Agency

Real median household income in the United States rose by 1.1 percent between 2004 and 2005, reaching $46,326, according to a report released by the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile, the nation’s official poverty rate remained statistically unchanged at 12.6 percent. The percentage of people without health insurance coverage rose from 15.6 percent to 15.9 percent (46.6 million people).

Since reaching an historic low in 2000, over the last seven years, the number of children living in poverty in the United States has grown by 11.3 percent to approach 13 million, even after a 145,000 child improvement in 2005, according to an analysis by the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) of U.S. Census Bureau.

Hispanic buying power in the United States will draw even with African-American buying power in 2006 – at just under $800 billion – and is projected to exceed it in 2007, according to a report on minority buying power released by the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business.

Advertising spending for the first half of 2006 rose by 5.1% over the same period last year, due to gains across major media, according to preliminary figures released by Nielsen Monitor-Plus, the advertising intelligence service of Nielsen Media Research.

Nielsen Media Research released updated television household estimates — called universe estimates — for Hispanic, African-American and Asian-American TV households in its 210 local television markets, also called Designated Market Areas (DMAs).

In America’s Anglo society, people living in Spanish-speaking households are sometimes regarded as second-class citizens. In October, if they happen to live in a Nielsen household, they’ll begin getting some first-class treatment. In a plan unveiled to clients on Tuesday, Nielsen Media Research said it would begin paying Spanish-speaking households more money to be part of its TV ratings service than Hispanic households where English is the dominant language. The goal, the company said, is to boost the number of Spanish-speaking households in its sample in order to make it more representative of the U.S. population.

Dallas based Dieste Harmel and Partners has named Aldo Quevedo as the new President and Chief Creative Officer of the agency. Tony Dieste become the Chairman and Chief Idea Officer at the same time, Warren Harmel becomes the CEO and Chief Insight Officer.

As a leader, you have a clear vision for your company and are 100 percent committed to pursuing it. But something is going wrong between the creation of that vision and your company’s ability to make it happen. What that something might be is all too often a murky mystery. If you can relate to this scenario, your company is suffering from what Rick Lepsinger, president of OnPoint Consulting, calls “the strategy-execution gap.” In an effort to quantify this pervasive, frustrating problem, he conducted a survey . . . and the results were stunning.

Th**************@********Ad.com wishes you a safe Labor Day weekend.

On Friday of this week, all mainstream agencies in the final phase of the agency review process have been requested to appear for a briefing of the last round of the agency review. Along with the invitation to all mainstream agencies, all multicultural agencies in the last round have also been invited to observe the process.

Sitting in the bushes overlooking the Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas we have place our HispanicAd.com cyber camera. We expect to see incumbent Houston-based Lopez Negrete Communications, Austin-based LatinWorks and Miami-based Accentmarketing joining the briefings.

Could there be a wildcard?

We will have to wait and see if our cyber-camera tells all.