• by Lynn Russo Whylly , January 3, 2008

Hispanic-American buying power is going through the roof and marketers are throwing a casa party. By 2011, the segment will overtake African Americans as the ethnic group with the largest disposable income, according to The Selig Center, with spending reaching $1.2 trillion.

Of particular interest are second-generation Hispanics. Making up roughly 25 percent of U.S. Latinos, they are actually more like their general market counterparts than their first-generation relatives. They are mostly bilingual, but prefer English, and are very Internet savvy. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, 76 percent of Hispanics born in the U.S. use the Internet regularly compared to 43 percent of foreign-born Hispanics.  

Since this segment is expected to double in size by the year 2020, outnumbering first-generation Hispanics, it’s no surprise that marketers and advertisers would like to better understand the needs of this group. MRM is poised to poach, forming the American-Hispanic Advisory Panel to explore, inform and support digital and direct marketing to second-generation, “hyper-acculturated” U.S. Hispanics.

“We believe this emergent consumer segment is high-value and under-served,” says Maria Lopez-Knowles, senior vice president of MMR Worldwide. The panel was formed to “better understand how Hispanic Americans — in particular, the hyper-acculturated segment — consumes media by activity and by language, and to gain insights into opportunities to better tap them.”