The New Record Label - You

A group of friends hanging by a river were horsing around when they came up with a song as they were jamming. One of the men in the group pulled out his cell phone and recorded it. Everyone loved it and they forwarded it to eachother as a ringtone. And they forwarded it to friends, and then their friends forwarded it and so on and so on. Within a few months, that song would be uploaded to Youtube and played over a half million times with fans posting their own music videos. The song eventually becomes a Top 10 hit in both the US and Mexico on Billboard's Latin Music List. Sound unlikely?

Well this is real. This scenario happend to an amateur Mexican regional grupero band called Los Picadientes de Caborca (The Caborca teeth-pickers.) This assortment of musical rejects now find themselves on tour and having daily phone interviews with radio DJs while being chased by fans. The best part - they don't have to share any profits from sales of their single, La Cumbia del Rio, with a record company. In fact, record companies are stalking them to get in on the action.

The web's transformative power on the music industry is so prolific that new models of doing business are explored every day. Just two months ago, Cucu Diamantes, a relatively well-known singer and former front woman of a Latin band, Yerba Buena, launched her solo album, Cuculand, exclusively online with the help on iTunes and MySpace. Her video for her single, Mas Fuerte, is now a Top 20 video favorite.

What all this means for Hispanic music lovers is that there will be more options for them and less control on the type of music we gain access to by the music labels. Now our biggest challenge is finding all of this great music, which is a fun problem to have.

Hispanic Movie Viewers

Hispanics are avid movie watchers and no doubt helped the fourth installment of Fast & Furious become #1 at the box office this weekend. In 2007, Nielsen EDI estimated that Hispanics accounted for 33% of all moviegoers. That is more than double what Hispanics represent to the national population.

To understand the scale of this, Hispanics purchased 297 million movie tickets in 2007 compared to 150 million for African Americans. Hispanics also go to the movies more often purchasing 10.8 tickets per person vs. 7.9 for the general population.

The importance of Hispanics to Hollywood is clear. Given our propensity for downloading content online, it seems natural that the movie business should be catering to this audience online. Yet movies distribution on the web is still a frontier of pirated content. No studio is willing to release the grip of movies on the internet because of fear that their industry will go the way of the music business.

While certainly this is a realistic fear - Apple's itunes proved that digital content distribution can be profitable if properly managed. If movie studios don't make the first move soon on the web, no doubt tech savvy Hispanics will do the job for them and likely will choose a free content based model.

Hispanics and Sports - Futbol vs. Football

The second reason why Acculturated Latinos choose Hispanic targeted media in Spanish is really quite simple: soccer. Or actually, let's call it futbol since that is how we refer to it.

For non-Hispanic Americans, it's hard to comprehend how large an audience futbol commands. Futbol for them is a children's game that minivan moms shuttle their kids to practice after school. Maybe, they cite the World Cup, the tournament that grips the globe every four years. Of course, by globe we mean every country except the majority of people in the U.S.

But futbol is a religion to Hispanic Americans. It doesn't matter if you are U.S. born or foreign born, acculturating or unacculturated. The fact of the matter is, soccer is king.

Sure, the NFL commands a pretty large Hispanic audience - last year the league drew 70% of Hispanics. But, the recent World Cup qualifying match between the USA and Mexico reached about 85% of all Hispanics (male or female, young or old) through television, radio, online and mobile. Also, there's a reason why the Spanish word for futbol fans is "hinchas," which means "to pump" as in the act of pumping the very soccer balls they use to play the game. Hispanic fans are as integral to the game as the actual ball they kick along the pitch.

Going back to the original point of this two-part post, sure you can reach more acculturated Hispanics via general market media. But, let's be honest...reach isn't really the name of the proverbial game these days, it's "engagement" or "connection" or "breaking-through" to this audience. You can ignore the opportunity to address this attractive target at your peril, but make no mistake that your competition may not be so cautious.

The Power of Spanish-Language News

Clients often tell me that they adequately reach "acculturated" Hispanics via their general market media plans. They also believe that English Dominant Hispanics simply do not watch or read Spanish-language media, despite data that shows a portion of them do. Why would they consume Hispanic targeted media if they speak English? Well, options for one. But really, it boils down to two words: News and Sports.

Today, let's tackle news. Hispanic focused news organizations cover topics that general market news bureaus just don't touch: immigration, inner city education, workplace injustice and information on legal and government processes.

But more importantly, the lens that Spanish-language news organizations use to filter information is far different. Don't believe me? Let's look at an example.

A lot of digital "ink" has been used to cover Mexico's violent war against the drug cartels which have left over 8,000 dead. Today, NYTimes.com featured a piece on the escalating violence and spoke about the corruption of police forces, the flow of money and weapons from the U.S. into Mexico and the aid that Mexico will receive from the U.S.

Now, look at a piece on Univision.com that highlights the dead, particularly the "good" authorities that have been murdered by the drug cartels for refusing bribes.

No doubt, American media has a very particular point-of-view on Mexico, Mexico's systems and certainly, it's "third world" or "developing" status. Yet we Hispanic-Americans have a more nuanced and arguably, accurate perspective on our countries of origin. Spanish-language news organizations give us a better picture on what is occuring there and discuss topics like the human toll of this war, something that U.S. based media simply glazes over. Apparently, dead Mexicans aren't that interesting.

Until American media broadens its approach to the coverage (or lack there of) that it provides for relevant Hispanic issues, Latinos - acculturated or not, will always turn to Spanish-language news as an alternative.

Hispanic Targeted Online Video

Ad Age reported today that Hulu.com, the Fox-NBC joint online video venture, is now the second most trafficked video site - trailing YouTube.

Given Hispanics' propensity to watch videos online, I wondered, where does Telemundo fit into all of this? Telemundo afterall, is NBC-Universal's Spanish-language flagship network. It's suppose to be their crowning, visionary achievement in understanding the opportunity that Hispanics pose to the marketing world. But Telemundo's content is no where to be found on Hulu.

Telemundo owns its content, unlike most of the programming airing on it's gorilla sized competitor, Univision. That includes the right to distribute it on digital platforms.

Yet, Telemundo has struggled in the online space. It recently divorced its distribution partner, Yahoo!, partially dissolving a strong Spanish-language portal that attracted over 1.6MM unique visitors in January 2008, according to Comscore. In January 2009, a Telemundo-less Yahoo! en Español attracted 1.3MM unique visitors, a 19% drop.

But a stand-alone Telemundo.com audience is a shell of its former self. In January, the struggling new site attracted just 133,000 unique visitors despite a televised media blitz on Telemundo network and on MSN Latino - their new online distribution partner.

It remains to be seen whether or not Telemundo.com will be able to regain even a fraction of the audience it once enjoyed through its partnership with Yahoo!. But it begs the question - why not tap into Hulu.com instead of going at it alone?

Gossip Girl (and Boy)

The self proclaimed Queen of Media, Perez Hilton, may be the most well-known celeb gossip blogger on the net. The fact that he is Cuban-American is not surprising. We Latinos love gossip! Love it!

A quick Google search for "farandula" (gossip) resulted in 912,000 different sites dedicated to the subject. "Chisme" is another word that means gossip, and that term generated 1,090,000 hits. (The fact that we have more than one word that means gossip should be a tip-off.) All the Spanish-language portals have a significant number of pages dedicated to the subject. People en Espanol's site attracts a pretty large audience daily seeking the latest on Salma Hayek's French wedding or Jessica Alba's latest denial of her Hispanic heritage.

Following celebrities for Latinos is like a cultish religion. The most popular programs on Univision and Telemundo, the most trafficked sites online and the highest circulation magazines are all dedicated to this subject.

With so much interest in this "escapist" content - marketers need to figure out more creative ways of tying into this world. While many advertisers shy away from tabloids in the general market, in the Hispanic market - you're aversion is a missed opportunity to connect during a seriously guilty pleasure.

YouTube en Español

Last month I posted a blog about pirated Spanish-language Univision content on YouTube. The jist - there's a lot of it. So, it came as no surprise that while I was reviewing the top 10 Youtube videos of 2008, that a Spanish-language short movie, Lo Que Tú Querías Oír (What you wanted to hear), was in the #3 spot. The quirky "love story" (if you want to call it that) logged 76.5 million views. That's impressive.

What's really surprising is that the video was uploaded back in 2006! But, the video's audience didn't really take off until last year. It speaks to several factors including the shelf life of content online, the dynamics of viral and word-of-mouth online and the hyper growth in popularity of Spanish-language content online. Tons of topics for us to tackle another day, but I expect these types of examples will only continue to multiply.