as children, and have a strong cultural identification as Americans, but were born in another country. Educators, particularly within community colleges, have struggled to address the unique needs of this growing population. Four year colleges are beginning to face this challenge.

While most of the focus of research and analysis on this group has been related to education, the impact of the existence and growth of the “middle” generation of younger Hispanics is profound for marketers. This group’s existence, potentially on a large scale, creates all kinds of problems for the common associations made with the 3-part language segmentation model, including media preference, message impact and absorption. Do you buy Spanish media to reach them or English, or a combination? What language do you message them in? If in Spanish, what level of proficiency and vocabulary do you assume? In a world increasingly driven by search engines and keywords, how these consumers use type in search phrases can be complex. What taxonomy is appropriate on digital platforms like Websites, mobile devices and social apps?

Most important, the existence of a Hispanic Generation 1.5 points to an unmet need by a large segment of U.S. Hispanics – possibly tens of millions of them. This unmet need is manifesting itself in our education system, which is quickly trying to adjust to meet their needs. However, this group will likely have unique needs throughout our commercial economy – financial services, healthcare, and media – just to name a few. And as marketing becomes more about utility and providing value and less about blasting a one-way, self-serving messages, there is potentially a huge opportunity for marketers who provide real value to Generation 1.5.

(an edited version of this article originally ran on MediaPost’s Engage Hispanic blog on February 2, 2012)

I know everybody and their mother is putting out their analysis of the U.S. Census figures these days, particularly as they relate to the Hispanic population. However this article is definitely worth your time, as it tackles some pretty big issues and implications, both in the near-term and in the future (a few generations out).

In full disclosure, I was interviewed for the article (my take on the implications for business and marketing is included) and Wharton is my alma mater.

In many ways, the 2000 Census ushered in an unprecedented golden age of Hispanic advertising and media that we’re still enjoying in 2009 (in light of the difficult economy).

As we prepare for the Census count next year, I keep thinking that the results, which should begin to trickle out in early 2011 (less than 18 months from now), will be a Catch-22 for our industry.

One of two things will happen – either the 2010 Hispanic population numbers will exceed or fall short of expectations. In some ways, both spell trouble for Hispanic advertising.

Obviously, if the Hispanic population numbers fall short of expectations, there will be inevitable talk that the Hispanic market has peaked and that recessionary economic pressures and impending immigration policy changes will mark the end of the “golden years” of Hispanic population growth. This is the kind of worst case scenario that is very similar to the disastrous effect of higher than “expected” inflation (sorry, I digress to my macroeconomics background). This will inevitably lead to marketers reassessing their Hispanic advertising budgets and potentially flat lining them or worse.

If the Hispanic population numbers exceed expectations, the common theory goes that it will serve as further fuel for the fast burning fire that has been growth in Hispanic advertising and media. While no doubt a boost for the Hispanic media business (broadcast, radio, Internet, mobile, print), I question if it is not a mixed blessing for Hispanic advertising agencies.

If the Hispanic population numbers do exceed expectations, what do you think general market agencies will do? I can’t imagine they will sit idly and watch their budgets get reallocated to their Hispanic counterparts. That is not what they’ve done the last 5-10 years. I have to believe big Hispanic population Census results will only reinforce the importance of their efforts to take on Hispanic agencies. It would be a matter of survival.

What do you think?

A major Republican strategist put it this way:

[A]t the end of the day here’s the one statistic we all got to remember: the country’s changing. Ronald Reagan won in 1980 with 51 percent of the vote. We all worship Ronald Reagan. But if that election had been held with the current demographics of America today, Ronald Reagan would’ve gotten 47 percent of the vote… The math is changing. Anglo vote’s 74 percent now, not 89. And if we don’t modernize conservatism, we’re going to have a party of 25 percent of the vote going to Limbaugh rallies, enjoying every, every applause line, ripping the furniture up. We’re going to be in permanent minority status.

Mike Murphy
Meet the Press
March 1, 2009

In 21st Century America, whether you’re a political party, the Great Communicator, or a major brand, you can’t win without reaching multicultural audiences.

For me, this is a reaffirmation of two facts that I have always believed – that anything is possible and that anyone can achieve their dreams in this great country

I hope we as a country can ride this unprecedented wave of optimism to solve the many problems we face.

For those of us in the marketing and advertising industry, particularly within multicultural advertising, I hope you all are inspired by today’s events to face the challenges to our industry head-on, not lose faith, and believe firmly that we will achieve our goals this year!

God Bless America.

Contacto magazine reports that according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, while nonfarm payroll employment fell sharply (-533,000) in November, and the unemployment rate rose from 6.5 to 6.7 percent in the overall economy, among Hispanics, the unemployment rate declined from 8.8% in October to 8.6% in November.

While this is interesting news in light of the overall economic backdrop, it is particularly noteworthy considering that there has been a prevailing notion that the Hispanic job market has been particularly hard hit by the severe downturn in the housing market and the dependent construction market.

It’s always dangerous to extrapolate too much meaning from one month’s data, especially for a segment of the economy that is notoriously hard to accurately track (due to undocumented immigrants).

Yet this data, however flawed and limited, does point to the resiliency of the Hispanic market. As I’ve argued before, I think this downturn has spurred a dispersion of Hispanics from traditional Hispanic population centers in the southwest to other parts of the country such as the south, southeast, and Midwest. And as Juan Tornoe adeptly noted in a post on Anderson Cooper’s 360 blog on CNN, Hispanics are well prepared for economic downturns, understand how to weather them, and are generally optimistic about their economic futures.

John McCain and Barack Obama both knew that Hispanics were a potential swing factor for the presidential election this year. Hispanics are the nation’s largest and fastest growing minority group; with an estimated 46 million they make up 15% of the U.S. population (Pew Hispanic Center, 2008). In 2008 Latinos compromised 9% of the eligible electorate nationwide and were estimated to make up about 6.5% of the total of voters this year.

Not only were Hispanics a potential swing factor, but they are online in greater numbers than ever before. According to the eMarketer: U.S. Hispanics Media Usage 2008 Report, there are 23 million Hispanic Internet users as of 2008, and they spend more time online than watching TV or reading newspapers and magazines.

With these kinds of numbers you’d think both McCain and Obama put big time resources into reaching them on the web via pay-per-click search ad campaigns. This was not the case.
Some may blame this on political affiliation – Hispanics for a long time have leaned toward the Democratic Party. 57% of Hispanic registered voters call themselves Democrats with just 23% aligning with Republicans – a 34% gap in partisan affiliation among Latinos (Pew Hispanic Center, 2008). Perhaps both candidates feel their resources are better spent elsewhere?

Well, not exactly. Obama spent over $3 million on Google ads, with a bulk of that most likely going towards search and contextual ads. McCain did not released figures for his online ad spending but we can assume it was lower than Obama, probably somewhere in the $1 to 2 million range.

Back in September, Valleywag dug up data from HitWise and found the keywords the candidates were buying on Google. While many keywords are the same in English and Spanish (Palin, John McCain, Obama), both candidates were bidding for keywords related to specific components of their campaigns (gas prices, obama taxes, mccain energy).

In order to look deeper into the candidates’ Hispanic SEM strategy, we took the time to plug in all the keywords that both McCain and Obama used in their English search campaigns, but in Spanish. Only three showed up for Obama and none for McCain. The three Spanish keywords that the Obama campaign bid on were “biografia obama”, “obama sitio official”, and “barack obama presidente.” However, the ad executions were in English and took the user to the English version of the donation page of the Web site (both Obama and McCain have Spanish versions of their site).

Next, we went to Google’s keyword tool to look up some keywords in Spanish that, had the two candidates had a campaign in place, would have driven considerable traffic to the Spanish versions of their sites. Since Google’s keyword tool gives us global search volume, we had to do some of our own math. The total number of Spanish-speaking Internet users in the world (minus the U.S) is somewhere around 114 million (that is, Latin America and Spain). Since the number of Hispanic Internet users in the U.S. is 23 million, we are assuming that close to 21% of the Spanish-language searches in the world originated in the U.S. The keywords we chose to analyze are:
• Elecciones (5,691 searches/month) – Elections
• Petroleo (3,801 searches/month) – Oil
• Inmigracion (23,100 searches/month) – Immigration
• Impuestos (3,108 searches/month) – Taxes
• Educacion (15,540 searches/month) – Education
• Guerra (315,000 searches/month) – War
• Gasolina (12,705 searches/month) – Gasoline/Gas
• Elecciones presidente (1,134 searches/month) – president elections
• Encuestas elecciones 2008 (1,134 searches/month) – polls elections 2008

If we take a conservative 2% average CTR for ads on Google the number of clicks per month for each keyword would have been:
• Elecciones: 113
• Petroleo: 76
• Inmigracion: 462
• Impuestos: 62
• Educacion: 310
• Guerra: 6,300
• Gasolina: 254
• Elecciones presidente: 23
• Encuestas elecciones 2008: 23

Which brings the total number of visits per month each candidate missed for not bidding on these 9 keywords to 7,623.

Both candidates missed out on thousands of visits from web savvy Hispanic Internet users, and possibly their donation money as well. The importance of having a Spanish-specific SEM campaign can’t be stressed enough. Did this turn out to be a factor on Election Day? Probably not the deciding factor, but nonetheless a factor to be considered by politicians in the future.

Ramiro Padilla, Digital Strategist, Sensis
Rob Kallick, SEM Coordinator, Sensis

While there is some debate as to whether the mobile announcement was a success (many news outlets broke the story before the actual deployment of the 26 word text message), there is no doubt that the exercise has brought mobile marketing to the forefront of discussion among political pundits, the advertising community, and most importantly, the broader population.

The Obama camp thought enough about mobile marketing, and it’s importance as both an effective marketing vehicle and one that projects technology savvy, to use it to make one of its most important announcements.

They go into a number of different types of media, here are some of the pertinent parts.

Video

Together, the videos on Obama’s YouTube channel have been viewed nearly 52 million times.

SMS

Texting is also playing a crucial role in the campaign’s obsession with growing its database.

Social Networks

His presence on BlackPlanet, which ranks behind MySpace and Facebook in terms of traffic, is so deep that he maintains 50 profiles, one for each state.

And finally, there’s this quote, which reflects grudging admiration from the other side for what they’ve been able to do.

“You can see the main difference between the Obama and McCain campaigns by going to their Web sites,” says Alex Castellanos, a longtime Republican media consultant whose clients have included Romney and President Bush. “Go to McCain’s. Pretty standard. Looks fine. But go to Obama’s. At the very top, there’s a quote.”

Alongside a photo of Obama, it reads: “I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington . . . I’m asking you to believe in yours.”

“Because of the Internet, Obama has built a movement.”

Anyone?