Hispanic Media Continues its Growth Pattern

I’ve always been a big proponent of marketing to the Hispanic and Latino communities. Recently, I spoke with Dr. Luis Pacheco, a well-known television doc on Univision and distributor of his own line of supplement products. He told me about this growing market and their buying power. Current U.S. Hispanic spending power is now over $1 trillion. A few other interesting items he shared were:

• 65% of Hispanics 45 and over believe that herbal remedies and supplements are effective
• Herbalife and Omnilife are “hitting home runs" in the Hispanic community
• The Hispanic supplement category is very under presented in the retail channel
• Tortillas now outsell bread in the United States
• Piñatas are now the second most favorite party favor

In the past, I’ve worked with a few clients who had a Spanish-speaking spokesperson and found great interest in booking them on radio talk shows that catered to the Hispanic and Latino marketplace. Doing a little digging, I found Spanish-language media remains important to the nation's growing and changing Hispanic population. And in the last year, this media sector tended to fare better overall than the mainstream English-language media.

Hispanic newspapers overall lost circulation in 2010, but not nearly to the extent of the English-language press. English-language dailies saw a 5-percent decline for the six-month period from March to September 2010 compared with the same period the year before. And daily Hispanic papers grew circulation by 1.9-percent. The financial picture seems to have improved as well in the last year.

Spanish-language television had an even more positive year. Univision's audience continued to grow and now competes with—and in some timeslots outpaces—audiences for ABC, CBS and NBC. Indeed, between Univision and Telemundo, and all of their affiliates, the 2010-2011 season is projected to bring in $1.5 billion in advertising revenue.

Hispanic radio and magazines also showed growth. The number of Spanish-language radio stations grew 8 percent (from 1,224 in 2008 to 1,323 in 2009), and magazine ad spending increased in 2010. There are several ways to measure ad spending and revenue, and looking across all of these calculations, Spanish-language magazine ad revenue growth was up approximately 5 percent in 2010. On the digital front, while Hispanic Americans do not access the Internet at the same rates as most non-Hispanic Americans, there is growth, and bilingual Latinos are already heavily online.

Looking for a new market to sell your products with a vast arena in which to promote your products? You just found one.