Agency

The anthropological concept known as ethnography is displacing focus groups at some companies as the main tool for evaluating consumer product use.

In the face of ferocious competition from warehouse shopping clubs, some supermarkets are trying to create a sense of community in their stores, offering cooking classes and enhanced personal services.

Faced with dwindling sales and sagging market share, many supermarkets are making an about-face on store sizes.

Instead of trying to compete with superstores in terms of price by building supermarkets as large as two football fields, stores are downsizing, selling fewer products at higher prices.

Phoenix Marketing International’s most recent market research study reveals that Minority Gamers spend almost twice as much as Caucasian Gamers on monthly electronic gaming purchases.

BURST! Media says that Internet use continues grow at the expense of other “traditional” media such as TV, radio, magazines and newspapers. According to a recent BURST! survey of more than 2,600 web users about changes in their media consumption in the past year, 60.9% respondents said they spend more time on the Internet today than a year ago, with 32.2% spending “much more time” while 28.7% said “somewhat more time.”

The unemployment rate for the foreign born fell to 5.5 percent in 2004, down from 6.6 percent in the prior year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. The jobless rate of the native born also fell to 5.5 percent in 2004, declining from 5.9 percent in the previous year. This news release compares the labor force characteristics of the foreign born with those of their nativeborn counterparts. The data on nativity are collected as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly sample survey of approximately 60,000 households. The foreign born are persons who reside in the United States but who were born outside the country or one of its outlying areas to parents who were not U.S. citizens.

HBO Latin America Group hired the new and recently formed advertising agency, The Lab, to help them create and produce their new image campaign for the Latin American region. The campaign will support the HBO brand as well as the new releases of movies and original series.

Uniting under the common goal of increasing representation of women and minorities on corporate boards, three leadership organizations-Catalyst, The Executive Leadership Council, and Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility (HACR)-today announced their collaboration as the Alliance for Board Diversity and released the results of their first joint research, Women and Minorities on Fortune 100 Boards, which assesses diversity in the boardrooms of the Fortune 100 companies.

Auditorium Circle, an area in the heart of downtown San Antonio known for cultural events at the Municipal Auditorium, has a new face on the block with the completion of a 9-month revitalization project. Creative Civilization – An Aguilar/Girard Agency is the anchor tenant at 106 Auditorium Circle occupying the entire 15,000 square foot second floor.

A new analysis of remittances – the money sent by immigrant workers in the U.S. to family members abroad – by the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest national Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S., affirms that reforming the $45 billion Latino remittance transfer market could help put Hispanics on a path toward greater prosperity and wealth.

The Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility released its final rankings and results of its groundbreaking HACR Corporate Index survey. The Index measured FORTUNE 100 inclusion of the Hispanic community across five distinct areas of their business models, including corporate executive leadership, corporate governance, workforce representation, Hispanic community market share and reciprocity, and minority supplier outreach and development.