Think Multicultural

As I’m sure you’ve seen by now: All advertising is multicultural.

It’s official - the concept of “minority majority” markets has become a reality in 1 out of every 10 U.S. counties, according to a recently released U.S. Census Bureau report.

CNN just ran a story on the data - which is very compelling.

Leading the way is Los Angeles County, home to the 2nd largest city in the U.S. - the City of Los Angeles. As of 2007, almost 71% of LA County’s residents are minorities, lead by 4.7 million Hispanics and 1 million African-Americans.

It’s also interesting to note that 3 New York boroughs - Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx - have more than 1 million minority residents each.

For anyone that follows my posts on TM, you know I have been talking about this seismic demographic shift, and that it is creating huge opportunities and threats to the advertising business as we currently know it. Multicultural advertising is no longer a niche strategy - it is quickly becoming the mass market. Hispanic, African American, Asian and other emerging market agencies know this, and general market shops see the writing the wall. It’s only a matter of time before big ad spenders start to rethink who their lead agency should be.

I had a very interesting conversation with the CEO of a prominent Hispanic Web publisher yesterday. We were discussing the challenges facing the Hispanic online advertising market, vis-a-vis the latest AdAge Hispanic Fact Pack that showed online received a paltry 4.6% of all Hispanic advertising expenditures vs. the 63%+ that went to broadcast and local TV.

He shared an interesting question that he posed to the Media Director at a prominent Hispanic ad agency - what is Univision’s unduplicated reach? The Media Director had no idea. So this very smart CEO asked a few other Media Directors at big Hispanic shops, and got the same glazed look. No one could answer the question.

This publisher, and countless others, subscribe to comScore to provide their unique monthly traffic, by which they live and die. If you look at the latest comScore Hispanic panel data, the top Hispanic focused Web sites have between 0.5-3 million monthly unique visitors per month. If you expand that list to all Web sites, regardless of content focus, the top 10 sites get between 4 and 15 million monthly unique Hispanics.

While we all know that comScore is flawed, most every publisher will tell you that comScore numbers are overly conservative and skew their unique visitor numbers down (significantly in some cases). Therefore, it would not be a theoretical leap to say that comScore data provides a low-end approximation of the unique, unduplicated reach of these Web sites.

Back to the question of Univision’s unduplicated reach? Any ideas? I have heard some guesstimates in the low 2 million range for their most popular prime time telenovelas. That is about the same as the number of unique monthly Hispanic visitors that Yahoo Telemundo pulls (according to comScore), who is charging in the mid-to-upper teen CPMs and probably getting about 1/3 of that 3.7% reported by the AdAge Hispanic Fact Pack.

Is it me, or does the market seem completely out-of-whack?

I’d love to hear some opinions and feedback on both sides.