Stephen Amendt
Digital Service Manager
EC Hispanic Media

For those of us not familiar with EC Hispanic Media, please tell us a little more about your company and core offering.

EC Hispanic Media helps connect sellers of various products and services with prospective buyers in the Hispanic market. While our flagship company deals primarily with classified ads, we also have established niche markets via Young Latina Teens and their Families preparing for their Quinceañera (15th Birthday) celebration, Hispanic Millennials, and Latino Small-to-Medium Sized Business Owners.

Are there any nuances about advertising to Hispanic audiences, as compared to others?

There’s many, with the most obvious being that the dialect changes depending on where you’re advertising. For instance, a torta in Los Angeles is a variation on a sandwich while a torta in Miami is a cake. In other cases, certain harmless words in Mexico may be vulgar in other countries, so it’s always important to make sure the dialect of the message you’re trying to express is not only culturally relevant, but is also universal or reflective of the Hispanic market you’re trying to reach.

What are some typical campaign success metrics that clients want to optimize towards? Are a fair amount of them still CTR, or are you seeing more clients implementing viewability metrics into their reporting?

While there has been an increase in clients interested in viewability metrics, CTR and viewability have always been secondary in terms of measuring the effectiveness of a campaign just due to companies’ abilities to aggregate data. Our typical approach, when possible, has been to prove the likelihood for our visitors to convert into leads or clients for our advertisers. As a result, we haven’t really been impacted by the visibility metric.

Do you always try to make sure the creative units match the language of the content? How do you do this, and are in what cases do you match English creative with content, and Spanish creative with content?

Typically we recommend matching the creative with the content of the site for any direct placement simply because the majority of our traffic is coming from organic search. As a result, the user has shown an affinity for using the internet in that language. With most advertising meant to be outreach, it makes more sense to take the extra step to meet the potential buyer as opposed to having them go an extra step to meet the advertiser.

To help make sure the message is as relevant as possible, we segment between English and Spanish language ad tags for our bilingual sites and have our own proofreading and translation department for all advertisers to help make sure the dialects and grammar are correct.

What are your thoughts on programmatic when it comes to reaching ethnic audiences (or those that speak different languages)? How would a buyer ensure their ads are appearing on sites that were of the same language or contextually relevant to their creative?

Programmatic can be a great tool for reaching ethnic audiences, but it can also be overly complicated with nearly every ad network trying to offer the same service and many publishers being leery of header bidding. In many cases, language targeting is the easiest way to reach out to different cultures, or at least the Spanish speaking cultures, but it also makes sense to run retargeting campaigns from the Spanish speaking sites to help try and redirect traffic back to your site, something most programmatic offerings should provide.

This also means that companies without a foreign language site should get one. Beyond retargeting capabilities, while showing a Spanish ad to an English speaker is awkward to begin with, directing a Spanish speaker clicking on a Spanish ad to an English site is just as jarring.

What role does mobile play in your campaigns? Do you see clients asking for a larger share of mobile impressions as compared to desktop / video, or is it even?

Mobile is the number one source of traffic to our sites, but we don’t see an increase in clients asking for a larger share. This is primarily because as mobile was growing as a platform, we made the decision to not segment the offerings between mobile and desktop. And since our focus is set on leads and clients provided, clients haven’t really seemed to mind.

What are some of the biggest challenges you face as a media seller?

The biggest challenge has been finding a balance between monetization and user experience. While other companies were starting to overload on the High Impact campaigns to the point where ad blockers have grown to become more popular, we were choosing to keep them off the site simply because we didn’t want to impede any users progress on the site.

This, of course, meant that we were missing out on a lot of available revenue, but it also forced us to become more creative with our offerings and the programs we worked with, while also allowing for our traffic to grow. (Not to mention, not end up having to deal with the same ad blocker issues that are plaguing other sites).

Are there any innovations happening right now in digital / mobile advertising that excite you the most?

There’s a couple of things happening right now that I think are great for the industry. DFP enabling Enhanced Dynamic Allocation will mean that publishers get all the benefits of header bidding without the latency. Native ads becoming more prevalent and available just means that more companies have the opportunity to have their ads noticed than what was likely found with traditional banners. Also, there’s some new movement on campaigns that would typically be High Impact, but also still non-obtrusive for the user. Yieldmo is an example of a company that’s been making great strides there.

How do you incorporate social into your media proposals to clients?

There’s a couple of different ways that we’ll integrate social media into our proposals. The first being that a part of our business is also fashioned similarly to a boutique agency where we have a team available to manage social media accounts or paid campaigns.

We may also promote the company or their deals/products/services in a post on our own pages. We’re a little more protective of doing this though because we want to make sure their message aligns with our audience so we’re not losing any fans or decreasing our engagement.

Lastly, what is your take on the future of advertising to reach Hispanic audiences?

I think future advertising towards Hispanics will eventually end up gearing more towards the English language with a large focus around the culture and dynamic of the Hispanic household. With more Hispanics being born in the United States than immigrating here, it’s more likely that we’ll continue seeing more Latinos becoming more English preferred when interacting with media, but still closely tied their heritage, which will help companies uniquely relate to the Hispanic consumer to help earn their trust and their business.

EC Hispanic Media is a Los Angeles based company with headquarters in Norwalk, California. Through its flagship digital product, ElClasificado.com, EC Hispanic media reaches almost 2.5 million Hispanics on a monthly basis. Its print magazine footprint extends from the Central Valley of California to San Diego with a distribution of close to 1 Million magazines weekly from its family of brands. In the last year, the distribution has grown at a neck breaking pace, and has recently expanded into the the English market with EC Classifieds!

EC Hispanic media also owns quinceanera.com the #1 quince community site in the world, which currently attracts more than 375,000 Latinas monthly. EC Hispanic Media’s events division produces “Quinceañera Expo” which attracts 20,000 attendees annually, and the “Su Socio de Negocios” small business workshop series.

EC Hispanic Media also reaches the bilingual Hispanic via its online property alborde.com and its “Día de los Muertos” event in November. Most recently, EC Hispanic Media launched the monthly publication El Punto in the Los Angeles market to fill the void in local news and information left behind by other shrinking publications.

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