11 Mar Google’s Hispanic Strategy Focused on Cultural Identity

Latin American Herald Tribune (March 10, 2011)

MIAMI (EFE) – Google’s approach to the U.S. Hispanic market is centered more on the cultural identity of Latinos than on the difference in language.

This is the strategy designed by Mark Lopez, the head of Google’s U.S. Hispanic unit, who from his new offices in Miami is trying to significantly increase the amount of advertising directed toward U.S. digital media in Spanish.

“Of the Hispanic media’s $4 billion in income from advertising, barely 3 percent is going to digital media. In the coming years, there will be accelerated growth,” Lopez told Efe.

Lopez, who was the chief operations officer at Terra Networks USA before joining Google, is the person in charge of putting into practice a new strategy based “on an imaginative and creative view.”

“There’s a cultural differentiation in consumption of media. The segmentation of the language is not enough and we must fully enter into the Hispanic world’s digital market (although) we don’t yet understand how it works,” Lopez said.

Google’s point of view is geared toward identifying a segment of the Hispanic population that speaks English and Spanish more or less fluently and the members of which preserve their Hispanic identity and likes by means of the Latino culture.

Google’s initiative is not new for the Hispanic communications media industry in the United States because it is something that Univision, Telemundo and publishing group impreMedia, among others, are already doing.

“The determining thing about that strategy is that Google’s interest opens the doors to an accelerated growth in the Hispanic digital market, as well as the impact that the … 2010 Census figures are having,” said Ciqui Cartagena, marketing vice president for the firm Story Worldwide.

For Univision, the largest Spanish-language communications media firm in the United States, Google’s interest in the Hispanic market is a natural response to demographic changes.

“It pleases us that a company of Google’s importance is pushing for a strategy that will help increase the power and influence of the Hispanic community in this country,” Isaac Lee, the president of Univision’s new division, told EFE.

Telemundo also feels that Google’s entry into the Hispanic market is good news because it confirms the strategy of the No. 2 Spanish-language television channel in the United States, according to Peter Blacker, vice president of Medios Digitales.

“It motivates us a lot that Google is now taking the same road that we’ve been on for several years, and that means that many companies will fully enter the digital Hispanic market,” Blacker said.

Telemundo’s strategy focusing on the cultural identity of the Hispanic market was launched with the bilingual mun2 cable channel directed at Hispanic young people.

A recent Google study showed 86 percent of U.S. Hispanics have a high-speed Internet connection in their homes and 78 percent use the Internet as their main information source, even more than television. EFE

Source: Latin American Herald Tribune