Think Multicultural

In the battle of dueling press releases from Univision and Batanga, the strange thing was the shenanigans going on in them.

Batanga’s release reported a “combined total audience” of 10.8 million. The key takeaway appeared to be Batanga = 10.8 million uniques. However, once you look closer, Batanga really has about 3 million unique visitors. HispanoClick, the Hispanic ad network they acquired a few months ago, accounted for more than 70% of the “combined total audience.” It makes sense for Batanga to report a combined number, as Batanga’s 3 million uniques doesn’t compare well to Univision’s 16.5 million. At that point you’ve got a niche music site vs. a broad-based juggernaut. However, if you throw in HispanoClick’s reach, suddenly you’re looking at more of a fair fight – Batanga’s combined 10.8 million to Univision’s 16.5 million.

I think Batanga’s acquisition of HispanoClick was a good move for several reasons, but I also think that Batanga is a good enough property and a good enough brand that they shouldn’t have to go fudging the numbers in their press releases.

On the other hand, Univision’s release cited a study that found that “Univision.com was the most-visited Spanish-language website in the U.S. among Hispanics who used the Internet at least once in the 30 days prior to taking the survey” and various other claims making Univision sound very impressive. Weird thing was, the data was based on a study by Forrester Research that included “150 non-Hispanics, 402 Hispanics; 269 Spanish-dominant/bilingual Hispanics and 133 English-dominant Hispanics.” 552 people? Really? How much did Univision pay Forrester for the opinions of 552 people? Is that even a statistically significant result? Also, why is the claim qualified by “who used the Internet at least once in the 30 days prior to taking the survey”? Is the result different for all Hispanics across the board? Or for Hispanics who used the Internet at least once a day in the prior month?

Again, Univision is the 800-pound gorilla in the market, do they really need to use shady numbers to prove it?

What’s my point? No point, really, just that you have to love PR people. Amazing.

Although the multicultural ad industry sometimes drags its feet getting into the digital age, the PR industry doesn’t seem to have that problem. Very early on, PR agencies and their clients realized the power of the Internet and of blogs in particular. The trouble that Wal-Mart and Edelman got into back in 2006 is a testament to this.

At ThinkMulticultural, we get outreach from time to time from PR agencies for companies like Wal-Mart and AT&T who want us to feature what great things their clients are doing in multicultural markets. This is done in hopes that something we write about those clients will reflect well upon them. That’s perfectly legitimate. Sometimes it is even interesting and we write about those things.

But there’s a downside to blog-outreach, and that’s the spam comment. Comments appear when someone writes in response to a post and it then appears below the post (see the “Submit Comment” box at the bottom of the page?). In contrast to real comments, spam comments are designed to look like real comments, but really are just links back to some other website, used to drive traffic and increase search rankings on Google.

We got a spam comment last week from a major multicultural media company. We were really surprised, because normally spam comments come from people selling Viagara and fake Rolex watches, not from large, legitimate companies.

We’re not going to name names this time, but you know who you are. And we know who you are. Do us all a favor - use legitimate PR and advertising. If you’re doing something interesting, we’ll write about it. Don’t drag down the conversation with cheap tricks like that.