Friday, September 28, 2007

Advertising Week's last panel hit its target

I've had an obsession with Advertising Week attendance all last week and figured that maybe, as the last panel of the week, and, as one of inherently targeted appeal, Hispanic 2.0 might not get a big audience. Instead, it had about as many attendees as Martha Stewart, and far more than TV producer Michael Davies, both of whom aim their wares at Americans of all races, colors and creeds. So what is Hispanic 2.0, you ask? It's second generation Hispanics—bilingual, and usually with one foot in Latino culture and one foot not. But if the use of "2.0" seemed like an attempt to simply borrow some Internet lingo, the name actually fit both from an online perspective and an offline one. It was readily apparent that the panelists— Maria Lopez-Knowles, Senior Vice President, MRM Worldwide; Joe Santa, Senior Art Director, Corbis; Gonzalo Perez, Director of Multicultural Research and Consumer Insights, MTV Networks; and Chris Velasco, Director, Branded Entertainment, MSN—see Web 2.0 as central to targeting not only second-generation Hispanics—a splinter group from first generation—but the many splinter groups within Hispanic 2.0, from New York natives whose parents are from Puerto Rico, to Latinos in L.A. whose parents come from Mexico. In fact, given the difficulties of targeting using older media, it would have been hard to have a serious discussion about targeting second-generation anyone specifically ten years ago. Thankfully, times have changed.

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