US Hispanic High Users Of Mobile, But Which Hispanics And How Are They Using It?

The Latino market continues to be an attractive one for the mobile industry, with figures like “3.1 percent of the general population used their mobile devices to watch videos, 6.7 percent of Latinos did and 26.8 percent of Hispanics sent a photo or video with their phones vs. 15.3 percent of the general population” getting execs salivating. This is from an Adweek article quoting a 2007 M:Metrics survey (which resembles one that was released in May). There’s an effort in the article to make the high use of mobiles by US Hispanics seem a new and surprising thing, but everyone following the mobile industry has known about it for at least several years.

Moving on…There is some detail on MTV Tr3s, a bilingual program on Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Vcast, and pertinent comment that indicates that a lot of the interest of companies is finding out exactly who is using what: “With some 70 percent of U.S. Latinos owning mobile phones, about 20 percent now are using their mobile devices to watch entertainment programming, [Lucia Ballas-Traynor, SVP and GM of MTV Tr3s] said. “But who is that 20 percent and how do they use it? The fact that we will be able to get there first and access the data is what makes this very intriguing.” Which is an important point, because the Hispanic market is not homogenous and some past efforts have failed precisely because they didn’t bother to find out which segment of the Latino population they should be targeting.

There are still issues with complicated copyrights in mobile — Borja Perez, alliance leader for Yahoo! (NSDQ: YHOO) Telemundo, spoke about a partnership for a user-generated content competition with People en Espanol, saying: “We’re in a pretty unique situation right now because it gave us time to figure out all of the legal issues surrounding user-generated content and because we are the only ones who can generate content from the Web, then showcase them on TV with the blessing of four sets of lawyers.”

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