Latinos are the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic group and are an attractive market segment for grocers because they often have larger families than other demographic groups. More mouths to feed means more groceries to buy.

Arizona’s Hispanic households spend an average $5,648 annually on groceries, while non-Hispanic households average $5,288, according to Phoenix-based Behavior Research Center.

Read more

French-speaking Canadians can now get Google’s News Service in their own language, the search giant announced Wednesday.

The French edition of Google News Canada enables searches and browsing news items from more than 500 French news sources.

The feature is based on the same search service used by Google’s English division, but gives greater prominence to news and photos specific to Canada, with more links to stories about Canadian businesses, politics, celebrities and sport.

Read more

Managers at Cary Towne Center say a growing number of shoppers speak Spanish so it’s critical Santa can connect with all the children.

“It makes a big difference to see a child wandering…standing there, wishing to be close to Santa and before you know it he’s sitting on Santa’s lap and Santa is speaking Spanish to him,” Santa added. “That’s his language [and] he does not question it.”

Whether it’s in English, Spanish or French, Santa listens carefully to each request. While Barbie and Spiderman top the list of most young children, Santa says most of the older children ask for something bigger.

“This year, more than any other year, I’ve got more requests for peace on earth,” he said.

It’s a gift all of us could ask for this Christmas, no matter what language you speak.

Read more

Note: In the words of former South African president Nelson Mandela, “If you talk to someone in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

From “acute triangle” to “zero exponent,” the math glossary contains more
than 700 mathematical vocabulary terms commonly used in grade 6 through
Algebra 2. Users can select from among 12 languages — Arabic, Bengal,
Chinese, English, Haitian, Hmong, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Urdu and
Vietnamese. If a language other than English is chosen, users will see the
English term along with the word and its definition in the selected language.
Many terms include diagrams that illustrate the term with labels in the
appropriate language.

The glossary provides a number of benefits to students, teachers and
parents:

* Students — The tool is free, easy-to-use, and available 24/7 for those
looking to better understand mathematical terms and their definitions.

* Teachers — To communicate with students speaking many languages within
the same classroom, teachers can find help in one place. There is no
need to maintain a variety of print resources.

* Parents — Parents are better able to help their children with math
homework even if they do not read English. The tool is available to
anyone with Internet access.

Read more

[Spanish-speaking] travelers now enjoy a better, faster and friendlier airport experience with Delta Air Lines’ new Spanish-language automated gate announcements and select information on Delta’s Gate Information Display Screens (GIDS).

Starting Dec. 14, Delta gates in 34 U.S. airports will have the ability to play automated gate announcements in English and Spanish. Automated gate announcements will always be played in both English and Spanish in select cities and for all Delta-operated SkyTeam and Avianca codeshare domestic flights. Beginning in January 2005, display screens in Delta gate areas will also provide select information in Spanish, such as showing proper stowage instructions for carry-on baggage.

Read more

Most companies with a considerable Web presence have bitten the bullet and migrated to a commercial content-management system (CMS). The benefits of a CMS include the ability to assign content ownership and responsibility, easily modify and add content, assign effective dates and create workflows to make sure proper approval is gained before publication.

But what about a full-featured CMS from the open-source world? Most early attempts were not well received, but today that has changed. The open-source arena now has its own world-class CMS, called Plone, which is built on Zope; its content-management framework provides a full-featured CMS for open-source-friendly customers. In fact, Plone is more than a CMS — it is a complete development platform that supports advanced templates and objects, and has a full rendering engine.

To take a look at the Plone solution, point your browser to www.plone.org, where you will find plenty of documentation — a rarity for open-source systems. A tremendous amount of functionality is available without having to resort to customization. The default Plone setup includes support for various content types, workflow, internationalization (as of this writing, the Plone user interface has been ported to 30 languages), portlets and more. The user interface is also compliant with the World Wide Web Consortium’s AA rating for accessibility. In case you’re worried about support, more than 100 developers around the world and plenty of companies are dedicated to the continued development and support of Plone.

Read more

Lexicon Marketing, developer and marketer of Inglés sin Barreras, a video-based English learning program, has increased its advertising investment from $12.56 to $75.00 million in little over a year, and is now challenging the venerable Procter & Gamble for the top [advertiser in the Hispanic market] position.

Read more

Total monies spent by the top-50 advertisers to reach the U.S. Hispanic market have grown more impressively than the overall market itself despite slowing in growth in recent years. From 2000-2004, dollars spent by the top-50 advertisers grew from $658.37 million to $1.23 billion, an 87 percent increase. The dramatic increase in advertising expenses serves as an indirect indicator of advertising investment satisfaction by existing advertisers.

Read more

The Internet Advertising Bureau’s Hispanic Committee, comprising executives from companies such as Univision and Yahoo!, estimates that U.S. online advertising to Hispanics will reach $75 million this year, up 67 percent from 2003. Advertisers spent just $10 million in 2002, the bureau estimates.

Committee Chairman Peter Blacker, vice-president of multicultural and international advertising for AOL Media Networks, sees strong growth in 2005 as well. “I think the market is trending to well above $100 million for next year,” he says. “We’re seeing in our space right now sort of the go-go years of the ’90s.”

A strong selling point is the number of Hispanics who are going online at home. According to the 2004 AOL/RoperASW U.S. Hispanic Cyberstudy, 20 percent of U.S. Hispanic Internet users have been online at home for less than six months, compared with just 6 percent of general at-home Internet users. A separate report by Synovate predicts that by 2010, 62 percent of U.S. Hispanics will have access to the Internet at home – up from 45 percent this year.

Besides being a fast-growing Internet market, Hispanics also are spending slightly more time online than the general market. A 2003 study by the UCLA Center for Communication Policy determined that Hispanics spend 11.6 hours per week online, compared with 11.0 hours among non-Hispanics. The difference is greater at home, where Hispanics spend 9.8 hours per week online while non-Hispanics spend just 8.1 hours on the Internet, the study found.

Read more

Double-digit gains in Hispanic advertising expenditures were made in all media, but television continues to garner the majority of all ad dollars. Television ad spending accounted for more than 64 percent of all expenditures in 2004. Nearly all media examined are predicted to exhibit double digit growth through at least 2007.

Read more

Spending power of the nation’s largest ethnic group is growing at thrice the general population’s.

Marketing geared toward Hispanics has reached $3 billion so far in 2004, up 11 percent from last year.

That number is expected to rise to $3.6 billion by 2007, according to Hispanic Business Inc., which released “U.S. Hispanic Media Markets Report, 2000-2007” earlier this week.

“The Hispanic market is growing faster than the (general) market,” said Juan Solana, chief economist of HispanTelligence, the research division of Hispanic Business Inc.

Solana said that the spending power of the general population of the U.S. has risen 2.8 percent annually over the past decade, while Hispanic spending power has risen 7.5 percent.

In 2004, Solana said that the spending power of Hispanics in the U.S. is $700 billion and that it’s expected to reach $1 trillion by 2010.

The 2000 census is a major contributor in the surge of Hispanic marketing. Advertisers realized they had “a largely underserved” market of 35 million, Solana said.

Advertisement

The U.S. Hispanic population has since risen to 39 million, according to census estimates.

Read more

English remains the language of choice among the children and grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants, a new analysis of census data shows.

Read more

Central America is critically important to the prosperity of the Western Hemisphere. The next step is to push Congress in 2005 to ratify the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

Read more

Advertisers spent an estimated $3.1 billion in 2004 to market their products to U.S. Hispanics, up 11 percent from last year, according to U.S. Hispanic Media Markets Report, released by Hispanic Business Inc.

The report predicts that Hispanic market advertising expenditures in the U.S. will reach $3.6 billion by 2007. Spanish-language radio is predicted to garner the largest percentage of growth by 2007—gaining 21 percent.

Read more

It is 8:30 p.m. and it’s time for commercials on prime-time television. A Target ad flashes on the screen. A family digs through their stockings, about to open presents, to a danceable tune that sounds like “Joy to the World,” but you can’t quite understand it.

That’s because it’s in Spanish.

Marketers increasingly are going beyond foreign language TV stations to reach a diverse customer base. Target Corp., General Motors Corp. and Major League Baseball have all recently aired ads in Spanish on network television. Locally, the Wayne County Community College District ran a recruitment ad in the general market in Spanish with English subtitles and another in English with Arabic subtitles.

Read more