While many marketers prioritize reaching Hispanic audiences, they have trouble finding them online.
That’s a problem Batanga hopes to address. The Hispanic-focused publisher of sites like iMujer, Vix and BolsaDeMulher attracts 1 million to 4 million US cross-platform uniques per month, according to comScore, and 14 million desktop uniques worldwide, mainly in Latin America. Batanga, which focuses on social distribution, claims a social reach of 40 million people a day.
“Buyers are having a hard time scaling because they don’t know how to buy multicultural audiences,” said Guillermo Abud, an agency vet and Batanga’s VP of programmatic and business development.
For example, Abud said, advertisers buying on a Hispanic site often layer third-party data identifying Hispanics – overkill that adds cost and reduces scale. Or they go too deep, seeking targets like “Hispanic millennial auto intenders in LA.” And verification tools for fraud or viewability often block foreign sites frequented by US Hispanics, further reducing scale.
“You have to really identify which are the sites that are more relevant for your consumer,” said Abud, a fan of whitelists that include key Hispanic sites.
Batanga is also creating microsegments based on users’ content consumption to help marketers find Hispanic audiences with particular affinities without drastically reducing scale.
Abud described a hair care brand that wanted to target a hard-to-find segment: Hispanic women 25-34 who are into hair care. Batanga created multiple articles about taking care of summer hair. The advertiser tagged those articles and targeted ads to users who read the article.
While buys with this type of data targeting often transact directly, programmatic accounts for just 20% of Batanga’s US business, Abud said, and 40% of its Latin American business, where it has more inventory due to a larger audience.
But Abud is trying to grow programmatic buying of Batanga’s Hispanic audience by reaching out to DSPs and agency trading desks to improve the pub’s private marketplace relationships.
“Most [US] advertisers know Hispanic advertising is important and where the growth is coming from,” Abud said. “Especially [consumer packaged goods].”
Batanga is also publishing more articles in English to cater to Hispanic millennials or third-generation immigrants. It launched an English-language site, Vix, six months ago.
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“We have done tests where we translate content in Spanish, English and Portuguese,” Abud said. “We are getting more [overall] reach when it comes to English-language content.”
One of Batagna’s biggest challenges, however, is measurement. Brands tend to do bigger attribution studies, which overlook the smaller successes in Hispanic advertising. “Advertisers are not tracking everything that they do. They don’t track Hispanic campaigns as well [as general campaings ] back to product ROI and sale,” Abud said.
Nielsen Catalina uses product scanner data to track sales, for example, while many Hispanic shoppers buy at bodegas that aren’t equipped with scanners, Abud said. As marketers better understand the impact of their advertising to Hispanic customers, spend designed for the demographic can only go up.
