HispanicTrending

Great tribute to a great person, professional and friend! He believed in Hispanic Trending, before I did! 🙂

February 16, 2015
By Valerie Graves

As I joined fellow advocates of advertising diversity in ringing the opening bell at the NASDAQ exchange recently, I couldn’t help thinking that our industry, a trendsetter in so many areas, is bringing up the rear when it comes to diversity.

Sure, there are terrific initiatives such as I’mPART (to Promote, Attract, Retain and Train diverse employees in advertising) from The Advertising Club of New York, and the industry coalition, ADCOLOR, have made valuable strides by providing support to educational diversity programs and creating a vibrant community where advertising and marketing communications professionals of color can see others like themselves succeeding.

There have also been longtime efforts like The Multicultural Advertising Intern Program from the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) have been churning out quality entry-level candidates for decades.

Yet, after many years and some committed efforts, the participation of African Americans and Hispanics at the professional level in the industry hovers around 6 percent, woefully short of reflecting America’s changing demographics or our importance as consumers. As the Census Bureau reported, “All in all, minorities, now 37 percent of the U.S. population, are projected to comprise 57 percent of the population in 2060… The total minority population would more than double, from 116.2 million to 241.3 million over the period.”

The hottest topic in the ad industry is something called Total Market Advertising, which is intended to broaden a brand’s communications to include the country’s growing minority populations. This often takes the form of inclusive-looking ads and commercials, cast with a racial rainbow that does indeed look more like the real America than the euphemistic “general market” advertising of the past.

But let’s be totally honest about Total Market Advertising as it currently exists. Perhaps it should be renamed “Total Budget Advertising,” an attempt by powerful agencies to maintain financial control as the country heads toward becoming majority minority. It is a brazen move to re-capture the meager budgets allotted to multicultural agencies by claiming that they are now unnecessary.

Consequently, traditional African American agencies, in particular, are struggling to find their role in this new landscape. In the brave new world of Total Budget, er, Total Market Advertising, ethnic insights are taken into consideration from the start of the process, planners and creatives are equipped with the tools they need to create inclusive, effective advertising, and all is right with the world.

The trouble is that this approach is a lot like describing an elephant to someone who has never seen one, then asking them to draw a picture. Some things have to be experienced to be totally understood, and I maintain that culture is one of them. To speak to Black and Hispanic people most effectively, the advertising industry needs a wealth of Black and Hispanic advertising professionals, something that is still sorely lacking.

Over the course of a long career spent working in both “general” and multicultural agencies, I have occasionally been asked, “Haven’t we gotten to the point where people are just people?” Too often, I suspect the questioner was really hoping we had gotten to the point where people are just White people. The undeniable answer is that people are certainly just people, but culture is still culture. African American culture is different from White American culture.
Culture is not taught; it is experienced, felt and known.

No one understands African American culture like an African American. Or Hispanic culture like a Hispanic American.
The closest thing to an exception is that African Americans have spent centuries living in a culture where understanding how White Americans think and feel often held the key to our survival. We lived in their homes, raised their children, cooked their food and anticipated their needs and desires in a way that society never required them to reciprocate.

So-called “Total Market” advertising messages too often originate in creative departments dominated by tattoo-ed hipster White guys and female Lena Dunham wannabes.
There is a lot of research to prove that they are not as effective as targeted communications largely created by people of color and/or culture.

Even when ads include us, it is important to know the nuances of how people of color see ourselves and how we wish to be seen, and who knows that better than a person of color? When the object is to affect our buying behavior by making a genuine cultural connection, we are even more essential.

As I rang that bell to open the NASDAQ exchange, I glanced around at my ad industry colleagues. In a group of 21, there were five African Americans, a vast improvement over the years when I almost always found mine to be the only Black face in the crowd. Still, there is also vast room for improvement, and the increase in our presence in the general industry should not come at the expense of multicultural agencies.

Source: The Dallas Weekly

February 5, 2015
By Jesse Scheckner

The Electronic Retailing Association (ERA) returned to South Beach late last month to hold its annual Great Ideas Summit at the Loews Miami Beach Hotel. The three-day event, which was held from January 26-28, attracted thousands of representatives and interested parties from the direct-to-consumer marketplace and electronic sales industry.

Among those in attendance was the ERA Hispanic Council. A combined peer forum and networking body, the Hispanic Council is the country’s leading organization working with both U.S. Hispanic and Latin American direct response marketers and service providers. Over the course of the past five years, the infomercial industry targeting Hispanic consumers has grown rapidly, both in its ability to reach consumers and in the quality and production of its programming.

“What we really hope to accomplish here is to share valuable information with all Hispanic marketers out there,” said U.S. Hispanic Council committee chair Tom Baker. “Everybody consumes differently. When you say Hispanic or Latino, it’s very broad-based. There are 23 different countries that you’re pulling people from that are here who all have different tendencies in the way they learn and spend. Everybody’s just kind of learning that right now, which is why we’re seeing the spending dollar go up when investing in reaching those communities.”

With infomercial giant Guthy Renker investing more than $100 million last year alone in reaching out to Spanish speaking buyers, marketing approaches with regards to the Hispanic community are undergoing a renaissance of sorts. Where before English language infomercials were merely overdubbed by one dialect of Spanish and broadcast throughout the U.S. and Latin America, some companies are now dedicated solely to reaching Hispanic clientele, with infomercials made specifically for audiences in individual countries and regions.

Certain tendencies among Hispanic consumers, such as the fact that they are the largest base of consumers who purchase through mobile devices, have also affected how products are marketed to them.

“They’ve realized the buying power of this audience and have a better understanding of how to market to them,” says Baker. “You have to find the right resources to use, the right agency, call center and approaches to handling calls. An Anglo call takes about 15 minutes on the average, where it’s going to be a 20 to 30 percent increase on the Latino side because they’re more conversational, ask more questions and want information. At first, marketers didn’t like that, but what they realized after trying it for a while was that they made more dollars on the back end because of the loyalty from the marketplace.”

At the forefront of this shift in sales techniques is Listen Up Español, the leading Spanish language call center focused on the U.S. Hispanic market. The Portland, ME headquartered company—whose Hermosillo, Mexico based center employs more than 800 agents and serves direct response, nonprofit and corporate clients in areas including inbound sales, customer service and lead generation to Spanish advertising services—has been ranked #1 in Business Production and Services among the Fastest Growing Private Companies by the INC 500.

“We want to be able to help our marketers to be smarter,” said Listen Up Español co-founder and president Tony Ricciardi. “We’re trying to create more touch points in our technology that allows the marketer to have more touch points with the customer, such as text messaged or emailed receipts at the end of a call that double as a way for the customer to communicate with the agency after the sale. In today’s economy it’s not just about the transaction, it’s more about getting into a conversation, having a longer lifetime value. Working with the Hispanic market is all a question of how to become better communicators in that market, whether on the customer service side or the sales side.”

Source: Miami Beach News