Census To Extend Hispanic Media's Reach

The 2000 Census was shocking to many advertisers and television stations. Its findings showed the Hispanic population wasn't merely a fast-growing demographic group but, rather, an exploding one. The results triggered a rapid expansion in Hispanic TV and other media and the advertising to support them.

The 2010 Census now underway will again transform the Hispanic media when findings start coming out next year, the experts say. But with this census, it'll be the increasing complexity and wider distribution of the Hispanic population, rather than the mere growth, that will have the greatest impact.

"This census will have advertisers and marketers focusing much more on the segmentation within the Hispanic market," says Julio Rumbaut, a media consultant in Miami. "The population has become much larger, unquestionably. But it's also become much more diverse."

The results of the 2000 Census were eye-popping. The Hispanic population soared 58% from the 1990 Census, to 35 million people, it found. That was much faster than many demographers had expected. Hispanics became the fastest growing minority and the largest at 12.5% of the U.S. population.

"The 2000 Census was really a wake-up call, in terms of the growth of the Hispanic population and the Hispanic consumer market," says Jeffrey Humphreys, director of the University of Georgia's Selig Center for Economic Growth. "Virtually everyone in corporate America had underestimated the number of Hispanics going into the 2000 census."

The 2010 Census is likely to confirm what most people already know-- that the Hispanic population has continued to surge throughout the first decade of the 21^st century.

The Census Bureau's final estimate for the Hispanic population before the 2010 results come out is 48.4 million people, up 37% since 2000. That's 15.8% of the U.S. population -- one out of every six people.

Hispanic media outlets have grown even faster. The number of networks, TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines and media websites aimed at the population has more than doubled since 2000, from 1,051 to 2,400, according to New York-based ad agency D Exposito & Partners.

Ad spending on all that media soared 164% from $1.47 billion in 1999 to $3.88 billion in 2009 (more than four times faster than the population), according to ad-tracking firm Kantar Media. As a percentage of total advertising in the U.S., it grew from 1.46% in 1999 to 3.1% in 2009, Kantar says. (Kantar's figures include TV, print and online, but not radio).

Broadcast TV kept pace during the decade. Then as now, Univision is the No. 1 Spanish-language network with NBCU's Telemundo the perennial leading contender. Each has its own long list of O&Os and affiliates.

Other broadcast networks have pushed into the market, including Univision's TeleFutura, Spanish Broadcasting System's Mega TV, Liberman Broadcasting's Estrella TV, LATV, Vasallovision and TV Azteca's Azteca America.

Some are carried on stations' main channels; others on their digital multicast subchannels.

According to SNL Kagan, there are 324 Spanish-language TV stations now on the air, not counting the multicast channels.

There are also plenty of cable TV networks targeting Hispanics, but only about 10 with significant distribution. Top players include Univision's Galavision, which launched in 1979. It's typically the most-watched Hispanic cable network.

Others include Telemundo's bilingual mun2, the privately owned English-language network Si TV, sports networks ESPN Deportes, Fox Sports en Espanol, GolTV, CNN en Espanol and Discovery en Espanol.

Advances in Hispanic media are due in part to improvements in media measurement, although critics say there's still a lot of room for improvement.

Nielsen, for instance, ditched its Hispanic-only surveys in 2007 and folded Latinos into its national and local samples, included with national people meter ratings and local people meter data in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Miami.

Moreover, the Census Bureau since the early 2000s has been doing a better job of keeping tabs on all demographic groups in between the decennial censuses with its annual American Community Survey.

Due in large part to that better tracking, media watchers do not believe the findings of the 2010 Census will be the surprise that the 2000 census was.

What they do expect is that the census will reveal that the size of the Hispanic population will have again soared, likely to more than 50 million.

But, more than that, the census is expected to tell a story of a Hispanic population that is becoming increasingly diverse -- the language spoken at home is changing -- and more spread out around the country.

"What we are going to see is Spanish-language media in new geographic areas that haven't traditionally had Hispanic broadcast like Charlotte, N.C., Arkansas and markets in parts of Washington state," says Gisela Girard, president-COO of ad agency Creative Civilization and chair of the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies (AHAA). "Advertisers in these areas are realizing they need to communicate with cultural relevance to increasingly larger segments of their populations."