By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: April 20, 2013

Graphic

Comparing Generations

The Wrap Media

Alan Sokol convinced Sony to buy Telemundo, reaping billions. Now he has his eyes set
on a new target.

April 09, 2013
By Lucas Shaw

Alan J. Sokol uncovered the power of Spanish-language television more than a decade ago, when he did some research into Telemundo. Noting the nation’s growing Hispanic population, he recommended to his bosses at Sony that they buy the network.

Sony did just that, partnering with Liberty Media and Apollo Adviseres to purchase the company in 1998 for $539 million. Four years later, they sold Telemundo for $2.7 billion. It remains the best deal in Sony’s history.

Now Sokol (left), who spent time as COO at Telemundo during the Sony years, is ready to unleash that power in the world of cable as the CEO of Hemisphere — which, began trading on Friday, is the first public TV company dedicated solely to Spanish-language fare.

Formed by the mergers of assorted smaller companies, Hemisphere operates two U.S. cable networks. One of them, Cinelatino, is the second largest Spanish-language cable channel in the United States.

Sokol is convinced that Spanish-language cable is television’s next gold mine. (more…)

eMarketer
March 25, 2013

More foreign-born, Spanish-dominant Hispanics come online

Online Hispanics are digital mavens and leaders on a variety of social networks. The Hispanic demographic itself, though, has many distinctive characteristics, including preferred language and country of origin, and these differences create varied digital participation levels.

An October 2012 survey of US Hispanics by the Pew Hispanic Center found that between 2009 and 2012, the percentage of foreign-born and native-born Hispanics who used the web rose by 18 percentage points and 27 percentage points, respectively. This helped drive up overall Hispanic internet use to 78%, from 64% three years ago.

eMarketer’s estimate for the percentage of US Hispanics who accessed the web at least once per month is lower, at 66% in 2012, but the pace of internet uptake among Hispanics is the fastest of any other group.

Despite a lower than average overall internet penetration rate, Hispanics who are online are notably active.

According to Pew, Latino social networking penetration among internet users reached 68% last year. Of these social media users, English was the dominant language for 34% of users, while Spanish was the dominant language for a quarter of users. Another 40% considered themselves bilingual.

Social media use skews young across demographics, but among Hispanics the preponderance is especially strong. Only 13% of Hispanics on social networks were over 50. (more…)

By Insight Tr3s

We know that Hispanics are big TV viewers – but what do their TV set-ups look like at home? Tr3s’s new study, “Hispanic Adults 18-34 Living ‘The Next Normal’” has some revealing insights about what services they subscribe to and what kind of TVs they prefer. Here is a summary:

Bicultural Hispanics 18 to 29 are more than twice as likely as their non-Hispanic peers to have multiple cable/satellite providers.
• 26% of bicultural Hispanic 18-29s subscribe to more than one cable/satellite provider, compared with 12% of non-Hispanic 18-29s
• 18% of foreign-born Hispanic thirty-somethings have multiple cable/satellite providers

Those with more than one cable/satellite provider are most likely to have made that choice to satisfy the diverse viewing preferences of their household.
• Among Hispanics 18-39 overall, the main reason for choosing multiple providers is “to get the channels everyone wants”
• Non-Hispanics 18-29 also want to accomodate diverse viewing preferences in their households — and they have an equally strong desire to have a backup in case one system goes out (more…)

This Sunday is the Oscars, where all of Hollywood will gather to celebrate the year’s accomplishments in film. And when it comes to cinema, Tr3s’s research has shown that Hispanics are major movie buffs. Here are a few of Tr3s’s key findings about Hispanics and the big screen:
Hispanics are a large and young-skewing segment of the movie-going audience.
• They account for 1 in every 5 movie tickets sold in the U.S.
• 53% of Hispanic adults who go to the movies are under 35 – much younger than the general movie-going audience (36% under 35)
Hispanics are more likely to see a movie opening weekend or within the first two weeks.
• 65% of Hispanic 18-34 movie-goers prefer to see a movie anytime within the first two weeks – more than Hispanics 35-49 (48%) and non-Hispanics 18-34 (52%)
• 28% of Hispanics 18-34 who go to the movies prefer to go during opening weekend – more than Hispanics 35-49 (22%) and double the rate of non-Hispanics 18-34 (14%)
When it comes to picking a movie to go to, Hispanics tend to take turns – though younger Hispanics feel they have a strong influence over movie selections. (more…)

With more than half the population of many U.S. cities who are multicultural and Hispanics comprising more and more of the U.S. population, when does it become meaningless and redundant to execute marketing strategy that is directed to a general market and a Latino market perceived to be homogenous?

Multicultural creative agency LatinWorks and consumer research consultancy EthniFacts say in a new study that such a view is far too simplistic with regard to Latino self-definition, and doesn’t take into account the extent to which the so-called general market comprises a large population of Hispanic consumers who consider themselves American, or both American and Latino. (more…)

Paramount Market Publishing, Inc.
Re-Post March 2013
January 15, 2013

“If the [U.S.] Hispanic market were a nation, it would soon be the 11th largest economy in the world,” global CEO Sol Trujillo told the Wall Street Summit of 2010. That would place it on the list right near Russia, Canada and Australia.

PMP contributing author Isabel Valdes

At that size, and with tremendous growth potential – the Hispanic market grew 43% in the last 10 years — how can this market still seem invisible so much of the time, failing to get the investment share and business priority it ought to have?

The answer lies in a seriously flawed system for gathering multicultural sales data. What multicultural market researcher experts call the “sales data undercount” is estimated at between 40% to 60% of the true volume of multicultural consumer sales, depending on the brand or product category.

How does this occur? Most consumer product and service companies gather all sorts of multicultural demographic, psychographic and behavioral data and have made great strides in marketing and advertising to these customers. However, tracking sales remains poor: What percentage of corporate sales and growth is generated by purchases of each of the different consumer groups: Hispanic, African-American, Asian-American and Asians?

Re-Post
Published January 14, 2013

Spanish is already the second-most-used language on Twitter, after English, the director of Spain’s Cervantes Institute said here Monday.

Victor Garcia de la Concha was joined by Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo at an event in Madrid to present the institute’s 2012 Yearbook, which provides an in-depth examination of the presence of the Spanish language throughout the world.

Spanish, with its 500 million speakers, is second only Chinese globally and is in third place on the Internet.

Despite this “spectacular” evolution, the growth potential for users of Spanish continues to be outstanding given that more than 60 percent of Latin Americans are still not on the Web.

Besides the growing presence of Spanish online, Garcia de la Concha emphasized the annual growth of 8 percent in the number of people learning Spanish as a second language.

If the current growth trend continues, he said, 10 percent of the world population will be able to get by in Spanish within three or four generations, and the United States will be the country with the largest Spanish-speaking population.

In addition to the United States, the Cervantes Institute also will focus its efforts on the booming Asia-Pacific area, where demand for Spanish instruction is advancing more and more quickly.

In China, 70 percent of the requests to study Spanish currently are rejected because of the limited access to teachers. Despite that, some 25,000 Chinese university students are learning the language, compared with 1,500 in 2000. EFE