Latino TV in English?
The New York Times had a very short but interesting piece on the bilingual Latino market, and how advertisers are out to target not only Spanish-speaking Latinos in campaigns, but the elusive "assimilated Hispanic":
Hispanic TV Without the Spanish
A SECOND front has broken out in the battle for Hispanic television viewers - and this time the programming is in English, Hispanic magazine reports.
There are now two cable networks - the independent SiTV and mun2, the 2001 spinoff of NBC's Telemundo - that are offering English-language programming aimed primarily at "the 18-to-34-year-old English-dominant Hispanic audience."
SiTV says it reaches 10.5 million Hispanic homes via cable, while mun2 says it has 10 million.
That the two networks have chosen to use English-language programming to try to reach this audience is easy to understand, writes Richard D. Hoffmann.
The majority of American Latinos are bilingual; they watch and listen to media in Spanish and English. Up to now, however, most of the efforts to reach this audience have been in Spanish, so there may be a niche in the market.
"Total Hispanic television ad expenditures, growing about 25 percent a year, are estimated this year to come in north of $3.5 billion," Mr. Hoffmann writes. "The lion's share, as usual, will go to Spanish-language TV." Ad spending aimed at the English-speaking Hispanic market could reach $500 million by 2010 - and possibly more, analysts say.
"When I look at the Hispanic part of our audience, 60 percent of them are English-speaking, U.S.-born," said Jeff Valdez, co-founder of SiTV. "That's 60 percent of maybe $800 billion of Hispanic spending power. That has never been validated by television." He estimates that advertisers currently spend only 3 percent of their budgets on programming aimed at that audience.
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