Gonzalo del Fa de GroupM
For Gonzalo Del Fa, president of GroupM Multicultural, Latino talent continues to be underrepresented in content behind and in front of cameras on American TV.
He said that despite Hispanics representing about 20% of the US population, this group does not receive a similar percentage in advertising investment. This is not the case of African Americans who account for 15% of the population. “We are not putting enough pressure,” Del Fa emphasized in his keynote address “Embracing Hispanic culture through media: The state of the Hispanic media industry” at the 20th Annual Hispanic Television Summit.
He highlighted that the Hispanic population in the US has grown 85% since 2000 to date (from 13% to 20%), the purchasing power in 2000 was US$500 billion and today it is US$1.9 trillion, “it has increased four times”.
“Clearly, the Hispanic population has grown and evolved, but this is the TV Summit, what has happened to TV in the meantime? Facebook didn’t exist in 2002 and I mention Facebook because it was a game changer. At that time we called TV, TV and now we call it traditional media. So it’s evolved, we’ve gone from linear TV to digital video; we went from the 30-second to six-second spots and from the whole family gathered in front of the TV, we went to each member of the family seeing something different in streaming on their device. Clearly media and TV have evolved, the Latino community has grown, but I still have mixed emotions with this notion that the Latino community is being ignored. Perhaps we are not being ignored, but I still do not see a fair representation,” he sentenced.
