You might have heard of greenwashing around environmental issues, or pinkwashing around Breast Cancer Awareness Month. But, there is also "Latino coating."
“Once a year, you know, companies do their Hispanic Heritage Month effort, whatever that looks like, you know, maybe they change their logo and add a little green and red, you know, accents to it. Or they do their little employee resource group driven initiative and then they don't do anything the rest of the year. That is the classic Latino coating effort," said Jose Villa, chair of the Hispanic Marketing Council.
He has been in Latino-focused marketing for nearly three decades. His organization spearheaded a campaign to get companies to stop Latino coating and think more critically about how to market to this growing demographic.
Villa joined The Show to talk about Latino coating, the opportunity lost in it and how he thinks the presidential campaigns are doing in their Latino marketing.
Full conversation
JOSE VILLA: It's translations, awkward adaptations of campaigns. It's, it's, it's, you know, it's casting the, the Latina, you know, the Hispanic woman in the mixed race family on your commercial, right? You know, with, with 2.5 kids as opposed to 1.5 kids. You know, it's the, running your ad on Spanish TV, in English, you know, during a soccer game.
So there's a bunch of different examples but there are, you know, the overarching sort of issue is just, it's, it's not a well thought out, it's a haphazard and in some ways like token approach to the Hispanic market.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Token is a good word for it. What has the effort looked like to, to change this from your point of view? Like, are there companies that get this and are doing this better now? And, and what does that look like?
VILLA: Well, absolutely. There are definitely companies that are doing things right, have been consistently doing that for many, many years. And it tends to be focused in certain industries. There's certain industries that have for many, many years, been focused on the Hispanic market because a lot of their growth has come from it, you know.
And classic examples are like the big beer brands because they heavily sell to the Hispanic market and it's a big part of their consumer base. And so they've always done a good job.
It's kind of everybody else that we kind of have to like, educate everyone once in a while because they forget, you know, and it's, part of it is also just, you know, there's generations, you know, there's new marketers coming into positions of leadership in companies. And so you always, you know, they don’t know all this. So we have to, we have to constantly educate.
And then the other thing is the Hispanic market is also changing all the time. So the Hispanic market in 2024 looks very different than it did in 1984, let alone, you know, 2004. So that's also a big reason why we have to be doing this.
GILGER: That makes a lot of sense. So, OK, so we have to talk about what this looks like in the political landscape that we are in right now because if anyone's talking about advertising at this particular moment, we are thinking immediately of the bombardment we are all experiencing of political advertising right now. Both campaigns seem to understand that Latinos are going to be an incredibly important demographic in this election.
How do you think they're doing? Are they taking the same approach these two campaigns?
VILLA: Well, they're taking different approaches. And I think they're both doing some things right. And then they're both kind of missing some opportunities as well.
So in terms of the, the Harris campaign and the Democrats, they've got their “Hombres for Kamala” campaign, they're really focused on Hispanic men. And I think, I think that's really smart. I think that's an example of doing the, the, the segmentation and the real sort of precision targeting that, that is the most effective in the Hispanic market. They understand that the Hispanic market is not a monolith.
You know, 68 million Hispanics are not all the same. And they're really focusing on one particular subsegment of, obviously a very big one, of primarily Mexican men. And that's, you know, that's super interesting because they, they know that's where they have the biggest problem, in terms of that's where they're bleeding support to the Republicans. And so they're, they're really laser focused on that demographic.
Now, you know, whether the policy and the messaging is right, that's kind of another issue. But they're, you know, they're laser focused on the right market. They understand some of the key insights that they have to hit on and they're doing a really good job in that sense, right.
GILGER: OK. So what about on the Trump side? I mean, he has made at least as far as polling shows some pretty big inroads with, especially Latino men.
VILLA: Yeah. Yeah. He has and, and I think that's just been driven by some of the issues that have resonated with Hispanic men. And I think what, you know, they're doing smart, you know, they've got their Latino Americanos or, you know, Latin Americans for Trump effort, and that's kind of the platform that they've been working under.
And, you know, they're kind of taking a slightly different approach in some ways. I think also smart in terms of even using that word, Latino Americans for Trump, they're not, they're, they're understanding that it is a diverse population and they're seeing a lot of support from the non-Mexican segments of the market. That happened starting in 2020. They saw they were doing really well with, with Puerto Ricans, obviously, Cubans are very traditionally conservative group and primarily in Florida. But also like Venezuelans, a lot of new immigrant groups that have come into the United States in the last, you know, 15, 20 years. And so they've kind of have a little bit of a, almost a broader umbrella tent that they're using to reach Hispanics.
And really like focusing in on the fact that they're not just focusing on Mexican Hispanics, but this broader sort of big tent of these other groups of in terms of country of origin that they're making sure that they're, they're connecting to. Because, you know, that whole, that whole hyphen concept of, you know, most Hispanics identify with their country of origin, you know, they're Cuban American, they're Venezuelan American and, and they're sort of tapping into that in the way that they're approaching the Hispanic market. And again, I think smartly.
GILGER: So, so one of the things that comes to mind when you're talking, talking about the idea of Latino coding and how brands do this kind of ineffectively is that it's a big missed opportunity. It sounds like, it sounds like you think both of these political campaigns are doing a pretty good job not missing that opportunity, finding the demographics that matter here and trying to reach them. Are they hitting all those marks though? Where are the missed opportunities for them?
VILLA: One of the missed opportunities I would say, particularly on the, I think on the Democrat side is, is missing the importance of the Hispanic population in some of the swing states that you don't traditionally consider to be swing states to be Hispanic markets. So, you know, some of those markets up in the, in the upper Midwest, you know, the Michigan, the Pennsylvania's. And even in the South, in North Dakota, not putting in as much of an effort to reach those groups because there are a lot of Hispanics in those markets. And you know, they, they could represent the difference in the election.
You know, on the, on the Trump side, I, you know, I know they have an overall strategy of sort of outsourcing a lot of their outreach and on the ground activity to third-party groups. And I know this election cycle, they're not doing a ton of Hispanic-targeted advertising coming directly from the campaign.
So it's a missed opportunity in the sense that, you know, they're not putting their resources, they have a lot less money than the, than the other side. But they're still, you know, I think a missed opportunity there in terms of investing some of their precious dollars into this market, which they could activate very effectively in all seven of the swing states.
