Target boosts Spanish-language ads for the holidays

Dive Brief:

Target is expanding its outreach to Hispanic consumers with holiday spots from 72andSunny and Team Arrow Partners, which nods to the importance of the U.S. consumer segment in its general marketing, according to Adweek and The Wall Street Journal.
One ad, "The Toycracker," stars a girl named Marisol (an Hispanic name that takes a cue from the traditional Nutcracker's “Marie”) and married stars John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, who will appear in two four-minute videos during ABC's Dec. 11 broadcast of Frozen. Target chief creative officer Todd Waterbury told Adweek that the couple works well for the retailer’s multicultural approach, which is increasingly important to its growing Hispanic consumer base.
The retailer is boosting spending on Spanish-language television ads by 67% this year, according to The Wall Street Journal. Last year, Target spent some $9.1 million on Spanish-language television ads and about $100 million in total on television ads, according to Kantar Media research cited by the Journal.

Dive Insight:

Target, the 28th largest spender on Hispanic media in 2013, has focused several past marketing efforts on reaching Hispanic shoppers: Last year it launched an advertising campaign dubbed #SinTraducción (“without translation”) that the retailer’s SVP of marketing Rick Gomez said “celebrates the untranslatable moments in our Hispanic guests’ lives.” That campaign was expanded to include a comprehensive integration and product placements into the hit CW sitcom “Jane the Virgin,” which features mainly Latino characters.

Thanks to income and population growth, Hispanics of all ages in the U.S. will drive consumer spending beyond millennials’ influence by 2020, according to recent research from Morgan Stanley analysts. Retail spending by Hispanic-Americans will rise by 1.6 percentage points by 2020, more than millennial spending growth of 0.6 percentage points and spending growth by 65-years-old-plus whites of 0.4 percentage points, according to Morgan Stanley. With a median age of 29, there are plenty of Hispanic millennials, for that matter: Some 60% are millennial-age or younger, according to Pew Research Center data.

Limiting outreach to U.S. Hispanics solely through Spanish-language media would be self-defeating, considering that 80% of native-born Hispanics younger than 18 years-old speak only English at home, according to Pew. Plus, Hispanics born in the U.S. account for nearly two-thirds (64%) of the Hispanic market, according to Nielsen, and 35% of all Hispanics living in the United States speak both English and Spanish at home.

Hispanic-Americans live in every state, and are both upwardly mobile and mobile-first. The Census Bureau counted 55.4 million Hispanic-Americans in 2014, or 17.4% of the U.S. population, and the demographic is projected to include 106 million people by 2050.

CVS Pharmacy has similarly expanded its Hispanic-focused “CVS y más” initiative, first launched in Miami last year, to nine Los Angeles-area stores this year.

This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the 2016 holiday shopping season. You can browse our holiday page for more stories.