Hispanic TV: Targeting the ‘New General Market’

Language, Cultural Barriers Are Becoming Irrelevant in Marketing to U.S. Latino Segment

By Laura Martinez -- Multichannel News, 12/5/2011 12:01:00 AM

Soon after NBC decided to air a couple of Spanish-language commercials during an NFL Sunday Night Football telecast in late 2010, the Peacock Network’s Columbus, Ohio affiliate, WCMH-TV, asked viewers to weigh in on the matter.

The comments quickly began to pour in: “That’s it; this is why this country is finished!” wrote one angry viewer, peppering his comment with a colorful list of expletives. “Corporations are kamikaze and don’t give a damn about anything but keeping costs down by hiring Mexicans and then selling them stuff since they are the only ones working.” And so on.

Unfortunately for those on the complaining end, the airing of Spanish-language commercials on English-language television (and vice versa) is a growing trend. Marketers and TV executives are using several media vehicles, regardless of language, to reach an increasingly multicultural and bilingual crowd.

BILINGUAL REALITY

The reason is simple: Hispanics represent 16% of the U.S. population and while most speak Spanish, about half of the demo speaks English with fluency, watches Englishlanguage TV and surfs the net in both languages. So Spanishonly media buys are no longer on the marketing agenda.

“Planning and allocating marketing investment should not be about funding two plans: Your general-market plan and your multicultural plan,” Antonio Ruiz, partner and director of communications planning for advertising agency The Vidal Partnership, said. “It’s about having one plan, a total market plan.”

While most marketers continue to buy and allocate resources based on what’s left over from their general-market plan, others have started to dip their toes into this “total market approach,” working in partnership with media properties to reach audiences across different channels, properties and even languages.

NBCUniversal, with its recently launched Hispanics at NBCU initiative, is among the media companies embracing this concept. The Comcast-controlled media giant has a dedicated sales and marketing group pitching clients on the opportunity to reach up to 93% of U.S. Hispanics across 42 brands and their online extensions, be it broadcast, cable, Spanish, English or even Spanglish. “The key here is cultural relevance,” according to Telemundo chief operating officer Jacqueline Hernandez, the executive charged with leading the Hispanics at NBCU initiative.

This “cultural relevance” was on full display in September, when insurance company State Farm became the first major advertiser to launch a multimedia effort across various NBC properties, including Telemundo, mun2, Style, NBC and E! The occasion was the Sept. 16 NBC broadcast of the Alma Awards, an awards show honoring Latinos on television and done in partnership with the National Council of La Raza (NCLR).

State Farm ads were tailored for each media property in which they appeared. On-air spots ran during the NBC broadcast and then during the mun2 rebroadcast of the awards show the following day. The campaign included online banners in both Spanish and English on Telemundo.com, as well as brief capsules on the Style Network and video vignettes praising the awards winners on E!

“It’s about surround-sounding the consumer,” Hernandez said.

Also on board for the September Alma Awards was Verizon Wireless as co-sponsor of a series of vignettes in Spanish honoring Hispanic celebrities including Ricky Martin, Shakira, Pitbull and Christina Aguilera. Verizon’s commercials aired in Spanish during the primetime NBC Almas broadcast.

Hernandez, a self-proclaimed true believer in the total market approach and someone who loves to talk about cultural relevance, also understands the power of data. Her company will soon begin to gauge such relevance through brand-awareness measurement tools.

SEEKING ‘MÁS’ APPEAL

The talk about a total market approach also was behind this year’s creation of Fox Hispanic Media, Fox Network Group’s initiative intended to broaden its ability to reach Latinos. FHM now has three Hispanic- oriented networks: all-sports network Fox Deportes; women-oriented Utilísima and the recently launched Nat Geo Mundo.

Tom Maney, senior vice president of advertising sales at FHM, praised NBCU efforts, but said selling across different platforms can be tricky.

“Each client is very unique; you have to look at each one and determine what they want to be doing and where they want to be doing it,” he said.

Maney and his sales team have found that going out to pitch a client for one specific network has led to scoring new advertisers for a different network. He cited L’Oreal, a very active brand in the Hispanic space, which was originally approached for Utilísima but ended up buying space for one of its male-oriented brands on Fox Deportes.

Fox Hispanic Media said it has seen ad revenue soar, with Utilísima securing 35 advertisers since it first began selling during the past upfront season. Among the enthusiasts: Toyota, Procter & Gamble, T-Mobile, Prudential, Samsung, Best Buy, Unilever, Kellogg’s and SC Johnson.

“Utilísima is selling like bread out of the oven,” Maney said.

Both Fox Deportes and Nat Geo Mundo (yet to be rated) have also scored more advertisers in the past months. “We went from mass appeal to más appeal,” Maney said, playing with the word más, which is Spanish for “more.”

AD INVESTMENT: NUMBERS GAME

Selling ads like “bread out of the oven” might be on everybody’s mind, but Hispanic ad agencies want it to make it top of mind. A recent survey by the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies claims marketers who spend heavily on Hispanic media are seeing their revenue grow faster than those who don’t. According to the study, those advertisers who spend 14.2% (the percentage of Hispanic adults) or more of their advertising budgets to target Hispanics have seen their top line revenue grow in the past five years.

“The biggest surprise [of this study] was the correlation we found between high investment in Hispanic media and top line revenue growth,” said Carlos Santiago, president of Santiago Solutions Group, which conducted the study for AHAA.

The study, which did not break down figures by media channel, found that 57% of the top 500 advertisers spent less than 1% of their budgets on Hispanic advertising in 2010, a group AHAA refers to as “in denial.”

The results aren’t free of controversy because, for some, allocating budget is not about picking the “right percentage” or a number that is consistent with the population number. “When you look at Coca-Cola versus, say, BMW you have to apply your brand development index, your consumption patterns, who is your consumer, etc.,” Maney said. “To pick a percentage and go with it is an easy answer to a complicated question.”

Still, the AHAA study claims a select group of companies that spends more than 14.2% of budgets on Hispanic media — which it calls “best-in-class” — have all reported revenue growth after investing consistently against the segment.

“But this has to be consistent; you have to invest more than 14% for at least five years for these results to show,” Santiago, whose group continues to pore over the results and plans to monitor the companies’ performances in the near future, said.

The media measured by the AHAA study comes from Nielsen, which means it takes into account budgets spend on what Nielsen defines as “Hispanic media” (be it cable, broadcast and print). It does not take into account spend on English-language networks that have large Hispanic audiences, like Fox or NBC.

KUDOS FOR CABLE SHOWS

According to a recent study by Viacom’s Tr3s: MTV Música y Más, a large chunk of Hispanic “millennials” ages 18-29 are watching

English-language cable, with South Park, American Idol and Pawn Stars among their favorite shows. “English- and Spanish-language broadcast TV is not really top of mind,” Nancy Tellet, senior vice president of research and consumer insights for MTV Networks Latin America, Canada and the U.S. Hispanic market, said. “Some of the people we surveyed weren’t even sure what CBS was.”

In the meantime, while companies establish themselves as “best in class” and others continue to be “in denial,” it seems that the days of buying English-language spots to reach the “general market” and then your Spanishlanguage spots to reach Hispanics are over.

“This is a new general market,” NBCUniversal’s Hernandez said.