Agency

The Mexican-born population in the U.S. has continued to increase but the rate of growth appears to have slowed beginning in mid-2006. This preliminary assessment is based on data that indirectly reflect the pace of migration over time.

Segmentation is more than a way to classify the market. It acts as a strategic framework for understanding, marketing to, and reaching customers and prospects. Taken to its fullest potential, segmentation provides the organizing principle—the lingua franca—for the way the entire organization thinks about its customers and prospects.

How do you get your clients excited and committed to your market? I have found the variety of approaches we multicultural marketing professionals take to sell our market to corporate America inspiring, amusing and at times, just flat out embarrassing. And while we have become more sophisticated in communicating our target’s business value, it is fair to say that the most important step in marketing brands to Latinos starts with “marketing latinos” to brands.

Search Engine Strategies (SES) is hosting the second annual Search Engine Strategies (SES) Latino Conference and Expo in Miami, Florida, on June 18-19, 2007. Executives and their marketing and web development teams will attend the event to gain insight on how to reach this highly lucrative Spanish and Portuguese speaking audience. SES Latino will offer its sessions in English along with live translation in Spanish and Portuguese.

Each year, the major U.S. cigarette and smokeless tobacco companies must submit reports to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that outline the total amounts they have spent to market the products they sell and the amounts they have spent in different marketing categories (such as magazine and newspaper ads, internet advertising, coupons, promotional expenditures at retail outlets, direct mail, and the like). The 2005 total includes $13.1 billion in cigarette marketing and $250.8 million in smokeless tobacco marketing. In 1998, the tobacco companies spent $6.9 billion on marketing ($6.7 billion for cigarettes and $145.5 million for smokeless tobacco).

Madison Avenue’s scramble for digital media and advertising services is a drive to remain relevant and to avoid being subsumed by bigger, far more capitalized players. That seems to be the picture emerging after an unprecedented series of deals that have consolidated some $12 billion in digital advertising services in the hands of big agency holding companies like Publicis, Interpublic and WPP, as well as two outside players: Google and Microsoft. Microsoft’s acquisition of aQuantive, in particular, looks to be a game-changing deal, making the software giant one of the biggest players in the ad industry.

The high costs of prescription drugs led many Hispanics and African Americans to take desperate measures, like delaying filling a prescription or skipping doses, according to a new AARP national study of adults 18 plus. The study also found a high level of support in the Hispanic and African American communities for state legislation to make prescription drugs more affordable.

New consumer research from Leichtman Research Group, Inc. (LRG) finds that 23% of all TV sets in consumers’ homes do not receive cable or Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) programming. This represents over 70 million TV sets in US households that only receive over-the-air broadcast television.

The broad picture of a niche medium.

It would be a mistake to think that the average podcast user is a 23-year-old male with a college education and a really big comic book collection. Podcast users are not a homogeneous group, and downloads range from music to religious broadcasts to museum tours.

That said, overall podcasting user demographics give a broad perspective on the medium.

Use a charcoal or gas grill? Prefer a full-size or portable grill? Serve chicken or hamburger? Who is more confident mastering the grill? The answers to these and other questions surprisingly varied between Hispanics and Americans overall, according to this year’s Weber Hispanic GrillWatch Survey, the country’s most comprehensive study on Hispanics’ grilling habits associated with ownership, usage, foods, and entertaining.

In case you are not familiar with these variables, let me explain. They are a measurement of your share of voice in advertising.

The Disney-ABC Television Group and Sprint announced that Sprint customers can now access a comprehensive portfolio of news and entertainment video programming from ABC Entertainment, ABC News and Disney Channel.

Not long ago, the Hispanic market was considered marginal by many businesses, being perceived as a largely immigrant group with income, language, and educational limitations. Today, with the commoditization of the concept of acculturation and the emergence of bicultural TV networks, no one argues that Hispanics are an appealing market segment that goes beyond the classic preconceptions to encompass more affluent, hip, bilingual and bicultural consumers. While this shift from low value to high value is important, there is an emerging shift that promises to elevate the role of Hispanics even to a higher level: Hispanics are moving from being a market in itself to being a strategic tool for competitive advantage in the general market. Those who chose to leverage the influencing power of “The Latino” in the crowded general market will profit from the next in strategic marketing.