iMedia: No Habla Espaņol?

Writers like iMedia's Elizabeth Lloyd are often perplexed as to why advertisers don't better take advantage of the marketing opportunities presented by Hispanic oriented media. After all, they conduct eight percent of spending in the U.S. and constitute and often easily segregated 14 million individuals online. But Hispanic media remains stunted for the same reason other groups seldom get special treatment: advertisers tend not to target much at all when they can get away with it.

Targeting requires not just media segregation, but also new creative, a separate analysis process and constant management. Without doubt, this is more than worth the effort for many projects, but for some projects it isn't. And it is those projects to which many agency and brand management executives point when creating excuses as to why due diligence wasn't pursued. It isn't a matter of a lack of appreciation of the significance of any group, but rather the institutional inertia seen everywhere in marketing, preventing the proper exploitation of demographic targeting and, not surprisingly, the new forms of available behavioral targeting as well.