Puerto Rico the talent pool for the US Hispanic Ad Industry — Understanding The Opportunity

As many of our readers have read through our publication HispanicAd.com, the island of Puerto Rico is suffering a severe economic downturn and the flight of executives to the US mainland has increased dramatically in recent years from many industries.

You can attribute the flight to economic stagnation and a over-dependence on government entitlements, crime or just plain lack of opportunities and growth.

The advertising and media industry in Puerto Rico has been in a BRAIN RECESSION way before the economic downturn of the island.  You have an executive base of advertising and marketing professional that are educated in the US & Puerto Rico, bilingual, US Citizens but caught in an advertising model that does not benefit the clients marketing ROI or the Industry at large.

The Media Mix Paradigm in Puerto Rico is based on the though that it does not matter if a medium is ineffective or inefficient in reaching your target audience, the majority of the media allocations are based on which media company offers the best incentives to the ad agency, some think clients as well, called Volume Discount.  A system that in the USA, would be called a kickback.  Plain & Simple, this model thwarts the ability to create impactful, meaningful and ROI driven ad campaigns.

The alternative new media vehicle on the island encounter a brick wall when trying to sell their platforms to agencies and advertisers for inclusion, when it challenges the business and profitability model of many agencies.

A good friend in the Puerto Rico Ad Business told me as a joke, but is holds true, the top five buyers and the top five sellers once a year get together at a Bar-B-Q and lay out the “media shares of the ad pie” for a full year in someone’s backyard.

A joke or statement, which does not generate a positive or negative reaction from anyone in the ad business on the island, just everyone walks away from the truth of The Secret.

It has become such a problem, that a couple of years ago, a Beer Account was pursued by one agency promising the client that they did not need a fee for service if they left another agency that had a long standing relationship with the account, they would take the account just based on the Volume Discount.  The local agency association and the agencies in town were in an uproar about this, which forced the agency using the negotiation tactic to rescind the offer to the Beer Account.

If the model works for the Industry and the clients, so be it.  They also need to understand the side effects of their model.

All of these factors have created a major lack of opportunity for mid-level executives on the island, hence lays the opportunity for the US Hispanic Market.

In full disclosure, the BRAIN RECESSION in Puerto Rico has impacted our efforts on the island with our publication ADnotas.com we started nine (9) years ago and the inability to find a sustainable relationship with advertisers even though we have 6,000+ business subscribers on the island.  The provincial nature of the ad business on the island knocked us out, regardless that we had grown up with many advertising agency executives on the island.  Lesson Learned.

The opportunity arises from the BRAIN RECESSION in Puerto Rico.

There are executives that have been classical trained in the advertising arts and skill-set of the top mainland mainstream ad agencies in account planning, media planning and definitively creative.

The ability to bring variety and highly trained executives to enhance the US Hispanic advertising, marketing, media, public relations bloodlines is a step towards growing our business.

They are all waiting for opportunities to exercise their craft and the US Hispanic Market offers these opportunities.

Should you be looking for top account, planning and creative executives, we can give you a hand looking in Puerto Rico.

Eugenio (Gene) Bryan

CEO