Marlborough Marketing Firm Adds Hispanic Focus
Marcelino Miyares Jr. heads up a new Hispanic division for Marlborough's Mercury Media.
Hispanic purchasing power in the United States is expected to hit $992 billion this year, and a Marlborough direct marketing company, Mercury Media, has created its own Spanish specialty practice to help customers take advantage of the opportunity that presents.
The practice group is called Mercury En Español, and is headed by Marcelino Miyares Jr., who started his career in Chicago, and went on to co-found Tamayo Miyares Advertising in Los Angeles. In 1987, he graduated from Northwestern University with a bachelor's degree in political science.
The Spanish language division will provide customers with direct marketing services in Internet, digital television and mobile marketing areas.
Market Nuances
Marketing to the country's 45.5 million or so Hispanics is not the same as marketing to the average American, according to Beth Vendice, president of Mercury Media.
"The language needs to be completely different," she said. "You can't always directly translate a campaign (from English) into Spanish."
If a company is targeting Cubans in the Southeast, then one dialect is needed. But if a company is targeting Hispanics in Arizona, where the Hispanic population is overwhelmingly Mexican, it would involve a different dialect, she said.
There are other details that must be attended to as well: family is a focus for Hispanics, and it's important to show an extended family, usually with grandparents and multiple children, in advertisements.
"They may seem like simple nuances, but to be effective it's important to get them right," Vendice said. "It's important to be credible to the customer."
Mercury En Español will also provide account planning, develop creative campaigns, supervise production, help set up call centers, develop telemarketing scripts and analyze how the campaign is working, Vendice said.
Mercury Media has worked on Hispanic direct marketing campaigns since early 2008, and with more companies realizing the value of the Hispanic market, the work has just kept growing, she said.
The privately-held company, with offices in Marlborough and Santa Monica, Calif., has 142 employees and billed $300 million in 2008, according to company officials.
Mercury Media is not alone in seeing the Hispanic market as a growth area. The Hispanic advertising industry is growing four times faster than the rest of the advertising industry, according to the Virginia-based Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies.
Along with the Hispanic advertising industry growth, Hispanic language outlets have grown as well.
"Ten years ago there were so few places," Vendice said. "Now there are more and more places: Univision, Telefutura and Telemundo. I could just keep going on and on."
As the industry is changing with more advertisers looking to gain entry into Hispanic markets, Mercury Media is changing, too.
On June 2, it hired a new CEO, Ronald C. Pruett Jr., to head the company. He most recently was the executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Polymedica/Liberty Medical, a large, publicly-traded diabetic supply company as well as one of the biggest direct response marketers in the U.S., Vendice said.
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