68 million Hispanics in the US, but only five percent of ad budgets. On the latest NASBA Broadcast Advocate podcast, Radio Ink President and Publisher Deborah Parenti and New Mexico broadcaster Matt Martinez dig into that gap, and into how radio remains a lifeline.
Hosted by Monica Armenta, CEO and President of the New Mexico Broadcasters Association, the episode opens on a question that has followed Spanish-language media for years: is the audience really there, or is the industry still failing to prove it to advertisers?
Parenti and Martinez spend the hour making the case that it is the latter, pointing to a Hispanic population that continues to grow even as the country’s birth rate overall slows, and to a younger median age among Hispanic Americans that advertisers courting future customers should be chasing.
Martinez, who operates four stations across northern New Mexico, describes agencies staffed by buyers in their twenties and thirties making national media decisions without listening to Spanish radio or watching Spanish television themselves, a gap he said shows up directly in local political campaigns that write off radio in favor of social media, even though older, more reliably registered voters are the ones least likely to be reached that way.
Parenti commented, “I believe probably the biggest misconception is that you can reach this massive audience by not using Spanish language TV, in today’s more diluted world, where there’s so much bilingualism, so much culture that has meshed together.”
She discussed takeaways from Radio Ink‘s annual Hispanic Radio Conference, commenting, “Every year I walk in there, and I’m at the age where, quite frankly, I could sit back and say, I’m done… But every year I go to that conference, and I see the dedication of these Hispanic radio broadcasters. There is an unmatched passion among that group of people, not just for their medium, but for their listeners, their viewers, whoever, and their vendors. It’s a real community.”
The conversation turns, too, to a story Martinez has told before but one that still anchors the episode: the 2022 Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon Fire, the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, which burned through roughly 341,000 acres and knocked out cell towers across two counties for months. With no other way to reach residents, Martinez’s stations became the region’s emergency broadcast system.
“We almost had 400 interviews in five and a half months, everybody from the governor’s office, state senate, state representatives, all the way to state and local representatives and local law enforcement,” he said. “It almost seemed that from that point forward, our business actually grew because I think people realized radio still makes an impact, and it hasn’t stopped ever since.”
Parenti and Martinez close the episode looking five years out, both landing on the same benchmark: getting Spanish-language advertising spend out of the single digits and closer to the size of the audience it is meant to reach.
