Countdown to Moctezuma’s Revenge

Lest there be doubt as to why I’m where I’m at (as opposed to shilling my talents blowing Smoke 2.0), here’s a roundup of this past week’s marketing stories regarding the growing power– and prominence– of the Hispanic market in the United States:

Spanish Language Media advertising grew 20.5 percent in the first half of 2006, versus 18.9 percent growth in online advertising and growth of 5.7 percent on network television. Where other media will continue to face declines, Hispanic media will grow.

In 2007, Hispanics are expected to have buying power reaching $863.1 billion, comprising 8.5 percent of the total consumer marketplace (versus 14.5 percent of the population), exceeding all other ethnic minorities. Expect your food, clothing, music and other entertainment choices to reflect it.

New Orleans is fast changing from a “Chocolate City” into a “Mocha City,” with Hispanics flooding in, digging in and pitching in– with excellent results for the city and the economy– and changing the complexion of the Gulf Coast, perhaps forever. And why not? Hispanics are the ones investing sweat-equity in the region. I’d stay, too.

And if New Orleans is a study in microeconomic trends, our society as a whole will be the case study in macroeconomics as the new generation of Hispanic children become primed to power the next cultural engine in the United States. Today, one in five people under the age of eighteen in the U.S. are of Hispanic descent, a 20 percent figure that’s expected to climb to 25 percent by 2020. Hispanics, today, also make up 20 percent of the population aged 20 to 34.

‘’In terms of that market that really defines popular culture, it’s getting Latinized much faster than the rest of the population,'’ Suro says.

That is of intense interest to U.S. companies.

‘’All of them are slowly waking up to the fact that moving forward, this is the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. economy,'’ says Marcel Suarez-Orozco, co-director of the Harvard Immigration Project and co-author of the book Children of Immigration.

“This is where the action will be in terms of new investment, new growth. So even though the attention is on immigrants, even if we seal the border tomorrow, the real growth will be in the second generation.'’
(Miami Herald)

You won’t hear the marketing blogger clique talk about it, though; they don’t get it, understand it, relate to it or acknowledge it. It’s another 400-pound (Spanish-speaking) gorilla sitting in their cluttered, wired, home “offices.”

And it makes me wonder how different the results would have been had New Line changed Samuel Jackson’s Snakes on a Plane line to read, “We’ve got chingón snakes on this chingón plane!”

Email Article Saturday, September 9th, 2006 at 02:57pm Mack Simpson

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