If someone told you that your marketing and advertising was failing to target a significant market segment - one that makes up a sixth of the population, one that spent over a trillion dollars last year - would you be concerned? You should be, according to a survey commissioned by Orci.  Just over half of respondents prepared no materials in Spanish to target the Hispanic market, and another 32% had at most 10% of their material in Spanish.

Those statistics suggest a remarkable degree of complacency by the marketers who responded, and the survey was commented on by both Forbes and Advertising Age. What should the marketers do about it? Presumably they should go out and find an agency with specialist knowledge of the Hispanic market and start targeting this neglected segment.

But maybe companies should also take a look at the survey in conjunction with the results of the Pew Foundation report from 2007, which, while stressing the bilingual nature of the Hispanic population, also found that 88% of second generation Hispanic adults and 94% of third and later generations spoke English very well, although they still speak Spanish.

Also, Hispanic marketing isn’t as simple as getting materials and ads done in Spanish. Cuban-Americans are different than the Puerto Rican community, who are different than Mexican Americans, and once marketers go down the road of specific Spanish-language Hispanic advertising and marketing efforts, it can be a fragmented and expensive effort.  If you believe that your current efforts are reaching a significant portion of the Hispanic population through English at some point, then you will not do more specifically aimed at Hispanics unless there is a compelling reason.

What would be a compelling reason?  Products that skew Hispanic, proof of return on investment and an expectation of significant sales growth from the Hispanic market. Do the survey results bear this out?

Orci’s press release noted the survey was sent to 9,300 senior marketers at Fortune 1000 companies in February 2010.  The results available on Orci’s site contained no data on the actual number of respondents, so there is no way to know what the final sample was.  This is unusual – and disturbing.  While it’s normal for companies to spin results of surveys and reports to be as favourable as possible and to use them to generate business, it’s very unusual to have sent out a survey to over 9,000 people and then not release the respondent sample size.

• 60% of respondents had Marketing/Ad budgets of $1 million or less – which means the sample skewed to the small end of the Fortune 1000 – it’s not clear how representative it was;
• Only 4% of respondents believed their products were more suited for the Hispanic than the General Market in the US.  There wasn’t a huge number who were looking at a big Hispanic skew.;
• While 8% of respondents said they expected sales to Hispanics in the US to increase significantly in the next 12 months, only 26% said they expected them to increase moderately and over 50% said they expected them to stay the same – which may explain why 38% said they didn’t believe an increase in marketing budget to Hispanics would be justified with a return on investment and 29% believed what they were doing now was appropriate.

I guess I should apologize here and now to Orci for having picked apart their survey; there is nothing particularly special about it, nothing that separates it from similar efforts by other companies. And that's my point: next time you see an article which quotes statistics and conclusions from a survey, don't necessarily believe what you read.

AdMob, the company which places ads on websites targeted at mobile users and which has just been acquired by Google, has published the results of a survey into app downloading, buying and usage habits. While the survey was quite small – under 1,000 people who opted-in to the survey – the findings were interesting. iPhone and Android users both downloaded just under 9 apps per month on average, but both were outdone by iPod Touch users, who averaged 12 apps per month.  And those iPod apps also get more use; an average of 100 minutes per user per day, compared to 80 minutes for iPhone and Android.

When it comes to actually paying for apps, Android users average just over one app per month, with only 21% of users buying anything; iPod Touch users average 1.6 apps per month, while the iPhone leads the way with 1.8 – and with 50% of users buying at least one app per month.

The number of ads served by AdMob continues to grow at an astonishing rate; in January, over 7.3 billion ads were served in North America, a jump of a third over December 2009. That rate of growth may slow in the coming months – all those Christmas presents are sure to have caused a spike in January demand and usage, which will likely drop off a little in February. The iPhone and iPod Touch accounted for a whopping 40% of those ads.

What does all this mean? It’s a good indication that the apparently insatiable appetite for apps shows no sign of slowing, and that the rise of the smartphone has yet to get anywhere near a peak. The marketing opportunities presented by providing branded apps, or by using mobile advertising, are ones that companies ignore at their peril. You can find the AdMob reports here.

RJ Metrics provided data analyses for Twitter last fall and again early this year, with the latest data running through the end of 2009 and updating the information for users and engagements. It’s very valuable insight on trends and potential audience on this major social networking venue and while I urge you to read the latest report at your leisure, here’s a summary:

There’s good and bad news in the topline results for the end of 2009. Total Twitter accounts are up to a little over 75 million. While new accounts were still being added at about 2-3 per second, or 6.2 million a month, that’s down about 20% from July 2009, which was the peak for new accounts.

40% have created an account but never tweeted, 25% have no followers, and 80% have tweeted less than 10 times, which means most people who have joined are inactive or barely active. Also, on a percentage basis, December 2009 was the lowest month for activity in Twitter history, as only 17% of accounts sent anything. However, it’s important to remember that this is 17% of the growing base of accounts, and further analysis indicates that those who come back become “more engaged” over time (see below).

The results include a cohort analysis of Unique Tweeters to understand their behavior and loyalty over time. Essentially, it resembles CPG Panel Trial and Repeat analysis and groups them into the week they first Tweeted (Trial) and then looks at when and how often they return (Repeat). About 20% of those who actually send come back and remain active, however, once grouped by month and looked at total content sent (not just whether they sent at all), that 20% becomes more active over time, and, as the report notes, “tweet so much that it makes up for all the people who left”.

The results point out that if 20% of 75 million accounts are active users, that means there are around 15 million people out there who are “highly active tweeters”. To put that in perspective, take a quick look back at the average ratings and viewership for the 2009 NBA Finals on ABC, which, according to the NBA’s press release, “dominat(ed) prime time”. The average rating was 8.4, with 9.6 million Hhds and a little over 14 million viewers. That would put average viewers for the Lakers vs. the Magic below the number of truly active Twitter users.

Data sources: Twitter: Compiled by RJ Metrics, via Twitter’s application programming interface (API) data, in December 2009. Accessed 2 million Tweets from 50,000 users to compile the analysis. NBA ratings: NBA PR release, June 16th 2009