Today we released “Hispanic Millennials and Mobile,” which looks at younger US Hispanic consumers through the lens of mobilenot just what they do with their devices but how they feel about them and how their smartphones impact their wider lives.
Pacific Ethnography conducted the research for us, which consisted of two phases: a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews and home visits with Hispanic Millennials from across the country, followed by a survey to explore and quantify some of the findings.
Young Latino Americans are interesting not just because they are an increasingly important demographic group, but also because they serve as a leading indicator for mobile attitudes and behaviors that will become more widespread in the future. The mobile-first lives this group leads today reflect the lives we all will be living in the very near future, as mobile-savviness diffuses ever more widely though the entire U.S. population.
For the IAB audience, the key finding was that Hispanic Millennials sometimes like and even welcome ads, as long as they are on their terms and their preferred timing66% say they pay attention to at least some ads on their phone. Moreover, email marketing communication is often seen as real communication, not as junk mail. And 21% of Hispanic Millennials say they’ve followed a brand on social media after seeing an ad (27% have done a search, and 23% have tapped/clicked on a mobile ad).
As with other Millennials, Hispanic Millennials are extremely diverse, and take on different roles and personas depending on time and situation. So it’s not enough for marketers to simply include Latinos in creative or run ads in Spanish to attract themthey have to be more sensitive and relevant than that to reach this media-savvy segment successfully.
In my early 20s, the Internet was still dial-up, and being “offline” was the usual way to be. For this population segment, the mobile internet means the reverse is truethey are always online, unless they are asleep, visiting relatives outside the US without international roaming, or deliberately hiding.
The phrase “mobile first” has been thrown around a lot by marketers and media companies in the past few years, reflecting their efforts to design products, content, and services with phone screens in mind. Millennials, and particularly Hispanic Millennials, are really mobile firstit’s not a business strategy, it’s a cultural and social shift. Marketers that understand this will be well positioned to reap rewards as mobile internet adoption spreads.