Brands Are Slowly Going Always-On With Hispanic Audiences

Two years ago, consumer goods giant Danone North America was spending significantly less on media that targeted Hispanic audiences. Many advertisers only purchase Hispanic media for one-off campaigns and do not consider Hispanic audiences when constructing the media plan.

But during the volatility of 2021, the company was looking to find ways to extend its reach in communities that had already shown loyalty to its brands. Hispanic consumers were 37% more likely to consume probiotic yogurt than the general population, according to market research, and Danone wanted to make greater inroads with the community via probiotic yogurt brand Activia, said Mike Sallette, vp of media at Danone.

So the company did a media buy for Activia with Hispanic-focused streamer Canela, and the results were impressive. Not only did the ads have particularly high video completion rates, but within the company’s mixed media modeling, Canela delivered the highest return on investment of any other media channel.  Plus, for a sustained period of time after the campaign ended, sales from Hispanic consumers grew faster than the general market, Sallette said.

After this success, Danone increased its investment in Hispanic audiences from a small, localized test-and-learn campaign for one brand to multiple months-long national campaigns for not just Activia but Silk, Danimals and International Delight.

“We needed to build street cred with these other brands,” Sallette said, noting there was internal concern that Danone’s existing creative would not resonate with the audience.

Test campaigns showed the original campaign messaging still resonated with Hispanic audiences, and there were easy options to translate campaigns to Spanish after an initial English run. “They took the test-and-learn approach seriously with us, it paid off, scaled nationally, and then we use that as an internal case study,” he added.

“We’re not recommending them just for the sake of being a Hispanic partner, but because it’s a top performer just like YouTube, Amazon, Hulu, GumGum.”

Danone is among the brands taking a more systemic approach to reaching Hispanic audiences in its media buying. But while there has been progress in recent years, brands like Danone are still more exception than norm, four industry sources told Adweek. Most brands still engage Hispanic audiences sporadically, despite making up 19% of the U.S. population as of 2022.

“Their investments should be much bigger,” said Isabel Rafferty, CEO of Canela Media, who noted 80% of the firm’s revenue comes from 10 brands that have always reached Hispanic audiences, with only meager sums coming from the rest of the Fortune 500. “It’s not big enough for the audience scale.”

Still, after a national reckoning on race put the spotlight on the advertising industry’s media investment in 2020, there have been some improvements. Colossus SSP, which focuses on diverse marketplaces, saw a nearly eight-fold increase in Latinx-targeted private marketplace revenue between the second quarters of 2022 and this year.

Investment still lacking

Many brands looking to reach Hispanic audiences will do a test campaign of around $10,000, which is not enough to see meaningful results, said Iesha White, lead of the impactful investment initiative and associate director of programmatic at performance agency Tinuiti.

Brands that hope their general campaigns will reach Hispanic audiences are often not doing enough to engage these communities, she added. “If you’re not intentionally including, you’re unintentionally excluding,” White said.

Another way brands end up leaving out Hispanic audiences is through supply path optimization efforts, which have become in vogue as advertisers look to transact directly with publishers to avoid the ills of the programmatic supply chain. Brands often pick the largest publishers and sometimes forget about those that serve Hispanic populations, said Mark Walker, CEO of ad-tech firm Direct Digital Holdings, the parent company of Colossus SSP.

“You’re only going to pick the publications you know or your colleagues know,” Walker said of most buyers’ strategy, recommending instead that buyers use the open exchange to find high performing publishers, especially those that serve Hispanic audiences, and then set up private marketplace deals with these websites.

White also advises her clients to use inclusion lists with Hispanic publishers and to monitor what keywords their brand safety partners are blocking. “I’ve seen ‘Hispanic’ in a keyword block list,” she said.

The most critical misstep brands make is only thinking about Hispanic audiences when they’re reminded, and not seeing the segment as a critical part of any media plan, said Karina Dobarro, evp and managing partner of multicultural marketing at Horizon Media.

“I always say it’s a bit of a wave that comes and goes. The census and 2020 and those societal events will lead to an increased interest and dedication toward multicultural and Hispanic marketing,” Dobarro said. “Those tend to plateau a bit.”