As digital continues to turn the advertising world on its head, you’ve no doubt heard digital marketing evangelists talk about the need to “lead with digital.” What they are typically referring to is 180 degree change away from the common marketing approach of starting with traditional marketing programs and then extending them to digital channels. The argument being that as digital media (including Web, social and mobile) takes a larger piece of consumers’ media consumption pie and fundamentally changes how they interact with advertising that advertisers must fundamentally change their marketing strategies to align with new digital realities.

There are countless and growing examples of marketers embracing this philosophy – including extreme cases where marketers have completely forgone traditional channels in favor of digital or brands have hired digital agencies as their lead (or only) agency of record. Less extreme examples can be seen in trend towards traditional creative (TV and out-of-home for example) that looks and feels increasingly like online banner / rich media ads or the trend towards driving to the Web or mobile as the primary call-to-action on direct response offline campaigns.

What if a rebellious brand led their Hispanic marketing efforts with digital? The prevailing wisdom in the Hispanic marketing world has always been that digital is important, but not that important, what with a majority of Hispanics still digitally divided or lacking tech sophistication. What would be the fate of such an anti-establishment brand? What would “leading with digital” even look like in the Hispanic market? Let’s deconstruct a Hispanic ad campaign and see some examples of what a digital-driven approach might look like:

Campaign Planning

Campaign Objectives – During the “Mad Men” era of advertising (which I would argue continues to this day in Hispanic advertising), campaign objectives were always a “one-way street” – with objectives like increasing awareness or same-store sales. Digital made advertising a two-way game, and as such, effective advertising has to do so much more. Yet most Hispanic advertising objectives are still about being the loudest megaphone. If a Hispanic campaign started with digital, objectives such as interactivity, engagement, utility and word of mouth would inevitably take center stage (this is not the case for most Hispanic advertising today.) This new set of digitally-relevant marketing objectives lends themselves well to marketing frameworks, such as marketing funnels or consumer journeys, with corresponding metrics and the ability to establish pre-launch campaign projections.

Research – Every good ad campaign, regardless of target audience, starts with sound research. Yet most Hispanic ad campaigns start with analog research (traditional focus groups, consumer research panels, etc). Are their purely digital alternatives? I would argue that there is an incredibly powerful insight “fountain” currently available using social monitoring tools like Radian6 to listen to Hispanic consumers online. Think of it as the world’s largest focus group, except completely organic. With Hispanics heavily engaging in social media, there is a real opportunity to uncover powerful and actionable Hispanic insights. Unfortunately, it’s more work that just hiring a research firm to recruit participants for 4 focus groups or subscribing to a research tool. Taking it one step further, if you can build an online community of Hispanics tied to your brand that you nurture over time, you have the potential to continually tap into a new kind of focus group indefinitely (at a much lower cost)

Concept & Copy Testing – One of the biggest benefits of leading with digital is the ability to make quick and inexpensive mistakes. This is particularly important for brands or companies that are new to or have been out of the Hispanic market for some time (and will need to fine-tune their initial Hispanic programs). While copy testing is anything but new, utilizing text-based ads targeted to Hispanics (by market if appropriate) on Google, Bing and Facebook can provide quick and cheap feedback on concepts, copy and keywords that will resonate with Hispanics. Taking this approach further, creative testing using multiple iterations of banners can provide art direction feedback from a real-life “lab” of online Hispanics. If focus groups are a must, online versions provide valuable qualitative results at a fraction of the time and expense.

Campaign Development

Content Development – A sound digitally-driven Hispanic marketing campaign with objectives such as engagement, utility or word of mouth activity requires a different approach to creative development. A perfectly executed .30 second TV spot combined with a series of radio, print, and out-of-home ads will not be enough to achieve such interactive goals. Instead, creative production must be replaced with content development – a different approach that emphasizes multi-form creative that can live in various formats and lengths that tells a longer story. The content development approach emphasizes producing all forms of content (video, imagery, textual) that can deepen Website experiences, drive social engagements and spur viral communication – all while still providing for TV, radio and print ads. This nuanced, by significant change in approach, is akin to brands thinking like publishers and media companies.

Campaign Launch

Changes in how brands and companies launch and manage Hispanic ad campaigns represent the biggest opportunities in this digitally-led approach.

Digital Pre-launches – Most Hispanic advertising starts offline and then migrates online. Why not do the opposite? Digital creative typically takes less time to produce and digital media can be quickly planned, bought and trafficked, so why not launch pilot campaigns online before extending offline to more expensive, time-consuming and inflexible channels like TV, radio and out-of-home?

Digital pre-launching not only provides an opportunity to test concepts and copy as noted above (including all important questions of language – Spanish, English or both?), but can also provide invaluable data that can inform Hispanic campaign objectives, market selection, and media plans, both offline and online! Pre-launches can be run from a few weeks to a few months, but the benefits can be significant.

Digital Measurement – Most Hispanic marketing programs are evaluated post-mortem: “that network TV buy performed well in Phoenix” or “that print ad failed to drive call-center activity.” Taking a digital-driven approach means prioritizing real-time measurement tools such as third-party ad serving, Web analytics, and social media tracking tools to impact and influence campaign decisions mid-stream. This approach yields info on which top performing digital creative that can influence creative placements and rotations. Web analytics data on campaign microsites and landing pages can provide important geo-market results that can impact media weighting offline.

Hopefully you can see from this quick analysis that leading with digital in the Hispanic market is not about irrationally abandoning traditional media channels. Instead, it’s about drastically changing how Hispanic campaigns are planned, developed and managed. Keeping in mind that a large number of Hispanics are still not online, a thoughtfully executed digitally-driven approach to Hispanic advertising can bear significant fruit and take our industry to the next level.

(this article originally ran on SearchEngineLand.com in 2008)

As the U.S. Hispanic population continues to grow, advertisers naturally want to target this influential demographic. Search engine marketing allows advertisers to efficiently reach the Hispanic market through a number of Hispanic-focused strategies.

Though it may sound obvious, the easiest way to target Hispanics is by using Spanish-language keywords (i.e., “salud” for “health” and “prestamo” for “mortgage”). For the most part, advertisers are not bidding as heavily on Spanish-language keywords, so in the bid-driven world of SEM, the cost of Spanish keywords are lower. As the Hispanic population increases its use of search engines – millions of U.S. Hispanics come online each year – we might see the prices of these keywords go up, but more than likely they still won’t pass the cost of common English-language phrases.

However, when choosing keywords never rely solely on straightforward translation of English words to their Spanish counterparts. Think about acculturation levels of your target Hispanic audience and adapt your keywords and ad copy appropriately. Your ultimate goal should be cultural relevance—reaching your audience on a personal level.

It is estimated that a Spanish sentence contains 20 percent more words than its English counterpart. And Spanish searchers tend to search differently than their English-speaking counterparts, making heavy use of long-tail or extended phrases. The average English search phrase contains 3.9 words per phrase compared to Spanish phrases that contain 4.7 words, according to ExpertSEM.com. You can take advantage of this difference by bidding on long-tail keywords to specifically attract a Hispanic-dominant audience. Because of the specificity of the phrase, long-tail keywords will likely receive limited traffic. However, because these phrases are so targeted they are more likely to convert well.

When choosing these long phrases, stay culturally relevant. Pay particular attention to the regional differences of the Spanish language. California is primarily Mexican, Florida is heavily Cuban and New York is predominately Puerto Rican. In many instances, one phase will not accurately reach all of these cultures.

Target your audience where it lives

In addition to being culturally relevant, search ad programs give you the perfect opportunity to narrow your target audience and reach its members where they live. If you are looking to target Hispanics, you should geo-target your campaign to areas of high Hispanic population density. Florida, Texas, New Jersey, California and Arizona comprise the top five Hispanic search regions according to Search Engine Roundtable. Geo-targeting can be done by targeting specific states or by setting zip code restrictions. In either case, geo-targeting analyzes the searcher’s IP address to determine his or her location, assuring that they only see ads relevant to their area.

In the same way that long-tail keywords reduce the number of hits, geo-targeting can too because you are narrowing down the overall search audience. However, targeting does increase precision, which is often a welcome tradeoff.

When you are targeting Hispanics through the use of Spanish-language keywords or ad copy, a Hispanic Spanish-language landing page is critical. Apart from potential penalties if your landing page isn’t relevant to your ad copy, this is also about making a smooth transition and an optimal user experience for your visitor. If a person searches in Spanish, he or she is going to naturally expect to see a Spanish-language web page after they click on the search result.

With any SEM campaign you really have to work off the “test, learn and optimize” philosophy. Try different areas to target. Use Spanish and English-language keywords to see what works best. Try keywords that typically only Hispanics would search for, such as “Luis Miguel.” Try bilingual phrases such as “cheap fiesta.” The more you test and analyze, the better your campaign will perform.

A professor (Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management) from my alma mater, The Wharton School of Business, claims that paid advertising as we’ve all come to know it and make a living from, will inevitably fail, because:
1. Consumers do not trust advertising
2. Consumers do not want to view advertising
3. Consumers do not need advertising

While 600+ angry responses ensued, one particularly thoughtful debate developed between Professor Clemons and Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand, regarding the future and sustainability of search engine marketing on Google, Yahoo! etc.

I highly encourage that you read Professor Clemons’ original post, and the debate between Professor Clemons and Danny Sullivan.

For one, I think this is a very healthy debate for our industry to be having. It is during recessionary times that everything, including fundamental business models, need to be re-evaluated, optimized and/or abandoned.

However, I was struck by the omission of two key assumptions that most everyone has seemed to miss in this debate – the intelligence and savvy of consumers to:
1. Trust effective, honest and compelling advertising for products or services they are interested in and,
2. View and find value in ads that are relevant to their needs or wants

Professor Clemons doesn’t seem to see that. Those of us in advertising give much more credit to the intelligence of our audiences and the value of the products and services we are selling.

What do you think?

So I did what any new media geek would do, I started an online ad campaign.

From Lost Cat in Austin

First , I put up a free website on Blogger with a picture of the kitty and a contact phone number and email address. Think of it as the new media version of the lost-kitty flyer that you see taped to telephone poles and mailboxes.

Second, I logged into my Google Adwords account*and bought a bunch of keywords such as cat, lost cat, gato, and so on. I created an ad saying that I had lost a cat and describing the neighborhood in Austin where the cat should be. I linked that to the website.

From Lost Cat in Austin

Finally, I logged into my Facbook Ads account**and created an ad with a little picture of the cat and a short description. I also linked that to the website.

From Lost Cat in Austin

The only problem was geotargeting. The most granular geotargeting that either Google or Facebook allowed was to “Austin.” If you’re not from Austin, it’s a pretty big town. My niece lives down in South Austin near Zilker park, so I didn’t want to advertise way up in the North Austin suburban sprawl. Zip code targeting would have been perfect. A couple of zip codes could have completely covered the possible range of a small gray cat.

When I was at Admixture, clients frequently demanded, and we delivered, zip code level targeting. Instead, the coverage I got from Google and Facebook was a couple of hundred square miles. Granular geotargeting is not technically difficult. They could do it if they wanted, but for some unknown business reason they don’t.

As it was, I burned through my small Facebook budget in about an hour without a single lead. Google performed better, as I didn’t burn up my budget and got one decent lead.

So for now, Facebook and Google aren’t granular enough for really easy, good local advertising. They will be someday, but not yet.

And Juliette eventually came home on her own, limping on a broken leg. She’s now on bed rest at the vet.

* Yes, I am a big enough nerd that I have a personal Adwords account.
** Yes, I am a big enough nerd that I have a personal Facebook Ads account.

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

Among the topics covered include snapshots of two very successful initiatives my agency developed for United Healthcare and White Memorial Medical Center.

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.