Companies not "fishing where the fish are"

The Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies (AHAA) released its "Right Spend 2008" study, which highlighted the major issue in the advertising industry, companies not allocating the appropriate amount of their advertising to the Hispanic market.

Among the industries AHAA Chairman José Lopez-Varela says are not "fishing where the fish are" include toys and electronics.

-- Toy manufacturers are allocating on average just 1.1 percent of their total advertising budgets to target Latinos yet, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 25 percent of the country’s children under age 5 years are Hispanic. In California, more than half of all babies born today are Latino.

-- Hispanics are engaging with new media and new devices more rapidly and more frequently than their non-Hispanic counterparts, and spend more time and money on the Web for things like travel, pet supplies, automotive parts, baby supplies, and consumer electronics than non-Hispanics, yet manufacturers in this category such as Microsoft Corp., Dell, Inc., and Bose Corp., allocated just over $32 million of their $2.7 billion total advertising budgets to Spanish-language advertising: in some cases less than one-tenth of a percent.

For the report, AHAA worked in cooperation with the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) to analyze spending of the top advertisers using data supplied by the Nielsen Company