Future of Latino Marketing - End of the Mass Market Myth

The other night as I sat down to watch "From Mambo to Hip Hop: A Bronx Tale" - a PBS documentary from the folks from Latino Public Broadcasting - that I had Tivo'ed, it struck me - Latino marketing is about to undergo a radical change.

The documentary retells the story of the South Bronx from the end of WWII to the early days of hip-hop in the early 80s, linking the two music forms in time. It also details the US (specifically NYC) form of Caribbean music known as "Salsa" and the inter-cultural melting pot between African-Americans and Latinos that gave rise to hip-hop.

What struck me is how this South Bronx experience was fundamentally Latino and American and fundamentally unlike my experience growing up very Latino and American as a Mexican-American in Texas.

That goes again everything that Latino marketers have said since the 80s - that all Latinos in the country are united by a common culture that can be tapped into through a single platform like television.

Latino marketers nurtured the myth to hype the market size, to inflate the total potential of audience, that they could in turn sell to corporate America. To date, it's worked and driving the stock price of Univision and others.

In my opinion, that myth will destroy itself and crumble apart from its deceit within the next five years as corporate marketers become more sophisticated about targeting and using data to reach customers.

The first evidence of this is the complete failure of pan-Latino web sites to resonate with audiences as a cultural or language play.

Starmedia attempted to take the myth from across the United States to across the Spanish-speaking world. In doing so, it make the total size of the potential business seem much grander and lucrative than it ever was. The myth held long enough to get investors to open up their wallets on the hope of quick returns. But the end result was that the hype could not last without any underlying substance.

Expect big changes in the next few years.