Today’s eMarketer features a chart that highlights which region continues to grow through the advertising downturn and recession: Latin America.

Advertising Spending Growth Worldwide, by Region

On a related note, Fidelity’s Latin America fund is up 40.88% year-to-date.

Where will companies invest for the remainder of 2009 and 2010?

Billboard announced today that they are entering the digital music business with a site targeting the Hispanic audience – Billboard Canciones – with downloadable MP3’s for sale. While there are many good reasons for entering the business, as outlined in their newsletter, how will they compete with Apple, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, etc? We’ll see….

Tags: apple, billboard, canciones, Digital, hispanic, microsoft, MP3, music, songs

Recently, I had the opportunity to lead a panel at Portada’s Latin Americal Pan-Regional Advertising Summit about new ways of reaching Latin Americans online. My fellow panelists Alex Banks of ComScore, Igal Rubinstein of S.com.mx, Vinicius Losacco of Warner Bros. Pictures, and Giacomo Bertaina of McCann Worldgroup delivered the following presentations followed by a discussion:

For those of you who haven’t signed up for SlideShare.net, take a look. Very useful way to share presentations.

I really like what Cynthia Evans of Group M Latin America had to say in her presentation, especially this slide:
“Consumers filter media according to interests. The opportunity is creating integrated packages organized for context and content not necessarily for media and geography.”

Tags: advertising, Alex Banks, Business and Economy, Digital, group M, Latin America, marketing, online marketing, South America, Warner Bros

Franklin Vargas, Director Latin American Marketing at Genius presented the pros and cons of the Panregional Media Buy from the perspective of a large IT company at Portada’s Panregional Advertising Summit in Miami. See his slide here that summarizes his conclusions. Even though he presented the pros and cons equally, many attendees did not like his presentation because it challenged the concept of pan-regional advertising, for which Miami is a hub.

Pros:
1) Good fro massive reach
2) More strategy and brand control
3) More large options to explore
4) Less hassle logistically
5) Information faster and more trustful
6) Helps expand the brand

Cons:
1) Doesn’t concentrate in each country’s market
2) Less negotiating power
3) Avoids business relationship with media
4) Makes it hard to make strategic decisions
5) Makes it hard to see the ROI
6) Investment is higher

What do you think?

Tags: advertising, Business, Latin America, marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Miami, panregional, portada, ROI, Social Sciences, Strategy

My friend Pablo Slough shared this funny yet painfully true video…

Tags: adagency, advertising, agencies, funny, marketing, media, negotiating, negotiations, vendor/client

My friend David Berkowitz told me about a new white paper that his agency – 360i – recently launched: 2009 Social Marketing Playbook.

It highlights four questions that all marketers should ask when putting together a social marketing campaign:
1) Does the opportunity meet your brand’s objectives?
2) Does the opportunity leverage your brand’s existing arsenal of assets?
3) Does the opportunity abide by the social media rules of the road?
4) Does it provide significant value exchange?

In addition, the playbook features social marketing case studies from companies like Kraft, NBC, H&R Block, Vitamin Water and Skittles.

Take a look…

360i Social Marketing Playbook

Technorati Profile

Tags: Business, David Berkowitz, H&R Block, marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Skittles, Social media, twitter

This article originally appeared on MediaPost.

Put yourself in the shoes of a bi-lingual or Spanish-preferring U.S. Hispanic and try searching in Spanish on Google, Yahoo or MSN and what do you find? A good portion of the results, sometimes approaching 50%, come from sites based in Mexico, Spain, and other Spanish-speaking countries.

Let’s look at some examples I found recently on the first page of natural (not paid) results on Google.com:

1) Vuelos a Nueva York (flights to New York): 9 out of 10 were foreign

2) Restaurantes en Los Angeles (restaurants in L.A.): 6 out of 11 were foreign

3) Recetas mexicanas (Mexican recipes): 5 out of 10 were foreign

4) Computadoras baratas (cheap computers): 6 out of 10 were foreign

Globalization of Information and News

However surprising this may be, we need to look no further than Google’s corporate mission statement to see why this is the case: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google and other search engines index sites globally while we marketers, agencies and media sellers work within the economic and political borders of the U.S.

A search engine robot ranks results in each language by keyword ranking, the quality of the content and the number of sites that link to that site (with a possible preference to sites based within that country’s borders). So, when a Hispanic searches for a niche subject that a Hispanic publisher hasn’t provided in Spanish, where will a U.S. search engine send them? Wherever else in the world that content exists online in Spanish: Mexico, Spain, Argentina, etc.

Read more »

Tags: google, Google search, google.com, Hispanics, mexico, search, searchengines, spain, spanish, U.S. Hispanic, Web search engine, Website, yahoo