For a moment in time, agencies and brands upped their efforts to reach diverse audiences and spend on diverse-owned media.
But that hype has since petered out, says Rene Alegria, president and CEO of Mundo Hispano Digital, which owns news and entertainment site MundoNow.com. Protests following the death of George Floyd forced more attention on minority representation, and the rallying cries for equality spilled over into ad budget decisioning.
Fast-forward to 2024, and DEI budgets have only gotten smaller since their heyday in 2020, Alegria says.
Meanwhile, the US Hispanic population keeps growing – one in four Gen Zers in the US are Hispanic. MundoNow caters to a subset of the Hispanic audience, focusing on bilingual US Hispanic people who primarily speak English. Its products include an audience extension product launched in April that connects MundoNow’s first-party data to that of CTV programmers.
The group includes most US-born Hispanic people. About 91% of US-born Hispanic people are proficient in English, according to Pew Research Center. But, according to Alegria, advertisers often overlook much of this audience in favor of reaching only Spanish-speaking users.
I sat down with Alegria to get some hot takes about the reality of marketing to US Hispanic consumers.
On buyer demand for reaching US Hispanic audiences: “Many budgets earmarked for minority publishers are getting smaller. Agencies are cutting their DEI budgets, and we’re left with less ad spend. For us, that dilemma made CTV a lifeline because it promises scale.”
On using data to target US Hispanic people: “Corporate America is used to categorizing Hispanic people as Spanish-speaking, and so the ad industry has invested much more in researching the habits of Spanish-language households. This is why the bilingual, English-dominant population is the crown jewel of Hispanic audiences: They’re the most elusive and hardest to target. They can also blend in with general-market audiences that consume similar content.”
On English-speaking Hispanic audiences: “Pitching bilingual Hispanics that primarily speak English as a target audience has been a thorn in agencies’ sides. They’re not properly equipped to market to this audience because they’re used to categorizing Hispanic audiences as Spanish only. But if you’re not including bilingual people in your media plan, you’re missing the boat big time.”
On the value of CTV: “CTV is becoming the bridge between viewers and advertisers trying to reach the right Hispanic audiences for their brand. The more limited inventory makes it easier for us to prove there’s a huge overlap in content consumption habits between general-market audiences and US Hispanic viewers that mostly speak English. We don’t have to try as hard to convince advertisers they should be buying inventory that reaches the bilingual US Hispanic population.”
Answers have been lightly edited and condensed.
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