Bilingual portals target a young, fast-growing market. Latinos are hooking up to the Internet in greater numbers, but unlike some other ethnic groups, they have not created high-profile, cultural niches online. However, according to a Forrester Research brief (“Truth About the Digital Divide,” April 2000), among leading ethnic groups in the U.S., Hispanics rank second in terms of household Internet penetration, with 47 percent. This is a jump from 36 percent in January 1999. The brief also reveals that in the last two years, Hispanic-Americans lead all groups in percentage of households purchasing PCs, with 62%. Other U.S. …

Like traditional package good marketers, media has mastered the art of brand extensions. In broadcast, a short-run ‘60s series called Star Trek eventually spun off syndication stalwarts Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager. More recently, NBC’s Cheers begot Frasier, and Fox made Melrose Place out of Beverly Hills 90210. In network cable, ESPN spawned ESPN2, ESPN Classic Sports, and ESPNEWS. The are numerous magazine examples as well, with arguably the most successful franchise being Time magazine with its progeny People, Entertainment Weekly, and InStyle. For the last 20 or 30 years, these efforts to capitalize on …

The launch of Toyota’s Prius gasoline/electric car got underway with some truly innovative marketing Way back when we all had to learn the 4 “P”s of marketing—product, price, promotion and place—many professors emphasized the idea that unique products demand unique promotion. Subsequently, we spent years looking for proof that such concepts actually exist in real life and have been both lucky and disappointed in that quest. For all those cynics out there, here’s an example of a campaign that took into consideration the product itself and structured a media plan accordingly. The much-anticipated U.S. launch of Prius, Toyota’s …

Rich media advertising is all the rage today, but what does it really mean and where did it come from? Quite simply, rich media is anything even slightly more sophisticated than the basic animated GIF banners you see plastered all over the web today, all the way to integrated ads that show a thirty second movie trailer followed by an interactive behind-the-scenes tour where the user could buy merchandise on the spot. Rich media ads are an evolution of the animated GIFs, which are easy to create and, more importantly, small in size—so there’s no fear of making web …

The Internet is on track to surpass TV networks as a source of news. In a recent ZDNet column about the future of news distribution via traditional media, Jesse Berst predicted a substantial weakening of viewer-/readership and a consequent decrease in ad revenues. Citing a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (people-press.org) report that reveals how Americans accessed news from 1993 through the present, Berst presented a case for an all but inevitable shift toward online dominance of news distribution. And he asserted that by 2004, “roughly half of Internet ad spending will come from the …

Rumor has it that the Internet is old news, past its prime, passé. There’s a new kid on the block waiting to take its place and ready for a few billion in ad dollars. OK, Internet, it’s time to pass your crown over to the newest and most innovate medium yet—wireless advertising. Well, maybe I’m jumping the gun a little bit, but the advertising potential of wireless is enormous. Think of the wireless medium today as the Internet back in 1995, when technology, marketing and consumer demand all simultaneously merged into a new ground-breaking advertising medium. This new wireless …

Keyword buys have been among the big attractions in online advertising. When a person enters a search word at Yahoo, AOL, AltaVista or other sites, a search is conducted by that keyword. An individual banner ad may be served on the search-results pages brought up by the keyword. Keywords presumably offer the ultimate in targeting—one of online advertising’s big lures. The idea is that you are reaching a specific audience, which has demonstrated a pre-existing interest in your subject matter. “Keywords allow people to pay for search results,” says online media and marketing consultant Tom Hespos, whose clients have included …

When it comes to advertising on the Internet, the web may have all the sex appeal. But email ad campaigns are beginning to take off, and with good reason. With email usage growing and enhanced technologies allowing for more compelling advertising, commercial email messaging is hitting primetime. Forrester Research predicts that global email traffic will hit 1.5 billion messages per day by 2002, and Cyberatlas counts more than 260 million email boxes worldwide. Recent estimates from Jupiter Communications show that commercial email spending will grow from $164 million in 1999 to $7.3 billion in 2005, a forty-fold increase in …

Baby Boomers are in charge, and they’re all over the web First it came to Boomer-in-Chief Bill Clinton (born 1946). Then Bruce Springsteen (b.1949) and Cybill Shepherd (b.1950). Soon Jay “Dennis the Menace” North (b.1951), like his elders, will receive in the mail the document that signals one’s entry into geezerhood…the AARP card. Over the hill? Uncool? Out of it? Not this age cohort, mama. Baby Boomers—the same group that coined the phrase “Don’t trust anyone over 30”—are now turning 50 in record numbers. With every life-stage they’ve passed through, they’ve left a distinctive mark. Focused now on …

The convergence of media and the Internet has been a hot topic for years (see this issue’s cover story), but there really hasn’t been much success in achieving it until recently. However, there is one medium where convergence is actively taking place today, and that is radio. Radio is the perfect medium for convergence. There is little need to change the content (mostly the same music or talk found on radio), average bandwidth size will deliver it (although broadband is better) and most consumers can listen right from their current PCs with a good set of speakers. In fact, …