Truth, Lies and Media”

In 2002 I first began producing a half hour TV show called “Urban Latino TV”. At that time there was excitement from the recent census release but a huge scarcity of English language programming for young, U.S. born Latinos (American Latinos).  We felt compelled to produce broad appeal segments that had a primary goal of entertaining our core audience but at the same time educated Non Latinos to counter the stereotypes that resulted from this scarcity of accurate media images.     

In 2004 we changed the show to “American Latino TV” and launched “LatiNation” as a companion show for a one hour block. This strategy grew distribution, ad sales and audience but a happy coincidence was that with two shows we could now cover twice the number of subjects with twice the segments. I read great book about fragmentation called “The Long Tail” www.TheLongTail.com  which inspired me to coin a concept that goes something like “the more underserved the demographic, the more loyal they will be when you engage them”. What would happen if we use some of these extra segments to “sub-target” within the shows to more specific and underserved demographics?   

The extra segments meant staffing up production but our marketing resources were small. We needed to keep growing and media fragmentation was taking hold industry-wide. How could we grow audience in the face of such fragmentation and such limited marketing resources?

The magic happened when we turned to our source of strength, CONTENT, to help our weaker link, MARKETING. Our producers dug deeper, looking for untold stories, the kind that had rarely if ever been told in hopes of creating buzz. Keeping the “Long Tail” concept in mind, we tasked ourselves to identify subcultures within the Latin market that were large enough to impact but had been ignored by English and Spanish language TV. Could we include these subcultures while holding true to the mission of representing all American Latinos with positive and uplifting stories?

We began broadcasting stories on “sub ethnicities” like Afro Latinos, Brazilians & Filipinos and targeted lifestyle subcultures like punk, rockabilly and psychobilly. We covered tattoo artists, burlesque dancers, lucha libre wrestling, female boxing, roller derby, pin up models and more.

The more underground the subculture, the more enthusiastic the response, not only from our new subculture viewers but from the core viewers, who found the coverage refreshing, educational and counter stereotypical. The viewer emails and feedback was unprecedented. We built rapid word of mouth and new legions of viewers as each subculture had its own loyal following and those fans were now our fans.  

By including subcultures we produced a better show while helping achieve our marketing goals. Subculture members cluster and are accustomed to being ignored by mainstream media. They are early adapters and heavy users of social media like My Space, Facebook, YouTube, etc. They worked tirelessly to promote our shows to their peers and the price was right. FREE! 

Our marketing focus changed to enable an army of subculture fans to talk up the shows via web message-boards and social networking sites. We supplemented these efforts with targeted grassroots events such as Brazilian festivals, various ethnic parades, rockabilly conventions, etc. We were often approached by the media spawn of these subcultures (niche websites, newspapers, radio shows) that were so excited for the coverage on national TV that they eagerly provided us valuable publicity.    

Of course we continued covering major stories and using well known American Latino celebrities as hooks. But by simply targeting a few segments consistently to an ignored subculture and supporting this with a coordinated marketing effort, we garnered fans that may have never tuned in (or purchased our advertisers’ products).      

After selling the company “American Latino Syndication” to LATV Networks, I no longer produce these shows but the lessons I learned by targeting subcultures remain. I’m currently working on a documentary on Latinos in punk music and discovering more.   

Unfortunately, I feel that for some marketers, the entire Hispanic market is viewed as one big subculture with monolithic likes and dislikes. Sacrificing effectiveness for ease, they produce Spanish language creative, run 95% of their budgets on Spanish language media and call it a day. By doing this they don’t realize they are missing out on the largest and most dynamic subculture of all, over 25 million young, upwardly mobile and rapidly growing U.S. born Latinos who, heading into the 2010 census, are still grossly under-represented both on television and with marketing budget allocations.  

You can check a story we did on punk band NOFX to target the Latin punk subculture here:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6U4O-tlWpg