Fireside chats are a series of interviews in which OMG Ethnic (Omnicom’s multicultural marketing consultancy) meets the experts within our network to understand their perspectives on specific communities.
Latin Americans are considered the ‘invisible’ community by some in the UK and they make up a sizeable audience of around 200,000 largely young, well-educated people with very high employment rates. While there are a wealth of media opportunities for reaching this audience, few brands have tapped into them. Following OMG Ethnic’s recent campaign that targeted Latin Americans in the UK, they spoke to Sandra Hernandez, Client Director at Talon Outdoor to understand her views as a Latin American person living in the UK.
What’s special about the Latin American culture?
Latin Americans wear their hearts on their sleeve. It’s the little things in life that you’re brought up to appreciate, which makes for a much simpler lifestyle and offers perhaps a more laid back culture.
Family, food, music, dance and alcohol feature pretty heavily in our culture which is a recipe for magic if you ask me. Basically, life is one big fiesta and we roll in a pack so there will always be a cousin you can hang out with when you’re bored.
Hispanic is the biggest multicultural group in the US and is seeing strong, dedicated comms from brands. Why is it important for brands to have a bespoke approach for multicultural audiences?
From a communications perspective, Latinos are very loyal. Get them invested in your brand and you’re onto a winning long-term relationship.
All ethnic audiences are on the rise in the UK so much so that they’re no longer considered a minority, but more an integral part of the country’s demographic profile. Having said that, brands still need to understand that ethnic audiences have dual media characteristics born from the combination of their ethnic background and their Britishness.
This creates a unique opportunity for brands to tap into the mind-set of ethnic communities with the right message and tone. It isn’t enough to create one size fits all campaigns anymore. We should be talking to consumers in a bespoke way based on their environment, mood and the time of day. There’s so much data and audience insight available that we should all be using to create targeted and catered messaging based on the diverse society we live in.
How do you see the role of OOH in engaging multicultural audiences?
OOH is such a unique environment and provides the opportunity to reach audiences at so many different touchpoints throughout their week in a bespoke and innovative way. Whether that’s technology based, data driven, an immersive experience or big impact campaigns they’re all completely dynamic approaches.
We partner with OMG Ethnic in order to fully understand our target audiences and tailor our OOH offering to suit our client’s needs. We use our own internal calendar, the Talon Generator, alongside constant communication with the team at OMG Ethnic to identify unique ethnic events and key dates throughout the year. This means we are constantly providing our clients with relevant opportunities to engage with ethnic audiences, always with the right creative and contextual targeting. OOH offers the perfect canvas for both.
