The Melting Blog

Hispanic Communications en Voto Latino

Dallas-based columnist, Ruben Navarrette Jr., says both Presidential candidates are blowing the Latino vote:

So, with the contest a month away, you'd think that the campaigns would be pulling out all the stops with Latino voters. Not necessarily so, according to a new study. The amount of attention that Latino voters are getting depends a lot on where they live and what language they speak. If they live in a so-called battleground state and speak Spanish, they're being hit with television and radio commercials. But if they live in states assumed to be dependably red or blue and speak English, it's more likely they're being ignored.

Not completely surprising. As I've stated repeatedly here before, the English-speaking Latino segment is conspicuously absent in most corporate ethnic marketing efforts too. The ethnic marketing formula breaks down into something like this: Hispanic communications equals Spanish-language advertising -- and that's pretty much it. There are many Hispanic advertising agencies who probably prefer to keep it that way.

Unlike the Voto Latino PSA spots running on MTV (which, in my personal opinion, is a highly effective campaign), Latinos who prefer English (a gigantic legion of acculturated second generation natives) get short-shrifted when it comes to targeted messaging and media programming choices. Campaigns like Voto Latino are the exception, not the rule. It's a glaring omission -- one that will hopefully begin to change with the advent of nascent media upstarts SiTV, Mun2, and VOY. In the meantime, "ethnic" political advertising campaigns get caught up in the same trappings as corporate ethnic marketing strategies. Here's more from Mr. Navarrette:

Then, there is language. Who came up with the bright idea of targeting Latino voters in Spanish? At a time when English-as-a-second-language classes are filling up in Latino neighborhoods and Latino parents are removing their children from bilingual education, geniuses in both presidential campaigns decided that the way to inspire Latinos to exercise their civic responsibility was in a foreign language.

These whiz kids must have missed the report by the Washington-based Pew Hispanic Center in April indicating that most Hispanics either get their news from English-language media or flip back and forth between English and Spanish stations. Just 24 percent of Latinos get all their news in Spanish.

How could both presidential campaigns, in going after Latino voters, have been so wrong about so much? It looks like they got some very bad advice. They probably heard from political experts who assured them that Latinos could be targeted with the battleground strategy that the campaigns had in place for the mainstream. And then they listened to the Latino marketing experts--the sort of folks who usually help Fortune 500 companies sell millions of hamburgers and soft drinks--who told them that the way you reach Latino consumers is in Spanish. And the people running the campaigns didn't know enough to know better.

That's exactly right. Univision head Jerry Perenchio and his merry band of Hispanic media and advertising cronies pretty much dominate the discourse in convincing the marketing suits at Fortune 500 companies (who don't know better) that Spanish is the only language Latinos speak, listen to, or consume in media.

But we should now know better, shouldn't we?

Posted by thomas at October 4, 2004 12:27 AM | TrackBack