High Point To Hispanic Marketers: ‘Turnabout Is Fair Play’

By Adam R Jacobson

Total-market agencies are changing and adapting to a difficult economic environment by “going after your dollars,” motivational advertising industry consultant Robb High said this morning during a session at the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies (AHAA) annual conference, underway at the Eden Roc hotel in Miami Beach.

Noting that CMOs “don’t get” in-culture marketing and are yielding to general-market agencies that are “going to continue to push and push and push … because they want all the money,” High suggested that Hispanic advertising agencies get aggressive, and start to retaliate.

“Turnabout is fair play,” High told the hundreds of session attendees. “I say you should evolve and become a full-service general-market agency, along with being killer good in the Hispanic market. Doing so is not easy, and you have to change the perceptions of clients as well.

Hispanic market agencies, “under attack from the general market agencies, have no choice but to fight back in order to maintain viability as a business,” High says. How to start the fight is to work with Hispanic-centric brands already active in the marketplace, he suggests.

High also discussed the evolution of digital marketing, remarking that the general-market agency’s “interactive department” is now the entire agency.

High, a former CMO at Young & Rubicam Group and COO of Kirshenbaum & Bond, also offered a future vision on television advertising, saying that it will continue to be the “best mechanism for making consumer connections on a mass level, but the nature of TV advertising will change,” he says. “We will no longer be living in an environment with 14 minutes of commercial communication. Advertising is no longer locked in to a 30-second world.”

Courtesy of http://jakeadams.net>