• Automotive News, Monday, April 19, 2010 12:30 PM

As auto sales plummeted and marketing budgets tightened, diversity marketing took a bigger hit than general-market efforts, Laura Clark Geist reports. Automakers' spending on Hispanic-targeted TV, magazine and radio advertising dropped 38% last year to $322.2 million, according to Nielsen data, and black-targeted spending dropped 18 percent to $85.8 million. Overall, ad spending dropped 13% over the same period.

Ethnic minorities purchase almost one-quarter of new vehicles, according to Randi Payton, president of the media company On Wheels, which publishes African Americans on Wheels and Latinos on Wheels. Not surprisingly, he suggests that automakers increase their efforts to reach these markets, saying that "the returns can be huge" from "consumers [who] are starving for relevant content on products and services that speak to their culture."

The cuts could hurt automakers' standing with minority shoppers, maintains Andrea Hoffman, a former Mercedes-Benz marketing executive and author of "Black is the New Green: Marketing to Affluent African Americans." "These brands are going to play catch-up with the competition," she says.

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