Rafael Castillo, VP para Latinoamérica de SAM
Jose Villa, Founder and President at Sensis wrote in MediaPost an article regarding last month debate between Jeffrey Bowman from Reframe: The Brand and the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies (AHAA) over the relevance of Total Market vs. Multicultural Marketing. Villa agrees in some points with each side, but he said that both are missing fundamental issues. For Villa, Bowman is right pointing: the advertising industry needs to create new models to serve brands as demographics changes drastically; companies, particularly ad agencies, need to create new values for the brands they support, and brands need to realize their internal staff (who are disproportionately Gen X and Boomers) that are two generations removed from the consumers core that attracts, mostly Millennials and Generation Z. However, he said, Bowman fundamentally misrepresents multicultural marketing as “separate but equal” failing to understand that, historically, most multicultural marketing programs have been underfunded, compared with resources devoted to the general market. Villa agrees with AHAA in that segmentation is an important and valuable marketing strategy. However, he said, AHAA and the multicultural marketing industry need to move on from flawed positions such as: Acculturation-based segmentation is losing relevancy for most U.S. ethnic populations as they are increasingly native born, and focusing on Spanish-language media hurting the industry, as it also becomes less and less relevant to younger multicultural audiences that consume most of their media in English.
