Socialistas Make Face Time

I was laughing to myself in the subway on the way to work. I saw the campaign for Dentyne with the tagline, Make Face Time. The campaign in a nutshell tells folks to log off the computer and have more interpersonal interaction. I started to wonder, is this relevant to Hispanics?

Over the past 12-months, the Hispanic online population boomed. The online universe of Latinos grew 19% while the overall audience stayed relatively flat. What’s more interesting is where that audience has gone. It’s not Univision.com or Terra.com, two top Spanish-Language networks. Nope. Those sites actually saw decreases in audience.

The winner. MySpace. Their Latino audience surged an incredible 293% over the past year. Not only that, but Latinos are going to the site daily and spending a lot of time interacting with friends.

Social networking sites are popular with everyone. But for us Latinos, social networking sites are like steroids for our social ways. We’re more likely to have extensive daily interaction with more people and social networks allow us to broaden our scope further. What can we say, we like being friendly.

So does the Dentyne campaign work for our market? Hardly. If you look at the stuff that Hispanics are doing on MySpace or Facebook, it’s facilitating face time, not impeding it. We’re making arrangements to meet in person, sending invites, keeping tabs on friends in South America and reading and commenting on friend’s updates. “Lucinda is bored out of her mind.” - “Lucy, quit your job and come have a drink at Perfect Pint.”