Online Hispanic Trends

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

What Race Are Hispanics?

In a very timely article published prior to the coming 2010 census, Juan Guillermo Tornoe of Hispanictrending.net provides an excellent write up on how best to categorize Hispanics / Latinos.  It's not as easy as some might think...

Read the article at MediaPost

Hispanic Youth Make Up 22% of Total U.S. Youth Population

Pew Hispanic published a report in May '09 showing that 22% of the nation's youth are of Hispanic or Latino origin.

The data also shows that..

• 11% are first generation, i.e., they are foreign born.
• Over half (52%) of this group are second generation, meaning that they are the sons or daughters of at least one foreign-born parent, and
• 37% are third generation, meaning they were born in the U.S. to U.S. born parents. 

View the full report for the details and more info on these important and growing segments.

Methods to Target U.S. Hispanics Online

In an excellent article by Joe Kutchera of ContextWeb on the MediaPost website, Joe shared a number of techniques being used by various experts in the field to more effectively target U.S. Hispanics online. 

The specific methods that he covers to more effectively segment and reach the audience include:

Geo-Targeting - IP targeting to specific countries, states or DMAS to reach U.S. Hispanics visiting Latin American sites and Latin American audiences visiting U.S. based sites.

Behavioral Targeting- using collected on web-browsing behavior, such as pages they have visited or e searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual. Unfortunately, however, there is not enough money going into this type of targeting for online Hispanics.

Search - the experts recommend buying keywords in both Spanish and English to reach English and Spanish dominants in addition to the bilingual segment.

Contextual Targeting - placing relevant banners near content.

Content Category Targeting- buying online media across specific content sites.

Creative Re-Targeting - Delivering a cookie to a user who has been served a particular ad and following them throughout their experience with the same messaging.

Spanish-language Browser Targeting - targeting the segment of the audience that has set their browser to Spanish.

Read the whole article on MediaPost

Does it make sense to target Spanish Dominant Latinos online?

According to research done by Sensis, a multicultural interactive marketing agency in Los Angeles, "30% of Spanish-dominant Hispanics earning an average of $12,000 have Internet access." 

José Villa, President of Sensis, contends that there is a need for more content that is relevant to this segment of the audience, citing the fact that 40% of the audience that visits www.ElSalvador.com live in the United States.

This article also references Danny Allen from Admixture commenting on research done by the Pew Hispanic Center. According to the "Latinos Online" report from the Pew Hispanic Center, only 32% of Spanish-dominant US Hispanic adults are online. However, the growth in Internet usage by US Hispanics is about twice that of other groups, so the number of US Hispanics online is growing quickly.” 

Source: Portada

Mi Apogeo - taking an innovative approach to reaching an important segment of the online Hispanic Market

MiApogeo.com, which means My Apogy or My Apex, is taking an innovate approach to reach the quickly growing segment of online Hispanics who were raised in the U.S. or are second or third generation.

Adopting the most recent Web 2.0 tools and strategies, MiApogeo features a number of online community building tools to attract and engage this audience, including: 

• WikiLatino(R) - the first user-directed U.S. Latino wiki
• Social networking tools, and
• Culturally relevant content on politics, lifestyle, and the community

The site's founder, Rosa Alonso, explains that MiApogeo is targeting the "transculturated," those Latinos who didn't assimilate, but have moved beyond acculturation.  This audience tends to be young and prefers to read in English, and MiApogeo.com has designed a culturally and linguistically relevant strategy to meet their unique needs.

Source: MarketWatch 

One Label Doesn't Cut It

Two really interesting points from an an article by David Montgomery of the Washington Post highlight the complexity of neatly categorizing Latinos.

Depending on who your asking and who is listening, Latinos may consider themselves similar or very  different. As David explains, "What Latinos like to tell themselves is how much they have in common -- even as they laugh at their differences. What Latinos like others to notice about them is how diverse they are -- and they consider it politically incorrect if not downright hostile for outsiders to lump them all together."

The article also talks about how language is sometimes used as a proxy for identity and the differing media models being used by SiTV and Univision. SiTV focused on the under 30 set, of which a good number are bilingual or favor English, whereas Univision continues to expand its network of Spanishy-language programming.

Jeff Valdez of SíTV points out that "The two media models aren't mutually exclusive," saying that  "about 25 percent of the Latino audience prefers Spanish, about 25 percent prefers English, and about 50 percent is bilingual. That means there's the same-size slice of pie -- 75 percent -- available for English and Spanish outlets.

Read the full article in the Washington Post.

Younger Hispanics Respond Better to Bilingual Online Marketing

In a study conducted on how Hispanic customers participate in Web-based forums, Boston-based social media company Communispace found that "Hispanics are more willing to espouse ideas and commentary in a private, online forum than participants in English-language communities."

However, Communispace found that second-generation Hispanics were less inclined to participate in Spanish-only environments than their first-generation counterparts. The study showed that second-generation Hispanics are often less proficient at writing Spanish than reading it.

The results indicate that marketers should speak to more acculturated Hispanics on both English and Spanish to more closely mirror their offline experiences.  

Source: MarketingDaily

The Complexities of Acculturation in understanding the Hispanic audience - ad:tech, Miami 2008

The ad:tech conference in Miami this week provided some great insights on U.S. Hispanic acculturation. Felipe Korzenny, Professor of Hispanic Marketing at Florida State University, John Gallegos, CEO of Grupo Gallegos, and Natasha Funk, Director of Research for Terra Networks US, discussed the topic during the ad:tech session "Hispanic Audience Segmentation: The Complexities of Acculturation."

Felipe Korzenny provides an excellent definition of acculturation in his book Hispanic Marketing: “the process by which individuals acquire a second culture in addition to their first culture.”

During the panel, Felipe highlighted the evolution of acculturation models from a linear model, which assumed movement from being unacculturated to acculturated, to a bidimensional approach composed of four quadrants - Hispanic Dominant, Culturally Unique, Bicultural and Assimilated. He shared research that indicates that the Hispanic audience skews toward bicultural, and that more often than not Hispanics acculturate but do not abandon their original culture. He also talked about a multi-dimensional model, which breaks segments down by acculturation level and life stage to better understand the makeup of the U.S. Hispanic audiences.

John Gallegos, used "Beto" a bi-cultural Latino from Southern California to illustrate that it is not easy to quantitatively measure an individual's level of acculturation. In the first clip, Beto, speaking fluent English, talks about his use of technology, including his Verizon cell phone and his plans to purchase the most recent dual -operating system Mac, and his entertainment preferences, going to the movies and to clubs to meet people from multiple cultures, both behaviors that are widely shared with the general market. In contrast, in the second clip, Beto is speaking fluent Spanish with a strong Mexican accent and talking about the importance of his Mexican heritage, making numerous music and cultural references that show his in-depth connection with his Mexican culture.

John pointed out that we should see acculturation as just one of the tools in our toolbox to understand the Hispanic audience, not see it as a silver bullet that will provide us with all the answers.

Natasha offered a first glimpse of the results of a study conducted by comScore for Terra that highlight an excellent online target for digital marketers: the highly connected Latina. The results of this research are coming soon. Stay tuned!

ComScore Research for Terra Provides Insights Into Online U.S. Hispanic Market Segments

The recent ComScore study recently released by Terra provides interesting data on how engaged Latinos are with digital media, and provides detailed findings on three specific segments - High, Medium and Light Online Engagement Segments (OES). 

3,500 Latinos were surveyed in January and February of 2008, providing the following research-based characterizations of three online Hispanic user segments:

Characteristics of the Heavy OES:

• predominately male
• foreign born
• live in large cities
• young
• proud of their ethnic heritage
• prefer to speak Spanish at home

Characteristics of the Medium OES:

• generally young, but are more evenly split along gender lines
• more likely to be U.S. born
• more likely to live in New York or Los Angeles than Miami
• typically speak both English and Spanish in the home

Characteristics of the Light OES:

• oldest of the three groups (median age of 33)
• most acculturated (often speaking English exclusively in the home)
• displaying the lowest levels of Latino pride
• most likely to live outside the top five urban Hispanic markets