Hispanic advertising agency Lopez Negrete has formed a new interactive department and hired Moses Robles, a former VP of account services at Beyond Interactive, to head it and help staff it, reports ClickZ. Robles says his main job will be educating the agency's clients (which include Wal-Mart, Bank of America and Microsoft) on how to reach Hispanics online.

"U.S. Hispanics trust the Internet as an information source. They want content in Spanish. They want to engage in Spanish. They're with the curve in terms of being connected on broadband," he is quoted as saying. "It's just a matter of getting our clients to understand that."

Robles describes Hispanic online media as lagging, partly because agencies don't have the expertise to drive a hard bargain with publishers.

"It's really like back in '97 and '98…. Right now, on the Hispanic side, everything is back to CPM. They [publishers] don't want to talk about cost-per-click. It's going to take a lot of education."