Yesterday, Radio Ink reported on a podcast featuring the magazine’s president and publisher, Deborah Parenti, and New Mexico broadcaster Matt Martinez addressing a persistent issue: “68 million Hispanics in the U.S., but only five percent of ad budgets.”
Parenti and Martinez end the interview on an optimistic note, hoping that within five years Spanish-language ad spending will move “out of the single digits and closer to the size of the audience it is meant to reach.” We will see if the power of positive thinking wins out, because history tells a different story.
Back in the ’90s, when I was building the Z-Spanish Radio Network, the Hispanic community was growing six times faster than the rest of the population, and Hispanic buying power was projected to more than double every ten years — from $450 billion in 1999 to $1 trillion by 2010, and $2 trillion by 2020. Despite those attractive numbers, Z-Spanish was pushing growth against strong headwinds.
There was not only a lack of understanding but outright bias among general-market advertisers and their agencies. The issue broke wide open in May 1998, when a memo leaked from Katz Radio Group that urged advertisers to stay away from urban (African American) and Spanish-language stations, suggesting agencies buy only outlets offering “prospects, not suspects.”
Seven months later, the FCC released a study that fueled the debate further. It exposed a practice many of us in Spanish radio knew well: “ethnic dictates.” The report, titled “When Being Number One Is Not Enough,” confirmed that some advertisers instructed their agencies to exclude ad placements on stations serving minority audiences. When ads were placed at all, they were often discounted by as much as 50 percent compared with general-market stations with similar-sized audiences.
The study found that advertisers’ reluctance stemmed from stereotypical views of minority audiences as being poor potential consumers. These “no-Urban” and “no-Spanish” dictates severely reduced income to our stations, hampered our ability to raise capital, and depressed the value of minority-owned stations on an eventual sale.
The findings brought an immediate outcry from then-FCC Chairman William Kennard, who said minority broadcasters should have a fair opportunity to compete for ad dollars, and that some advertisers were “stuck in an outdated mindset,” failing to recognize the purchasing power of minority consumers.
Those were the facts we faced in the 1990s. We’re still facing them thirty years later, and it’s likely to continue for another thirty. Unfortunately, I can’t share Parenti and Martinez’s optimistic timeline, but we will keep working to make it better… however long it takes.
Amador Bustos is President and CEO of Bustos Media.
