Communications Crossroads - Fall 2007 - (Page 13)

Growing Market for International Programming Keith Galitz, president of Canby Telecom in Oregon, can tell you that the immigration trends in this country don’t apply only to Texas, California, and New York. “We have a fairly large Spanish-speaking population in Canby,” he reports. He estimates it at about 10-15% of the population. “We’re a rural community outside of Portland Oregon that is focused primarily on growing nursery stock,” like Christmas trees and rhododendrons, and Hispanics have migrated there to do agricultural work. “We’re not the only community in the area. Oregon has about 11 telephone cooperatives. Five of those are in the Portland metropolitan area. All ﬁve would tell you they see this [population trend].” Canby Telecom wanted to serve that part of the market, and so for many years they’ve offered bilingual customer care. In 2005, Canby started offering what they call the Latin Tier—mostly Mexican television, with some video on demand—in advertising, but hasn’t found that they have to promote it much. “We think it’s something we’re glad we got into, and we need to stay in it. We think the Latin Tier is a good addition to our product offering.” So far, Galitz hasn’t found other ethnic communities in his area large enough to require specialized programming. His advice to other telecom executives is “look to see if the package is the right one for your speciﬁc population. Some are more focused on South America. We needed Mexico.” Though Mexican programming is right for Canby, it’s a mistake to assume, as many do, that the only ethnic market of any size is Hispanic. “The Hispanic market is so large in the U.S. that it is no longer considered ethnic,” says Emrah Ozkan, President of Home2US. He points to other key ethnic markets in the U.S.: “The whole Balkans and the former Eastern Europe is, I would say, the next most important market after the Latino.” He estimates that this amounts to about 5 to 6 million people, not including those from Russia. Additionally, there are about 800,000 Albanians in the country—“many living primarily in the Las Vegas area.” He anticipates that the next big markets will be immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Fall 2007 COMMUNICATIONS CROSSROADS 13

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Communications Crossroads - Fall 2007

Up Front Contents TeleBites Cover Story: The World at Your Doorstep Business Advantages: Reaching Out to the Fast-Growing Hispanic Market Technology Today: Ideas from Foreign Telecoms You Should Consider Industry Calendar Index to Advertisers People Straight Talk

Communications Crossroads - Fall 2007

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