Cynopsis Media presents:
12.13.10
Good morning. It’s Monday, December 13, 2010, and this is the final installment of our special five-part series on Demographic Viewing Patterns. Evaluated by category, each Special E-Report explores the latest research on viewing patterns and evolving media preferences of specific demographic groups. All five of these reports can be found on our website under the Special Editions tab here.
Hispanic Market /Viewers
by Daisy Whitney
There are very few demographic segments in the media business that can lay claim to organic growth. One of the few that can is the Hispanic market and it’s growing like gangbusters. The expansion is fueled by the meteoric rise in the Hispanic population in the United States. That’s why networks like Univision and Telemundo are registering jaw-dropping advertising and viewership increases – both networks signed more than 50 new advertisers each during the past upfront.
And like many other consumer groups, research is showing that Hispanics are voracious adopters of new media, including VOD, Web video and mobile phones.
In fact, a recent Simmons study found that the number of Hispanics who watch online video increased 49% this year from 2009. The study also showed that Hispanics are 35% more likely to watch videos, TV programs or movies on the Internet than non-Hispanics. Given their fluency with new media and the overall growth, TV networks and media agencies are adopting more sophisticated tools to better reach Hispanics and other multicultural consumers.
“You need to speak to Hispanics in a way that is smart and provocative because marketers are realizing if they can win with Hispanics they can drive top line growth,” said Jacqueline Hernadez, Chief Operating Officer at Telemundo. “We’re not saying to reach Hispanics you have to do it Spanish. But you have to message in a way that is culturally relevant.”
Marketers will indeed have the greatest success in mining the Hispanic opportunity if they consider all the nuances of their consumers, said Jim Nichols, Senior Partner for Strategy with ad agency Catalyst SF. “The real opportunity for Hispanic TV is viewing the market as a spectrum, not a black versus white, Spanish language versus general market polarity. TBS gets it. George Lopez on late night is genius because it captures an assimilating Latino and a Hispanicizing Anglo pop culture. That’s most of America, not an unassimilated sliver.”
To better understand its audience, Telemundo partnered with Starcom Mediavest earlier this year to conduct a study on the Hispanic market. The way the Latino community has been defined previously is quite limited, said Danielle Cherry, VP Cultural Activation Development Director at Starcom Mediavest Group. “We wanted to put a stake in the ground and design insights to get to the core of who someone is,” she said. With the study, Starcom Mediavest developed profiles of different “identities” of Hispanics according to factors like global views, social interests, spirituality, achievement and cultural heritage. Starcom Mediavest then fused that research with Simmons data to create a customized look into the range of Hispanic consumers. That’s being used to better inform media buying across TV and other mediums.
Insights like this can help networks develop more tailored programs for advertisers. For instance, to reach the new Latina woman, known as MIA for Modern Independent Achiever, Telemundo is developing a short series called “Mia’s Mundo” to run on-air as “minisodes” with online and streaming extensions, Hernandez said. She’s currently in talks with advertisers about sponsorships for the show.
Telemundo has also been incorporating social media into many advertising and programming efforts. During the Miss Universe pageant this summer, the network used social media to drive viewers to the Web to vote on their favorite countries. Fruit of the Loom was integrated into the initiative. ESPN Deportes is also finding cross-platform tie-ins work because Hispanic sports fans are often platform agnostic and consume sports across venues.
In addition to understanding the consumer, networks are researching how Hispanic viewers respond to ads. ESPN Deportes found in its Hispanic Sports Fan Poll that 77% of Spanish speaking Hispanics feel loyal towards companies that sponsor events or sports they enjoy.
The Census is expected to show tremendous growth in the Hispanic population when data is revealed next year. Already, networks are anticipating big increases in their audience base. About 75% of all U.S. Hispanics speak Spanish at home and that trend should continue for the next decade, said Debbie Shinnick, SVP/Network Research at Univision. “We’re looking at 45 million Hispanics speaking Spanish at home in 2019, up from 33 million now,” she said.
That number is important to bear in mind because many Spanish-speaking viewers prefer Spanish-language content over English language programming. According to Nielsen, 23 of the top 25 programs among adults 18-49 bilingual audiences are, in fact, in the Spanish language. Almost three-quarters of Hispanics born in the U.S. watch Spanish-language broadcasts, said Mexican-targeted network Mexicanal citing Ecuesta research.
ESPN Deportes is seeing the benefits of a wide range of content offerings. “With ESPN Deportes we super-serve Spanish-dominant Hispanics and bilingual Latinos, while we also capture the English-preferred/English dominant Latino with ESPN’s English-language offering.In2009 more than 70% of Hispanics M12+ watched, read, listened to or logged on to ESPN branded medium,” said Michelle Bella, VP Sales and Consumer Marketing for ESPN Deportes.
Beyond Telemundo and Univision
Other networks target Hispanics too, such as CNN en Espanol, Discovery en Espanol and Fox Sports en Espanol. There’s also Mexicanal, which reaches 4.6 million Hispanic homes and is carried in some Comcast markets, via digital broadcast and on DirectTV’s Hispanic TV tier.
Beyond Hispanics, marketers are focusing on other cultural groups too. Clearly, a network like BET attracts a strong African-American audience with its presence in more than 90 million cable homes in the United States. The network said just last week that its music countdown show 106 & PARK had its best month ever in ratings in November and has been the top-rated music variety show on cable for the last 14 quarters in adults 18-49.
Then there’s emerging network MNet focusing on Asian pop culture and multicultural networks KarmaLoopTV that launches next summer. The network grew out of a street culture clothing line. The company’s CEO Greg Selkoe refers to the audience as “verge culture” an Internet savvy, creative, multiracial 18-34 demo. The linear channel will be an outgrowth of the Web site KarmaLoopTV.com that logs 4.5 million unique visitors each month.
“We have a country of 300 million people and in time race is going to be much less prevalent for people to identify themselves as the black market or the Asian market or the Latino Market. The world is changing pretty rapidly and soon there will be no majority race,” he said.
The Demographic Viewing Patterns 5-part series is available to read or download on the Cynopsis website in our Special Editions section.
Later —
Daisy Whitney for Cynopsis Media
12.13.10
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