Electronic Retailer - May 2011 - 46

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PENETRATING THE U.S. HISPANIC MARKET

“The bottom line is, the more people you reach, the more you sell. The U.S. Hispanic market is undoubtedly profitable, and it translates well to the retail market.”
– Bob Pearlman, president of Best Buys Direct
social media channels are growing at a fast pace, TV continues to be the majority of most companies’ ad spend. In-language advertising resonates best with the Hispanic audience and will positively complement English language advertising of the same campaign. And increasingly, high-performance creative content is being tailored to fit the tastes of the new U.S. Hispanic consumer, who wants high-quality content in any language and will not be as tolerant of advertising that is prepared with second-tier production values solely because it is in Spanish.

Television: Continues to be Most Marketers’ Best Bet
In recent years, Hispanic “pay television networks” – cable channels or direct broadcast satellite networks targeting U.S. Hispanic viewers – have grown from five to more than 70 networks, with new networks emerging to target specific segments of the U.S. Hispanic population. Generally, marketers should perform their initial test on TV because it provides the largest reach in the shortest amount of time to understand a campaign’s mass market appeal. Although web, mobile and

Inventory availability for U.S. Hispanic media does not necessarily follow the same trends as in the Englishlanguage market, and therefore, direct response marketers should not always follow the same buying patterns. Major Hispanic-focused events, such as the World Cup and certain news stories, will have a bigger impact on Hispanic buying than English-language buying. In addition, two-minute and other short-form formats are often very limited in larger Spanish-language networks but can often be obtained on the smaller ethnic cable stations at a lower cost and will work as a good test run for a new product. Your media partner should know the timely trends that affect media availability and rates and, as such, develop a plan that optimizes your budget and results. Phil Estevez, senior manager at Dish Latino, notes that in the past year DRTV has seen a tremendous rise of the general marketer looking to reach the Latino consumer, and, in particular, using the DR model to enhance branding efforts and lead generation. “We have seen an infusion of more and more hybrid DR account advertisers largely from the insurance and telecommunications industries,” he says. “Accounts that are typically branding advertisers have launched direct response campaigns to benefit from the media efficiencies and ROI [return on investment] tracking that DR has to offer. Our revenue has grown two- to three-fold in the past year from these hybrid advertisers, and national Spanish cable networks in general have benefitted substantially from this trend.” Because of its mass appeal and proliferation, Spanish language TV is often utilized to support a “brand-response” campaign for retail sales. There are a significant number of major U.S. metropolitan markets that show 30 percent and higher concentration of Hispanics. Because many big-box retailers cater to these markets, we have seen our clients experience significant sales lift when running a Spanish language retail sup-

electronicRETAILER | May 2011

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Electronic Retailer - May 2011

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