Online Hispanic Trends

The Hispanic Consumer on the Rise

A recent AdAge article, written by Peter Francese, highlights some very interesting data on the growth, characteristics and future of the Hispanic market.

Mr. Francese compares the growing Hispanic market to America in the 1950s with young, large, community-oriented families, which often include grandparents, migrating to the suburbs and pursing a better life for their children.

The main point of the article is that this growing market and culture will become more and more important as baby boomers retire and reduce their consumer spending.

Read the full article.

The Latino Digital Divide and Young Latinos' Cell Phone Usage

The Pew Hispanic Center released two new reports today: The Latino Digital Divide: The Native Born versus The Foreign Born and How Young Latinos Communicate with Friends in the Digital Age

One of the key findings in the first report is that technology among foreign born Latinos still lags behind their U.S.-born counterparts, especially in the area of Internet use.

  

The second report on how young Latinos communicate provides some great data on how Latinos ages 16-25 use their cell phones to communicate as summarized in the table below, the differences between natives and foreign born, and cell phone ownership and use as compared to young non-Hispanics.

 

Source: The Pew Hispanic Center

Latinas Online - Are you reaching them?

Please check out Bixal's recent blog on the growing and important online Latina audience: http://bit.ly/aLpOHX

IAB Releases Report on the Online Hispanic Market

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) recently released a very interesting report on the state of the U.S. online Hispanic Market entitled U.S. Latinos Online: a driving force.

The report consolidates data from a number of resource to provide a detailed look at the size, growth and dynamics of the online Hispanic Market.

You can download the report here. 

Unum Insurance Takes an Original Approach to Reaching Spanish-Dominant Latinos

Elena del Valle posted a very interesting blog on Unum's efforts to reach the Spanish-dominant segment of the U.S. Hispanic population. 

Instead of taking their English materials and translating them into Spanish, they developed original materials designed specifically to inform and educate Latinos who, as Pew data shows, will more than double to 31 percent of the American workforce within the next two decades.

Read the full post at HispanicMPR.com

Latinos Changing the US Political Landscape

By now most people recognize that Latinos are changing the US political landscape. But are political parties, both Democrats and Republicans, listening to what Latinos have to say?  Probably not, or at least that is the reading of an article by Washington Post staff writer Peter Levin on how “Republicans look to gain traction with Hispanic voters.”

Levin highlights a recent NBC-Wall Street poll that shows a drop of Hispanic support for the Democratic Party, just a year after voting in record numbers for President Obama.  

The article also cites hard-liners and “tea party” activists’ posture on immigration issues as the main reason why Republicans are still struggling to engage Latinos voters.

The article provides hard data on how political parties should be paying close attention to Hispanic voting behavior and population changes. Hispanics are the fastest growing segment in the US and their voting power has increased twofold over the last two decades. The article also underscores how important is that politicians listen to Latinos to really understand their perspectives and priorities.

Social Media and Mobile Internet Use of Hispanic Teens and Young Adults

The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently published a report entitled Social Media & Mobile Internet Use of Teens and Young Adults. 

A few of the more interesting findings on teens and young adults in general include: 

• Blogging and commenting on blogs by teens and young adults has decreased since 2006 while it has increased among older adults (from 28% to 14%),
• Both teen and adult use of social networking sites has increased significantly, but the sites where teens and young adults maintain their profiles are different, with 66% using MySpace compared to 36% of those 30 and over, and most interesting....
• Only 8% of Internet users age 12-17 use Twitter.

With respect to Latino teens and young adults, the results of Pew's research show that:

• Although not as often as White teens and young adults, Hispanic teens and young adults report going online once a day or three to five times a week.

• Although laptops have overtaken desktops as the computer of choice, Hispanic adults are less likely than White adults to own a desktop or laptop computer.

• Along with young adults, Hispanics and African‐Americans are more likely to go online wirelessly. According to the report "Half of all African‐American adults (48%) have used their cell phone to access the internet, compared with 40% of Hispanic adults and just 31% of white adults."

Forecast: More Complex Consumer Markets

The recently published AOL Hispanic Cyberstudy, Marketing to the web's most rapidly growing population, is full of great information on the online Hispanic market, but one reference I found particularly interesting was an article by Peter Francese in Advertising Age: New U.S. Census to Reveal Major Shift: No More Joe Consumer.

The gist of the article is that the average American consumer is gone and has been replaced with "a complex, multidimensional society that defies simple labeling."

Some key findings of the white paper include the following:

• The traditional two parent, two child family will only account for 22% of the population, while the most prevalent type of household will be married couples with no kids followed by single person households.

• White non-Hispanics will be the minority in California, Texas, New Mexico and Hawaii, and in the countries largest 10 cities, no ethnic groups will represent the majority of the population.

• 80% of the over 65 age group will be white non-Hispanics while only 54% of those under 18 will fall into this group. 

• And, as many of us already know, "In 2010, Hispanics will be the nation's fastest growing and largest minority (50 million people)."

Media Usage Way Up for Kids and Teens, but Particularly for Black and Latino Children

The Kaiser Family Foundation recently released a report that shows that the amount of time young people are spending with entertainment media has increased signifcantly over the past five years, rising from 6.21 hours to 7.38. When taking into account "media multitasking," the number actually adds up to 10:45 minutes per day.

Among other interesting findings, the results of the study show that mobile media and social networking are driving this increased consumption, and that Black and Hispanic children spend much more time with media than White children do - 13:00 hours of of total media exposure for Hispanics, 12:59 for Blacks, and 8:36 for Whites.

The news release says that "top online activities include social networking (:22 a day), playing games (:17), and visiting video sites such as YouTube (:15).  Three-quarters (74%) of all 7th - 12th graders say they have a profile on a social networking site."

Source: PRNewswire

Latino Internet Use Being Fueled by Growth in Previously Underrepresented Groups

The Pew Hispanic Center just released a very interesting new report - Latinos Online, 2006-2008: Narrowing the Gap.

The report looks compares and contrasts internet use patterns of native-born latinos, foreign-born latinos, blacks and whites.

Some of the key findings include:

• Internet use among Latino adults rose by 10 percentage points from 54% in 2006 to 64% in 2008, as compared to four points for whites and two points for blacks.
• This increase has been fueled by a growth in use by groups who have typically had very low rates of internet use - foreign-born latinos, those with lower educational levels, and those with lower household incomes.
• Although there were not large changes in the number of Latinos accessing the internet from home, there were significant increases in the the numbers using broadband, as well as for whites and blacks.

To promote consistency, the surveys were done via landline, and being that there was a significant increase in the numbers of Latinos that only use cell phones during this same period, the researchers concluded that the numbers in this report may underestimate Latino internet use.

To see the full report: Latinos Online, 2006-2008