Half-Billion Dollars in U.S. Hispanic Advertising

Are you localizing for domestic buyers? When the locale or region for which you're locale-izing is actually your own, but with a demographic twist, it becomes a kind of internal localization.

This is a much-studied phenomenon (and economic driver) in the U.S., where estimates point to 46 million Hispanics with USD900 billion in spending power. Take both of those figures with a grain of salt, but there's a market there, and several industries - notably banks and wireless companies - are internally localizing their products and services for it.

Still, what's the point of localizing your product - toys, electronics, books, irrigation equipment, insurance policies - if your company is not spending money to promote it?

According to a study from the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies (AHAA), the top seven advertisers to U.S. Hispanics spent nearly USD500 million in 2007. However, a number of large companies well known for their ad budgets (Dell, Microsoft, Apple) are pretty stingy when it comes to promoting their products among Hispanics. More data here.

Does anybody bother with this internal localization besides U.S. companies? Do companies based in other countries need to think about internal localization, and how to promote global products internally? Does Michelin run Arabic-language commercials in France for its Algerian and Moroccan inhabitants? Does BMW run Turkish-language ads in German newspapers? Does China Mobile market its cellular service to English-language expatriates living there?

Companies like Verizon Wireless and Bank of America put in place the equivalent of an overseas office, by creating marketing, sales and product teams. They work inside the U.S., but in a different language and on different opportunities for different people from the main teams.

I don't think we're learning how to do this by watching companies in other countries. I think we're making it up as we go along. It's odd to think of localization without the international component to it, but it's part of our job as localizers.