Market Focus: US Hispanics Online
If you're interested in the U.S. Hispanic market, you should attend ad:tech Miami, since its focused on Hispanics online. Currently 15% of the broader market is Hispanic, and this will grow to 19% by 2020. The Hispanic population is growing four times faster than general population, however spending for the Hispanic segment isn't proportional. It's also a young market.
I am surprised that so many of the presenters felt the need to reinforce how the market size for Hispanics is worth marketing to. IMHO, it's generally known that Hispanics are the up and coming minority that represents a huge opportunity for those that get in first.
One of the panel noted that research has shown that the perception that Hispanics are technologically behind is false. One example: cellphone adoption, which is 90% in the Hispanic community. In many areas (DVD players, taking pics with cellphones, etc) the Hispanic population has higher usage than the general population. Broadband penetration is also higher than the general population, so Hispanics can be reached with streaming media.
The trends are showing that the younger Hispanics are the ones that are most aggressively adopting new technology.
One presenter commented that quite a lot of Hispanic consumers, when visiting a Spanish site, change the language to English - there is a Hispanic segment that is clearly more comfortable using the net in English.
One of the panelists talked about how in shopping online, US Hispanics are shopping at the same rate as the general population, and are spending money. However they generally prefer to have Spanish language websites. What is interesting is that many Hispanics would shop the site in Spanish, but for making the order they switch over to the English shopping cart in order to make sure they are getting the best deal. However they said that keeping the Spanish version of the site up is critical and can hurt your overall conversion rate if you remove it and just support English.
A good question was asked by an audience member: given so many diverse versions of Spanish (Cuban Spanish, Miami Spanish, Mexican Spanish, etc.), which is the language to use for communicating with users. The panelist from Terra responded that in the TV world they use "broadcast Spanish", which is a more generic version of Spanish that works for the entire latin universe. Another panelist made the point that the content is the most important part, and if the content is good, he'll read any type of Spanish.
