MediaPost: Despite Latino Surge, Marketers Continue To Under-Spend In Hispanic Media

While Hispanic media spending continues to outpace other media growth by a factor of four, the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies (AHAA) said that rate should be roughly doubled to make it proportional to the Hispanic population. For reasons of political correctness it seldom appears in print, but there are four main reasons why advertisers spend disproportionately less on minority groups.

- The elephant in the room is the fact that most minority groups have less discretionary capital to blow on useless stuff. Advertisers selling useless stuff don't want to target these groups, unless the income barrier is destroyed by an unusually strong brand position in the demographic.

- Perhaps most controversial is the advertiser tradition of trying to peg brands to traditional, conservative cultures that they believe will give the brand a more highbrow sensibility. British lords don't really pull up to one another in limousines and offer Grey Poupon to one another, but an ad agency thought this would let them sell mustard for 15 percent more money in the Midwest. Advertisers seem to be making the bet that Hispanic aspirations are closer to a white middle class ideal than an idealized version of their own culture.

- With Hispanics in particular, the catch-all term - almost as bad as "Latin American" - hides an enormous diversity of different nationalities and cultures, making creative and programming difficult to peg. In an interview with NPR yesterday, a programming executive with the ABC television network noted that when they create a show based around Hispanics, they invariably attract only a subset of the greater audience.

- Finally, and less controversially, the foremost reason advertisers spend less on minorities is a fairly innocent one: advertisers remain reluctant to split up media budgets for targeting or greater efficiencies. There tends to be an institutional laziness, no matter the type of targeting.