Latin American and Hispanic Markets Adjust to Consumer Control

For Wednesday's Keynote Roundtable, held the second day of ad:tech Miami, Advertising Age's Laurel Wentz gathered together a collection of the finest minds in the Hispanic and Latin American market places to discuss the changing relationship between consumers, content and control. On the panel were MTV Networks VP of Digital Media Luis Goicouria, VOY Group Chairman and CEO Fernando Espuelas, Batanga Chairman and CEO Rafael Urbina-Quintero and NBC Universal, Telemundo Network Group Senior VP Digital Media Peter Blacker.

Among all members of the panels, the overriding acknowledgment that consumers have the keys to content kingdom was agreed to though not to the exclusion of well-produced content. Content is still king as has been said. It's simply being created and consumed very differently than it was just three or five years ago. The panelists agreed the explosion of consumer generated media has forever changed the media landscape and will continue to do so in ways even the best minds can't yet imagine.

Urbina- Quintero's Batanga has been enabling this shift towards consumer generated media with its Latino and Hispanic-focused events by involving event attendees who create their own content using their mobile devices while at events.

Mashing up content a bit, Blacker's Telemundo took the show Top Chef along with last year's winner Carlos Fernandez and created an entirely new and different content channel around the show with a blog written by Fernandez which includes his running commentary on this year's show contestants.

Many challenges accompany this explosion in UGC as noted by MTV Networks' Giocouria who explained Latin American mobile technology lags other parts of the world even while use of mobile devices trumps that of many other areas. This makes it difficult to deliver the latest and greatest content across a network that doesn't have all the latest bells an whistles.

On the challenge of quantifying the success of some of these new content delivery platforms and formats, Blacker noted, for example, the difficulty in assigning marketing value to branded ingredients used in shows like Top Chef.

In terms of mashups and challenges, the two together are a challenging mashup up of their own as explained by Urbina-Quintero who said Latinos aren't just Latinos and Hispanics aren't just Hispanics with one generation dramatically different than the one before it in terms of their U.S-influenced cultural mashup.

Further demonstrating the rapid changes affecting consumption of media was Espuelas' affirmation those under 25 have a completely different view of media delivery than older generations in terms of their shift towards portability and changing consumptions habits. He noted his seven year old son uses of the website Club Penguin which is a MySpace of sorts for young kids. His son's media consumption habits and even his social habits with respect to how he interacts with is friends has forever changed.

Urbina-Quintero said the content cat is out of the bag and there is no going back. While there will always be a market for so-called professionally developed content, consumer generated content will increasing compete with it for screen time. The challenge for marketers, Urbina-Quintero said, would be the proper aggregation of micro-audience content into a salable asset. In addition, he said content fee models will have to change in a world where so much content is freely created and distributed. Generations who are used to viewing so much content for free are going to balk and paying $100 monthly fees to cable companies.

All panelists agreed advertises will have to become much more flexible in their approach to targeting particular audience segments. The old rules are gone. The new rules haven't yet been written. We are in a state of flux and companies that wish to succeed have to simply continually adapt and be aware of daily changes in their respective spaces.