Explosive growth! Outpacing projections! Broadcasters are beside themselves in light of the latest census figures.
Network executives are scrambling after the Latino TV market in response to recently released census numbers. Pardon them for drooling.
The U.S. Latino population, which soared 43 percent during the past decade to more than 50 million, is considered a gold mine.
At 16 percent of the country’s population — fully 20 percent of the population in Colorado — the Latino market is huge and complicated. Gray areas in terms of self-identification, language, technology and media patterns are being held out to advertisers and marketers as worthy of study as the networks make their pitches.
The huge buying power of this minority combined with its special attributes and programming tastes calls for a more sophisticated approach, marketing chiefs suggest.
They’re chasing what Variety calls the “multiculti” market (multicultural, that is).
This week, NBCUniversal and Fox each unveiled new marketing initiatives aimed at Latino audiences, and Comcast’s intention to launch three minority-owned and operated cable channels over the next two years was confirmed by new parent NBCUniversal.
Fox Networks Group announced the launch of Fox Hispanic Media. Nat Geo Mundo, an extension of National Geographic for the Latino market; FOX Deportes, a sports network, and the recently launched Utilísima, a women’s lifestyle network, will be sketched in greater detail at next month’s upfront gatherings for advertisers.
NBCUniversal announced a marketing initiative called Hispanics@ NBCU and Comcast’s push to launch 10 Latino- and African-American- owned channels over eight years officially opened. As part of the merger deal with NBCUniversal, Comcast officials are accepting proposals for new channels. The first one, which will be “American Latino operated and programmed in English,” is due to launch next summer. (It’s not all about Latinos. As part of the “multiculti” effort, Comcast announced plans to expand carriage of the Asian-themed network, Mnet.)
In addition to talk about “Gen YLA” or young Latino-Americans, there is hard evidence being dangled before advertisers to prove that the Latino audience is a particularly promising one. Latinos play more games, access the Internet and use smartphones more frequently than their Anglo counterparts, according to NBCU data.
And NBCU believes it is uniquely well positioned to capture that audience, with high concentrations of Latino viewers across its cable/online/ theme-park properties, and particularly via its Spanish-language networks, Telemundo and Mun2.
The “upfronts” play out in coming weeks, selling the bulk of the ad schedule to advertisers in advance of the season.
Speaking of which.
“Black in Latin America,” the latest documentary from the prolific Henry Louis Gates Jr., features the Harvard professor poking around six Caribbean and Latin American countries looking for African influences. Music is his obvious first stop; but the “secret histories” of colonialism and slavery in Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico and Peru are his deeper subjects.
As he strolls a street in Cuba, talking of slave labor imported from Africa, Gates learns about the suppression of “blackness” in Cuban culture, the denial of African roots, the negative images of Africans presented there (he witnesses a display of Sambo dolls in a shop) and the struggle for racial equality of Afro- Cubans ever since the slaves arrived. It’s an eye-opening tour of the Caribbean and Latin America from a new angle.
“Black in Latin America” will air over four Tuesdays, beginning April 19 on PBS (at 8 p.m. on KRMA- Channel 6).
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
