Although I *** to admit when strangers steal my thunder, occasionally I can shove my ego aside long enough to offer up a high-five. If I ever meet Carlos Martinez and Robert Spallone, I promise here to do just that. For now, I hope they’ll accept this electronic one. Martinez and Spallone penned their July 2010 piece in Advertising Age titled “How to Connect With the Digital Latino” months before I penned a Blogging Out Loud piece on industry terms (real or otherwise) my Vertical Marketing coworkers and I would love to see go mainstream. But somehow, I missed theirs: the digital plaza. Say it again: the digital plaza. Now, close your eyes and imagine a bustling city center where children play, ladies exchange gossip, and men sip coffee while debating the day’s news. The plaza is an integral part of many vibrant cities, especially those in Europe and Latin America. But sadly, it’s lacking here in the United States. Unless you re-imagine it online. There the digital plaza is thriving, and leading the charge is the Hispanic/Latino community. “The unspoken need for social interaction has become a part of every Latino, even when they live in a relatively plaza-less culture, such as the United States,” Martinez and Spallone write. Numbers agree. An estimated 71 percent of Latinos use their mobile devices for activities such as SMS, MMS, email, surfing the Internet and gaming functions, compared to the market average of 48 percent. Moreover, as of 2009 nearly 23 million Hispanics were online, and smart marketers from leading companies such as AT&T, Budweiser, Ford, P&G and Toyota were responding. Offline, other brands continue to prove that the plaza — whether digital or traditional — is the springboard for the Hispanic community.
Maybe I’m just blogging out loud here, but it seems like smart marketers should not only embrace the concept of the digital plaza, but they should target the community that helped define it. As new opportunities emerge online though, let us not forget the power — or the powerful message — of face-to-face interaction.
This past weekend, Mexican beer giant Tecate ingeniously tied its sponsorship of a boxing match between American “Sugar” Shane Mosley and Mexican-American Sergio “The Latin Snake” Mora to Mexico’s Bicentennial Independence Day weekend. While the fight’s promoters were clearly targeting Mexicans and Mexican-Americans with their theme of “200: Celebrate and Dominate,” the beer maker offered up tangible in-store promotions
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