Trend – English language outreach to Latinos

The influential marketing blog Hispanic Trending writes…

“The trend started as a trickle a few years ago, but now it’s huge: Media companies providing content for Latinos, but in English. Why is this happening now?

Rodriguez: What’s happening is that media companies and the businesses that support them – i.e., brands – are beginning to understand both the opportunities and complexities of the Latino digital market.

The opportunities stem from the fact that Latinos currently outperform most other ethnic groups in digital technology adoption. More of us – as a percentage of our general group – congregate on social networks, buy smartphones, click on ads, etc. The complexities come from the sheer diversity of the Latino market. There are huge cultural differences between Cubans in Miami and Puerto Ricans in New York. And some of us prefer English, while others prefer Spanish.

But the growing numbers of Latinos who prefer English is fascinating to both media companies and brands. A language that not only binds young Latinos – the future of America – from different homelands but also with the general population, well, that’s a powerful tool for reaching a new population at scale.

M-A: The decision to reach out to this audience is marketing-driven, of course. How did advertisers come about their awareness of this audience? How much more attractive is the English-speaking Latino audience as a media market than the Spanish-speaking audience? And what took so long? We’ve been around a while.

http://juantornoe.blogs.com/hispanictrending/2012/02/why-english-language-content-for-latinos-is-the-future.html…