One of our most significant shifts in the past six months has been one-on-one marketing, which seeks to engage consumers with the product and enhance their experience of the brand. This is something TV cannot do.
Cindy Knight, Communications Manager, Toyota

U.S. companies will spend $132 million in online advertising targeted to Hispanics this year, up 32 percent from last year. The trend of increased online advertising has been driven mainly by tech-savvy Hispanic youths who are increasingly turning to the Internet as a primary source of information.

While the majority of Hispanic advertising dollars still go to television, the Internet is enabling advertisers to more distinctively target specific groups within the U.S. Hispanic population, from acculturated Hispanic youth on MySpace or YouTube to first-generation, Spanish-dominant immigrants reading online newspapers from their home country.

“One of our most significant shifts in the past six months has been one-on-one marketing, which seeks to engage consumers with the product and enhance their experience of the brand,” says Cindy Knight, Toyota marketing communications manager. “This is something TV cannot do.”

Language has become an increasingly complex component of Hispanic online advertising. Time Warner’s AOL Latino, a major Spanish-language Web site, used to just target countries such as Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil. “We started waking up to the reality that we have to speak to all Latinos and that a large percentage of this online Latino audience is bilingual or speaks English,” stated Peter Blacker, who worked on the original business plan for AOL Latino. Major advertisers are getting the message and using the Internet to target bilingual American Hispanic youth.