Hispanics and Mobile Marketing Campaigns

VentureBeat and CNET writer Jake Swearingen quotes me in a news story about the growth of mobile use and marketing strategies in the Hispanic consumer market. The story appeared, among other places, on The Industry Standard website.

Swearingen reports: 

For companies looking to make a move into mobile advertising, it might be good to a get a few bilingual Spanish speakers on staff. While money has already been following Hispanics online for a while, with Hispanic consumer spending expected to top $1 trillion by 2010, and use of mobile phones exploding within the Hispanic market, expect more and more mobile marketing targeted at Hispanics in the coming months. A March 2008 Pew/Internet study found Hispanics leading in nearly every single category of mobile phone usage, in some cases by double digits.

And later quotes me:

Hispanic mobile use has given advertisers a way to engage with an audience that has at times been hard to reach. Adam J. Segal, president of Washington, DC-based multicultural PR firm The 2050 Group, notes, “Until the recent explosion in mobile, Hispanic consumers were difficult to reach in massive numbers if Univision radio and television didn’t match marketing priorities. Hispanics are highly connected, receptive to mobile marketing efforts, and way over-index in many of the key categories that jive well with mobile.“ To that end, two companies, HipCricket and ImpreMedia, have both inked deals this week to engage Hispanic users over cell phones.

I connected the reporter with Jed Alpert the CEO of dynamic tech shop Mobile Commons which is leading cutting-edge mobile communications campaigns for a very long list of serious clients, primarily in the non-profit and political sector.