Latino Ad Networks Multiply: What’s The Difference?

Posted: February 27th, 2010 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Hispanics, Interactive Marketing, International, Latam | 2 Comments »

This article originally appeared on MediaPost.

The new report from the Pew Hispanic Trust — Latinos Online — shows that 64% of all U.S. Hispanics use the Internet and that foreign-born Latinos have crossed the tipping point with 52% online. As the Hispanic audience grows, they seek new content and increasingly find and regularly visit foreign web sites.

Why is this happening?
“Search engines and social networking are making it easier for [U.S. Hispanic] consumers to find and consume content outside of their home country,” says Rafael Urbina, the CEO of Batanga. “As a result, country-specific brands, such as newspaper domains, are generating a significant portion of their traffic outside of their home market.”
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$40 Billion In Cross-Border Latino Retail Sales

Posted: September 25th, 2009 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Hispanics, International, Latam | No Comments »

This post originally appeared on MediaPost’s Engage:Hispanics column.

How much do Mexicans spend annually on trips into the U.S.? Forty billion dollars annually, according to Jennifer Stefano, CEO of Border Billboard, who spoke at the Hispanic Retail 360 conference recently, citing a number of Scarborough and chamber of commerce studies.Do retailers credit this revenue toward a U.S. Hispanic audience or a foreign, Latino (Spanish-speaking) consumer? Either way, the 206 million people (Bureau of Transportation, 2008) that cross the border from Mexico into the U.S. every year increasingly represent a critical piece of revenue for retailers in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

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Border Control? Reaching Spanish Speakers on the Internet

Posted: September 3rd, 2009 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Hispanics, International, Latam | No Comments »

With computer prices falling, Internet users skyrocketing and no borders on the Internet, how can marketers turn their international Spanish-language web site visitors into revenues? That is the question that Juan Tornoe and I will answer in our panel discussion at SXSW Interactive in 2010. Please submit your feedback, suggestions and vote for the panel here on SXSW’s panel picker:

Vote for my PanelPicker Idea!

Some of the questions that we will answer include:
1. How do consumers cross geo-political boundaries to find, read about and buy what they want?
2. How can marketers understand those trends and then formally create products for international markets?
3. Why did The Home Depot shut down its Spanish-language site for U.S. Hispanics only 4 months after launching it?
4. In contrast, why did Best Buy embrace their visitors from Mexico and Latin America on their Spanish-language e-commerce site for U.S. Hispanics?
5. When will Mandarin, Spanish, and Portuguese bypass English as the top languages online?

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Best Buy Grows Their Spanish-Language Customer Base

Posted: August 25th, 2009 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Hispanics, International | 1 Comment »

Christine Webster-Moore, the VP of Business Initiatives at Best Buy, recently outlined three goals for how Best Buy wants to increase their sales among Hispanics and Latin Americans at the Hispanic Retail 360 conference:

1) We need to be more fluid in how we invite Spanish-language users to our web site including US Hispanics, Mexicans and visitors in our border stores.

2) We need to provide more creative ways to have our customers buy. We need to experiment more with programs like Flexicompras, our store within a store that provides lease to own solutions for poor or no-credit consumers. In the markets where Best Buy offered this service, their market share increased by 3-5%.

3) We need to go deeper into mobile and social media.
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