Kudos to mun2.

Last week’s New York City conference unveiling mun2’s Latino youth study once again confirmed what still confounds many General Market and Hispanic ad agencies: Latino youth do not want to be forced into choosing one culture over the other. As one of the conference panelists pointed out, Young Latino Americans (YLAs)-as the study calls them-are not pre-binary (“this or that”); they are sometimes Latino and sometimes American, depending on how they’re feeling at the time.

But through the relatively mild Q&A, it was Prof. Marcelo Suarez-Orozco who made a reference to the “elephant in the room,” that thing that somehow still intimidates many Hispanic ad agencies from fully embracing Latino youth culture. Yes, that big monster of a TV network that recently celebrated their Premios. It was quite exciting to hear so much valuable information about a burgeoning Latino segment but I couldn’t help but think about the hesitation that many marketers would have in embracing this study simply because it is so different from what they’ve heard from the traditional sources.

As I listened to the presenters and panelists, I was reminded of another urban segment that didn’t exactly grab advertisers’ attention when it first emerged: the hip-hop crowd. I can still remember when a little-known group of rappers named Run-DMC came to my college campus. People were just starting to hear about this thing called “hip-hop.” Little did they know that it would grow from just a small rag-tag of rappers and scratchers to a cultural force that today is at the vanguard of popular culture and fashion trends.

So what triggered the wave? Hip-hop culture was growing on its own, but it was catapulted into the spotlight when it was embraced by the mainstream media-when MTV starting showing hip-hop/rap videos, and when fashion and entertainment-oriented magazines started covering it. The “mainstreaming” of the YLA culture kept coming up in the mun2 conference, but it was never fully explored.

A couple of the speakers spoke about their expectation (or desire) that media will embrace the urban Latino culture, but no one offered any concrete predictions. To be sure, channels like mun2 are doing their part and fueling the market but what about the mainstream media? In some ways it is already happening. The Fox network is reaching urban Latinos through its programming (think “American Idol” or “The Simpsons”). And it won’t necessarily take another major TV network to accelerate the growth of the urban Latino (or YLA) culture. It will be YLAs themselves.

Just like the hip-hoppers demonstrated, once urban Latinos see more of themselves in mainstream media, they will be charged and begin to assert themselves socially. What we know as “American” culture is being transformed. The more Eva Longorias and Daddy Yankees young urban Latinos see or read about in mainstream media, the more they will assert their dual worlds-their dual identities. “American” culture will never be the same, just like it was never the same after hip-hop came on the scene.

Urban Latinos will continue with their bicultural lifestyles, but they have already started putting their foot down and leaving their imprints on the American scene. So, while the mun2 study found that “79% of YLAs cannot identify a brand or company that is accurately targeting Latinos,” perhaps after a while it won’t matter. Young urban African-Americans tend to gravitate toward brands which they feel they created. Young urban Latinos will do the same. It won’t matter what Univision, Hispanic or General Market ad agencies will think. That’s when the savvy marketers

Courtesy of Manny Gonzalez
Managing Consultant, Zyman Group, Marketing to Hispanics (M2H) Practice