Hispanic Cause Marketing: Poised for Growth
By David Hessekiel, President - Cause Marketing Forum, Inc. www.causemarketingforum.com

America is experiencing an upswing in Hispanic cause marketing – mutually beneficial commercial activity between a company and a cause designed to market an image, brand or service to the Hispanic community.

Best practices and the outlook for businesses and nonprofits serving the Hispanic market to “do well by doing good” will be the subject of a special session at the Cause Marketing Forum conference to be held on June 16 in New York.

Speakers will include Frenchie Guajardo, multicultural specialist for PowerPact, LLC, an integrated marketing agency that has developed Hispanic cause marketing programs for several Fortune 500 companies, and Joe Lampertius, Director Global Business Development and Brand Management for Valassis, where he oversees the company’s Hispanic Marketing Solutions unit.

Overall, the strategy of appealing to consumers by developing mutually beneficial business/nonprofit marketing partnerships has grown dramatically in the last decade. Avon and breast cancer, General Mills and Education and Timberland and City Year are just three of the high-profile programs that grow out of an estimated $900 million+ in annual corporate cause sponsorship.

At the Cause Marketing Forum, we have noted increased Hispanic cause marketing in the last few years. For example:

n Procter & Gamble and the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation teamed up with the singer Soraya in campaigns designed to fight breast cancer among Hispanic women.
n Cacique celebrated its 30th anniversary of manufacturing Mexican-type cheeses, with a campaign to inform the Hispanic community about diabetes and donate $1,000,000 to City of Hope for diabetes research.
n Colgate’s work with the Hispanic Dental Association to arrange for thousands of inner city children to be screened by volunteer dental professionals as part of the Colgate Bright Smiles, Bright Futures program.


“The Unveiling of HDN”

New York daily, Noticias del Mundo (www.noticiasdelmundo.com), Chicago weekly, La Raza Newspaper (www.laraza.com) and Houston weekly Semana are among the first wave of 10 Hispanic publications unveiling their news Websites this week as part of Hispanic Digital Network (HDN). Latino-owned and operated HDN is the nation’s first network of Hispanic publications online.

The first wave of HDN publications also includes seven other Hispanic weeklies that are among the leaders in their respective markets. They include: El Extra (www.elextranewspaper.com) and El Hispano News (www.elhispanonews.com) (both of Dallas), Semana (Houston), El Bohemio (www.bohemionews.com) (San Francisco), El Latino (ellatinoonline.com) (San Diego), El Vocero Hispano (www.elvoceromi.com) (Grand Rapids) and La Prensa Hispana (www.laprensahispananewspaper.com) (Indio, CA). Houston weekly Semana and Phoenix weekly, Prensa Hispana will go online later this week. Several more quality Hispanic publications from across the country and Puerto Rico will be unveiling their own HDN sites in the coming weeks.

“This is the achievement of an important milestone in Hispanic publishing, advertising and the booming Hispanic Internet,” said Manny Ruiz, CEO of HDN and its sister company, news distribution service Hispanic PR Wire. “HDN publications now enjoy first-rate news Web sites comparable to or better than most U.S. English-language dailies and this is going to help them strengthen and grow their businesses by better serving their readers and advertisers alike.”

From the point of view of advertisers targeting Latinos online, HDN publications individually and collectively reach a much coveted, generally Spanish-dominant audience that is presently the fastest growing and most heavily targeted on the Internet. “The upside of HDN for advertisers is that they can tap into HDN on a local level with publishers or at a network-wide level through HDN and its reps,” said Bill Gato, president of HDN. “At a time when Corporate America is busy trying to attract Hispanics online to visit their own Spanish-language company Web sites, HDN is hotwired to market and drive traffic to those sites through a combination of innovative advertising programs and marketing partnerships.”

HDN SITE FEATURES
HDN’s publisher sites feature all of the following:

- News / Photo Content: The ability to mirror the hard copy of the publications online. Publishers may also choose to publish other stories and features that appear exclusively online.
- Online Classifieds: Visitors may browse, sell or publicize everything from job openings and cars to apartments for rent and even personal ads.
- Advertising: Clients will enjoy ad positions in news venues that attract their target demographics.
- Community Calendar: A dynamic listing of concerts, community functions and other events.
- Weather: Visitors will be able to find the latest weather information.
- Special Sections: Web sites will feature special section links promoting everything from sweepstakes to local festivals.
- Hispanic PR Wire (HPRW) news feed: Visitors will be offered headlines from HPRW.

For more information, please visit www.hdnweb.com.