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Hispanicize Attendees

During the weekend of April 11th-13th, Miami played host to a gathering of bloggers, social media mavens, marketers, filmmakers, non-profit professionals and more at the Hispanicize 2012 conference. Though I was unable to attend, I followed Gus Razzetti’s blog at Clickz to read highlights of the conference. Though reading a second-hand account can’t take the place of being there and interacting with people, I found the following nuggets rather interesting:

From the Hispanic agency side, one panel confessed that there is pressure from clients to “ask what’s Latino about a specific idea instead of focusing on if the idea is good or not, pushing agencies to make it more stereotypical”. This is insightful for me, as I often see very stereotypical ads targeting the Hispanic market and wonder, who came up with this? Unfortunately, I can see how it’s easy to give in to the pressure to not necessarily make it good, but make it Latino.

Telemundo’s telenovela ‘Relaciones Peligrosas’ has shown how to use social media to attract an audience: By having social media as an integral component since day one, the Latino TV network started to build a deep engagement with its fans. Personal Twitter accounts were created for each of the main characters, providing them with a BlackBerry and training into social media best practices. Study after study has shown that Latinos overindex on social media. Combine frequent use of Facebook and Twitter with viewership of novelas- something that always gets fans talking- and you have a recipe for solid engagement with fans.

Lastly, while it is good to take note of the fact that the surge in the Latino population comes from American-born Latinos who are English dominant, it is still wise to take a measured approach; that is, not doing exclusively Spanish or exclusively English, but rather looking at things on a case by case basis. Razzetti writes: Data and consumer behavior shows that Latinos’ reality is more complex, showing a more bilingual behavior when it comes to language and media usage….Why would NBC or FOX or Google invest millions in creating new media options (either in Spanish or both) if their current English content is already “capturing” Latinos’ preferences?

All in all, it looks like the organizers put together a successful conference.