Think Multicultural

***THIS IS A RESPONSE FROM HMW TO OUR RECENT POST It’s 2008 and we’re still talking about building branded Web sites?***

Thank you very much for your comments on the Special Report I researched, reported on and authored for Hispanic Market Weekly. I invite other industry leaders, movers and shakers to read the piece for themselves.

While I’m pleased to say that we are moving in the right direction in terms of our digital and internet coverage, I was saddened to read that you were “more than a little disappointed with the report.” I was even more disappointed that your note about our special report was not send via e-mail to our editorial team but was posted in a public Blog. The link was dutifully sent to my email address by an astute reader.

The truth of the matter is large brands embracing the internet by creating their own websites is still underreported by the mainstream media and, with all due respect to my editorial team, was the *first* time Hispanic Market Weekly devoted an entire report to the subject. Previous years’ internet special reports offered the same-old, same-old with respect to portals. So again, I think we are certainly moving in the right direction with our editorial coverage of Hispanic media initiatives.

Frankly, I see no other trade publication devoted to the Hispanic market (subtracting, of course, those that post press releases or simply offer links to other news organizations’ work) that has covered Hispanic internet development in a similarly detailed way.

“Is building a branded Web site considered news in 2008?” You ask.

Well, to any company that simply translates their site into Spanish without doing any research into making it relevant to Hispanics, I’d argue the answer is YES.

While you say our report is vanilla, I can tell you that there are still many, many categories that are behind the curve when it comes to online activity. Only some are catching up right now. And to call the piece “a disservice” is something I can’t quite understand - wouldn’t this send the message to a CMO at a company considering a jump into internet branding and advertising that maybe such an initiative makes sense?

Aside from the consumer-focused website and microsite, there are indeed initiatives with respect to social media, e-mail marketing, search engine marketing, and mobile. But that wasn’t the focus of this report. And with MySpace Español still ramping up, the traditional English-language MySpace a bit overambitious with its advertising goals and real results and such things as e-mail marketing and search engine marketing still on the periphery of our industry, the discussion will be there in the months and years to come.

In the case of this special report, we simply couldn’t devote focus on the subject we decided was indeed relevant … and not “inane.”

“Inane” is the small piece of the advertising pie that goes to Hispanic media and, of that, how many of the ad dollars go to the four Spanish-language broadcast networks. “Inane” is the fact that Hispanic internet gets a percentage of a percentage of ad dollars as it is.

So perhaps telling the CMOs, media buyers and ad planners to invest more money by starting big and going from there still is a relevant conversation.

It’s as simple as thinking multicultural.

Adam Jacobson
Associate CMO Editor
Hispanic Market Weekly

I just finished up 3 days at the DM Days conference in New York, of which the 3rd day included the Hispanic Directo Day.

Overall, the conference was well attended with very good break-out panels. I thought it was particularly notable that more than 25% of the sessions focused on digital marketing. In fact, there were very interesting sessions on mobile marketing, Web analytics, and social media (yes, social media was a central theme of 8 sessions at a direct marketing event!).

The Directo Day Hispanic day at DM Days was not quite as in-depth as I had hoped. Hopefully next year Directo Day will expand and deepen.

I am definitely looking forward to their DMA08 Conference in Las Vegas in October.

When I lived in Alaska, the popular wisdom was that in the Gold Rush almost nobody got rich mining for gold, but that people did get rich selling shovels to the miners who were headed into the hills to go prospecting. Similarly, after the oil boom in the 1970’s, the richest man in the state didn’t own oil wells, he owned… grocery stores.

What does any of this have to do with advertising? This week, Forrester Research released its “Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 to 2013.” The report concluded that over half of businesses surveyed by Forrester have Web 2.0 (social networking, mashups, and RSS) on the agenda for 2008.

BizReport concludes that this result means that “The report adds weight to the frequent assertion that Web 2.0 isn’t just a passing fad and is indeed a long term strategy that marketers need to consider.” A hundred entrepreneurs are going to conclude that it means that the world needs more social networks. Several more Hispanic social networking sites will spring up.

On closer examination, that’s not what it means at all. Chances are that the companies surveyed (including BEA Systems, IBM, and Microsoft) did not respond that they are going to set up widgets on Facebook and homepages on MySpace like some Second Life pretender showing up two years late to the party. It’s a lot more likely that these businesses said that they will incorporate mashups and RSS feeds into their corporate collaboration tools, and possibly create an internal corporate social network among employees, vendors, and customers to facilitate interaction.

Those who are going to benefit from these trends are not the people who rush out and set up another new niche social network. Rather, it’s going to be the people selling shovels to the people rushing into the hills to find the next Facebook gold. Marc Andreeson is a really, really smart guy. He’s sold two Internet companies for over a billion dollars each. His newest company is Ning, which provides the infrastructure for people who want to launch a social network. They have enabled the creation of 230,000 (that’s right) social networks and are adding over 1,000 a day.

The point is that although Web 2.0 tools are interesting and likely the future of the Internet, the Forrester report is not evidence that marketers need to rush into using Web 2.0. The Forrester report is evidence that there is a lot of money to be made in the Web 2.0 tools that will be used by all those online prospectors looking for gold.

Here at TM, we preach the gospel of new media almost every day. However, as marketers and advertisers, as we embrace new media we also need to be cautious of differentiating between what’s new and compelling and what’s hype. As press releases come out announcing new research reports, take a closer look at what they actually say, rather than what someone thought would make the best headline.