How AI and Machine Learning Are Impacting Media

New technology and how it is transforming traditional media was the main focus at the recent Streaming Media East conference. There’s no doubt AI and machine learning are impacting media, and according to a panel of experts, it will be a boon to both consumers and the media business.

Nadine Krefetz, a consultant with Reality Software, noted that, “Machine learning and AI are more buzzy than ever.” The reasons why media should be focusing on these protocols include the need to harness huge amounts of data, stitch together all of the complex parts inherent in the data sources and automate the cost efficiencies and time.

According to Gabriella Mirabelli, EVP Consumer Insights and Brand Strategy, Valance Media, AI is the technique that creates human learning using logic. She noted that Machine Learning is a subset of AI that uses, “complex statistical techniques to improve tasks that the technology can do.” Another subset of AI is Deep Learning that “uses algorithms to help the machine train itself.” In sum, AI uses human intelligence while machine learning uses data to predict outcomes.

What AI Can Do
When applied to media, these systems enable smooth processing and understanding of the mountains of data now available to marketers. For Mirabelli, we are advancing into, “an Era of Insight from the Era of Data,” where there is greater complexity and too much data for humans alone to handle. She uses these systems to make buy decisions and to answer unique questions. For Field Garthwaite, Co-Founder and CEO, Iris.tv, these systems can be used to improve the customer experience and, for Thomas Ohanian, Global Sales Executive, IBM Watson, the underlying technology that these solutions depend upon enables speech to text, object recognition, voice and other interactive elements by “reducing human tasks and gleaning insights from content.”

What AI is Doing Now
Sports are a ripe area for AI. Ohanian explained that fewer people are going to events at the stadium, preferring to watch on the glass. AI offers real time insights by using algorithms to assess “intent, reaction and gestures to build interesting and timely sports highlights.” It is an instantaneous way to “pick plays, players, matches and play types through automatic curation which is very sticky,” to reduce the bounce rate and help editors find relevant content quickly.

Nikki Conley, Cloud Solution Architect, Microsoft, offered another perspective. Mistakes can be corrected or monetized. A recent Game of Thrones episode erroneously had a Starbucks cup in the frame. “If we ran through an analysis and saw the cup, we could remove it … or ask Starbucks for advertising support,” instead of inadvertently giving them $2.3 billion in free advertising. AI enables the ability to “look for occurrences in content in post-production with extensive tagging.”
From amassing data to curating content to correcting mistakes to providing an overall better experience for viewers and more profitable opportunities for advertisers, the future is now for AI in media.

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.

Thinking Out of the Box. An Interview with Jin Kim, President of CDA

Jin Kim, President of CDA, believes that both his identity and career have revolved around not really “fitting in to the traditional culture or system, which has actually worked out great for me to come in as a more ‘outside-the-box’ strategic thinker.” Starting out after college launching Korean Air’s successful Skypass Loyalty Program, he moved into marketing, then mobile, before launching Creative Digital Agency (CDA) in 2016.

Charlene Weisler: What is your definition of programmatic?

Jin Kim: There’s the industry definition: “Programmatic ad buying uses algorithms to automate the purchasing process.” I think the primary difference is with programmatic, you target the individual, rather than the publication. There is a lot of power in programmatic, particularly from a bottom-of-funnel attribution standpoint, which is really attractive advertisers who are always asked to prove return on investment. What we’ve seen is that so much emphasis has been placed on programmatic (which is at its best at the bottom of the funnel), other parts of the customer journey are starting to atropine from lack of attention.

Weisler: Why place more emphasis on direct?

Kim: Programmatic really excels at the bottom of funnel; attributing and optimizing conversions and lift to ad spend. The problem is balance. There’s so much buzz and activity around programmatic right now, that key parts of the funnel are being ignored. That’s the area that’s ripe for disruption. Programmatic has less qualitative impact at the awareness/inspiration stage compared to direct. There are also industry-wide challenges regarding brand safety, viewability and fraud that still need to be worked out. You see this rebalancing happening with the biggest buyers in advertising now – the brands who really have the budget the experiment and take risks to see what works best. Last year, even though programmatic market share went up, big brands shifted spend to direct ads. PG&E cut $200 million from programmatic spend and increased direct spend by 25%. Unilever increased the number of brands buying direct by 112%. Chase decreased the number of programmatic publishers in its portfolio by 98.75%. And the result of these shifts was either an increase in reach or YOY growth in sales.

Weisler: How important is Digital in a buy?

Kim: The main points you’ll hear people talk about are the data & insights, the high specificity of targeting, the agility (you can update a creative mid-flight), the scalability, and the ability to optimize for conversions and sales. But one thing that is often overlooked when it comes to digital advertising is the emotional impact. On mobile in particular, the retention rates for video are much higher than they are on broadcast TV, even though the screen size is smaller and the video length is typically shorter. The mindset of a mobile audience is quite different – more focused in – compared to their mindset when consuming other media channels.

Weisler: How relevant is creative in a campaign's success?

Kim: There’s a lot of cynicism when people talk about creative these days. I’ve heard people say that “creative is a commodity,” and some brands are experimenting with programmatically generated creatives and ad copy. There’s probably something to be said for that, but if you want to have a strong and lasting relationship with the consumer, you’ve got to have original creative that makes an impact. It doesn’t need to be huge and flashy, in fact, these days a smaller and more relevant story is often the most powerful you can get. One thing we believe is that video can be personalized. People have been extolling the virtues of personalized, one-to-one marketing communications for years now, but there’s this belief that video is too unwieldy and expensive to execute this way. If you focus on a mobile audience, I can tell you this isn’t true.

Weisler: What data is most important?

Kim: All data is important. Data centric organizations are the ones that will survive all the disruption happening around us. The top 5 firms in the world are all built around data. The Economist had a great quote last year where they said “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.”  

Weisler: What are the biggest challenges to brands today?

Kim: The biggest challenge for brands today lies in their ability to relay a powerful message through creative storytelling. Too often, brands try to tell their story from their own point of view when rather, the most successful campaigns are told from the audience’s point of view, allowing the brand message to appear naturally. These campaigns are much more authentic and therefore well-received by the audience.

The end-user is always, always, always the hero of the story. Another challenge a lot of brands face is agility. When you’re part of a huge, multi-layered company with dozens of departments, internal agencies, etc., it’s hard to push new ideas into the market.

Weisler: How can they be overcome?

Kim: Follow the data, follow the audience, and accept that you will need to constantly learn and evolve. If you are an expert in digital marketing in 2019 – and you don’t keep learning – your skill set will be obsolete by 2025.

Weisler: Where do you see your part of the business five years from now?

Kim: The biggest change is what’s happening at brick and mortar. Consumers are no longer required to venture into brick-and-mortar locations to shop, completing a majority of their transactions online. This is just going to ramp up more in the next few years. From our standpoint, this huge disruption at retail is an opportunity to facilitate transformation of the in-store experience. In the next five years, we expect our experience driving in-store mobile activation and digital engagement will help retail brands survive and thrive with the changes that are coming.

This article first appeared in Mediapost.com

How to Get Personal, According to Nielsen

"Marketers have to get personal," and should explore technological opportunities, according to Peter Katsingris, Senior Vice President, Nielsen Audience Insights (pictured at top).  

He kicked off the recent Nielsen press breakfast with additional personal touches added by Kelly Abcarian, Nielsen's Senior Vice President, Watch Product Architecture, and other speakers to highlight how the organization is keeping pace with the evolving media landscape via its own technological advances.

Presentations illustrated platform and device usage trends, preferences by demographic, ad-supported potential, dynamic ad insertion and how clients are using Nielsen's data to demonstrate TV's opportunities for advertisers, as summed up here:

The Trends:  More Time Spent with Digital Media
Katsingris has a team that "tells stories with data," enabling clients to better understand the impact of how consumers are leaning into content. "Marketers have to get personal," he noted, and should explore technological opportunities such as dynamic ad insertion to better reach consumers who are increasingly spending more time on their personal devices and various platforms.  He reported that, overall, weekly usage of media continues to grow.  In 2018, Nielsen found that viewers spent 79 hours with media per week, compared to 61 hours in 2010 and 51 hours in 2002. Multi-tasking contributes a lot of this extraordinary amount of time spent, as smartphones have surpassed radio and time spent with digital devices in general, reaching parity with time-shifted TV.

New platforms and devices are being adopted at impressive rates.  According to N-Power, in March 2018 91% of all U.S. households had a smartphone, 79% a computer, 69% an SVOD service, 64% a tablet, 55% a DVR, 46% a smart TV, 43% a game console, 40% an internet-connected device and 4.8% a virtual MVPD.  This increase in digital adoption has resulted in increased usage.  Overall, media usage increased +21% from January 2018 to 2019, especially among African Americans (+26%), Hispanics (+23%) and Asians (+38%).

The more opportunity to view on various devices and platforms, the more time is spent on them.  The shift in time spent is a cautionary tale for traditional media.  Once adopted, streaming usage grows from month one (1 hour, 8 minutes) to year one (1 hour, 20 minutes) while time spent with TV declined in the same timeline (from 7 hours, 19 minutes to 6 hours, 33 minutes).

The expansion of the data pool enables Nielsen to offer new and interesting ways to analyze usage, including which devices are used in which room in the house.  Enabled smart TVs tend to reside in the living room (53%) and encourage co-viewing, while internet-connected devices are in the master bedroom (26%) and (unsurprisingly) enabled video game consoles are in bedrooms that tend to belong to younger members of the household (32%).

The Opportunities:  Addressable TV Using ACR
"The time for addressable advertising is now," declared Abcarian.  "TV has changed and grown.  But we need to look at TV differently than in the past."  There is more connected TV ownership (+46% have at least one smart TV in the home, representing +8% growth from January 2018 to January 2019) and greater cord-cutting or shaving (25% of all TV homes).  But don't misread the trends, she advised.  "TV time is growing, not shrinking," because viewers are "using other devices to get to the glass."  In fact, the impact of connected devices is influencing linear viewing, offering a rebirth of TV.

Linear content is experiencing a 5-7x growth with internet-connected devices, while smart TVs provide a 2x growth to linear content.  In this environment, the ability to apply addressable advertising is a boon to advertisers.  It offers precision advertising that highly targets linear TV with advanced demographics.  It provides value targeting that enables agencies to reduce waste and, with Nielsen, "best in class measurement," using "similar audience segments definitions."  To that end, Nielsen is pioneering ACR technology to unlock the full 16 minutes of ads in programming and transforming C3 measurement, so as to enable clients to reconcile with addressable and be able to execute ad models across platforms.

Two main areas of focus in the coming months include audience-based buying to enable advertisers to use advanced audience segments to plan and buy linear TV campaigns, and addressable TV, which offers true one-to-one ad targeting, delivery and measurement across smart TV platforms. The result will be greater measurement transparency and standardization across these two areas. One example of industry collaboration that exists today is between Nielsen and OpenAP. Nielsen's audience data and Enterprise Audience API are used within OpenAP, enabling the buy side to create and share 777 segments within the consortium's platform since it launched in the Fall of 2017.

Part of this is the result of Nielsen's ability to deploy dynamic ad insertion, which is now in the testing stage.  Nielsen uses video ACR technology that is embedded in the glass screen's firmware or chipset.  "We then take a screenshot every half-second to see what is watched on-screen every two seconds," Abcarian explained.  This is matched back to the library and a decision is then made whether or not to replace the original network ad based on pre-arranged rules and audience profiles.  "It is a seamless experience for the viewer and is more engaging because it is a more relevant ad," she said.

The early learnings from this pilot indicate that broadcasters want to see improved sell rate percentages and agencies want accurate forecasts and more standard segments.  For all of this to happen, measurement reconciliation needs to occur, as well as some operational improvements; there are still too many manual processes at the current time to deliver addressable campaigns.  Some of the challenges are the result of walled gardens that "tie up addressable at scale," Abcarian said.  "We need more partnerships in the ecosystem."  She also noted that we need more scale in technology while keeping in mind the privacy that goes with it.

Another challenge is "too many demand pools and measurement sticks," she added.  "We don't know how to buy at scale with confidence."  Further, there needs to be a reconciliation with C3, bringing the measurement holistically across platforms.  Finally, there needs to be education.  "What do we mean by addressable TV?" she said by way of example.  "And, [we have to] put a value against the impressions."

Ultimately, Abcarianis bullish on Nielsen's ability to deliver an addressable product that will be embraced by the industry.  "It offers real-time scale that optimizes both the upper and lower funnel," she noted.  Nielsen is focused on creating a standardization framework that will drive consistency across all platforms.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

TV Ad Targeting: Lessons From the Digital World

Advancements made in TV ad targeting are proving to be a boon despite linear viewership erosion. A recent Advanced Advertising Summit highlighted how advanced advertising, precision audience targeting, and cross media measurement are adding to television’s assets and fueling its growth.

Advanced Advertising for TV Full Speed Ahead

According to Summit speaker Irwin Gotlieb, senior advisor to WPP, there are no technical obstacles standing in the way of TV ad targeting. The obstacles lie in business operations that continue to silo television and digital as well as in the measurement that has not kept up with the changing ecosystem. “A significant portion in the decline of TV viewing is poor measurement,” Gotlieb stated, as flawed measurement causes undercounting and less inventory.

But TV has an advantage. Its unparalleled reach, combined with newly available granular data, better targets the consumer through the purchase cycle and moves TV down the purchase funnel.

Learning From Digital’s Mistakes

As with any targeting technology, privacy looms large. In a recent article for AdExchanger, Alison Weissbrot wrote, “As digital marketers enter the TV buying world with sophisticated targeting capabilities, identifying the right balance for personalization in the living room is crucial.” At what point does a message become intrusive? While digital ads target individuals, the advantage for television is that ads target households. Relevant ads for the household protect privacy more so than those targeted to a specific individual.

Ad fatigue, ad irrelevancy, and brand safety are other problems faced by digital. TV ad targeting can avoid these issues with frequency capping and a fair ad rotation to avoid fatigue. Additionally, curated ad campaigns, bolstered by data analytics now available in advanced advertising platforms, ensure ad relevancy and brand safety. Jason DeMarco, vice president of Programmatic and Audience Solutions at A+E Networks, told MediaVillage, “We have identified the ability to increase the frequency of advertisers to have a more well-balanced delivery of ads and creative.” This helps the consumer on the user experience side and avoids saturation on the advertiser side.

Learning From Digital’s Successes

TV is also learning from digital by reaching out to smaller advertisers who might have previously been priced out of that marketplace. A recent example, reported MediaVillage, is A+E Network’s Precision1. According to Peter Olsen, executive vice president of Ad Sales and Content Partnerships, it “gives access to people who aren’t traditionally big spenders in TV.”

Some companies are also advancing the connection between digital and TV through initiatives such as CFlight. According to conference speaker Mike Mayer, executive vice president of Sales Solutions at NBCUniversal, CFlight “combines linear with digital impressions and sells deals with total impressions.” Consortiums like Vizio’s Project OAR, which stands for Open Addressable Ready, is another industry initiative.

Currently, addressable advertising for TV is two minutes local time per hour. But nothing will be ready on a national level until the measurement systems can handle it without any manual effort by the back office. However, the lessons drawn from digital will enable TV to more successfully and quickly move into this new advertising paradigm.

This article first appeared in Videa blog.

FreeWheel’s James Rothwell on the Potent Combination of Linear TV and Digital

James Rothwell, Vice President, Global Agency, Brand & Industry Relations at Comcast Advertising, can be considered a television evangelist. 

He currently handles responsibilities across FreeWheel and Spotlight, which means he manages both the sell and buy side of the business.  “Four years ago, I actually wrote my own job description, pitching to the FreeWheel CEO at the time that we needed to push our thought leadership out there, sharing the story about premium video and why TV is important to buyers,” he explained.  "It was a time when digital video was gaining a lot of traction in the marketplace.”

FreeWheel Council for Premium Video
It is vitally important to Rothwell (pictured at top) to support clients by “banging the drum” to highlight TV’s unique contributions to the advertising mix.  This philosophy resulted in the creation of the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video.  The group advocates on behalf of all FreeWheel clients on the publishing side -- meeting on a regular basis to discuss important topics of the day, including how to move the industry forward and research, data and thought leadership on the value of premium video, especially targeted at the buy side.

Since the council started, and three years into his leadership, Rothwell reflected that, at the time, “digital was the new kid on the block, getting all of the headlines and gaining the mindshare of advertisers and the press.”  But the landscape is shifting.  “Over the years, we have seen brand safety challenges and issues that have been happening on the digital side that have called the value proposition into question," he said.  "We have been trying to focus our efforts on making sure that message is not lost.  The TV ecosystem is superior in terms of the value it can generate for marketers with none of the risk.”

Fragmentation and Its Impact
But, let’s face it, TV audiences have been fragmenting and this is causing a shift in advertiser perceptions and in the marketplace in general.  I asked Rothwell how this TV viewership fragmentation is impacting advertisers’ ability to reach their target audience.  He conceded that “people are watching TV wherever and whenever they want on whatever device they choose.  As a result, companies have had to adapt and change their outlook, as well as the way they manage their businesses and the value propositions and solutions they offer to advertisers.”  The goal is to make it as easy as possible to transact and ultimately re-aggregate those audiences.  Rothwell focuses on that convergence and the idea that linear TV and digital needs to be as seamless as possible from offering to execution to measurement.

To Rothwell, with the fragmenting media landscape, advertisers are now trying to “find unique audiences and unique individuals within those audiences, as well as be able to manage the exposure of their advertising message across all of these different environments.”  In planning, he noted that there is an understanding of where that audience is.  But from a buying, executing and measurement perspective, there is a challenge because each of those different environments treats the delivery of those audiences separately.  This becomes cumbersome for advertisers to get a true sense of the total audience and manage the way they expose messages.  Synergies need to be established to move the business forward.

Measurement continues to be an issue and “has not caught up to audiences yet,” Rothwell noted.  "[Although we are] chipping away at it every year, it still has a long way to go.”  And as audiences are split across different screens, the advertising experience, “which isn’t consistent across those screens, is something that continues to be refined.”  He pointed out that there is a lot of testing going on in the industry, from ad length to formats, ensuring that the consumer gets the best experience and advertisers get the best value.

Challenges In Optimal Reach
For Rothwell, in addition to fragmentation, another challenge that prevents advertisers from attaining optimal reach is audience duplication.  “If we think about those audiences across television and digital screens, they are not mutually exclusive and many heavy streamers still consume hours of linear TV across multiple publishers," he said.  "I watch linear and OTT, and on my mobile device.”  He added that many heavy streamers also consume hours of linear TV across multiple publishers.
Complete audience de-duplication is also a challenge.  “Today, programmers and operators are increasingly able to de-duplicate their own audiences, but an advertiser needs to be able to manage reach across all channels, platforms and publishers," he asserted.  "It’s a big challenge."  This is important for monitoring ad exposures and fatigue.  “While TV viewers are scattered across the multitude of channels, digital video is even more fragmented than linear is with different streaming services, platforms and devices,” which adds to the complexity, he said.  Finally, up to a certain point, “linear TV can be very efficient in terms of target reach, but beyond that the cost of incremental reach percentage points climbs exponentially.”

Achieving Optimal Reach
Citing an example of incremental reach in the marketplace, Rothwell took a look at some of the Comcast data and FreeWheel campaigns running on their platform and saw what the audience overlap looked like when the campaigns ran on both digital and linear.  “What was really interesting was when we had large linear TV buys, the incremental reach opportunity on digital was good but didn’t blow us away," he said.  "When the buys were more evenly spread across linear and digital, digital was able to drive a huge amount of incremental reach and incremental audience for that particular brand.  That was interesting to us to see how digital can support linear, especially when investment in linear was lower.”  They also conducted research on reaching the right audiences with the right number of exposures across a combination of both linear and digital, introducing the concept of effective incremental reach, including optimal frequency.

“This is a huge opportunity for the TV business to create reach efficiencies across the different channels and across the different consumption patterns," he explained.  "It is a very complex problem to solve, but as data becomes more sophisticated and is liberated from its legacy silos, the promise of incremental reach will become a reality.  The value for a brand to be able to understand and control that messaging to different audiences in different engaging environments is phenomenal.”

For a more in-depth look at the FreeWheel Council’s work on incremental reach, click here.

This article first appeared in WWW.MediaVillage.com

Measurement Metric: Attention vs. Inattention

Attention is one of those measurement metrics that is important but difficult to quantify. What is attention? How is it measured? “Attention is more elusive than people realize,” noted Duane Varan, CEO, MediaScience, “similar to how we use the term engagement, which is often misused.” His firm recently partnered with Google to help answer some of attention’s unknowns. “Attention may be eyes on the screen … but not paying attention. Or looking away but actually listening,” he posited.

Varan believes that it is important to go back to basics and conducted an extensive literature review that underscored his belief that attention is heavily researched but there are still a lot of blind spots. “It is remarkable how little time is spent on inattention,” he added. To that end, Varan believes that inattention is not the same thing as low attention, especially when it comes to advertising. But the difference between passive and active attention is another matter. “Lean back attention is not a bad thing. It is relaxing,” he explained, “Same too for lean forward attention.” It may depend on the content being viewed.

Using the standard neuroscience measurements like eye tracking to monitor for fixations per second, is eye moving or not, Varan started to identify the good stimuli in a test of 105 short video clips identifying the degrees of attention.

Claire Charron, Research Manager,Market Insights, Google offered the following conclusions:

• Attention and inattention are two sides of the same coin.
• The best way to capture attention is through inattention.
• The absence of inattention is attention.
• The most accurate measure is blink duration and this is not usually used. It is the time it takes to blink. It drives levels of inattention.
• Fixations per session is another high measure.
• So the two main measures of attention – blink duration and fixations per second – have to do with the eye.
• In this test, “eyes on screen” didn’t have much variation because the test required participants to keep their eyes on the screen. So it is possible that in a natural setting, eyes on screen may supplant two metrics from lab test. At this point, we don’t know.
• Other measures, such as alpha waves and heartbeat, also correlated with self-reported attention and also picked up inattention. But skin conductance only garnered a mild correlation.
• All of this indicates that there is not much overlap between measures. Each contributes something different and which one you use depends on what you are trying to achieve.

“Attention is the absence of inattention,” concluded Varan, “And inattention can be accurately measured. Attention is not one kind. It is many kinds with many measures.”

The testing continues. Next step: apply to ads, and tease out different dimensions.

This article first appeared in Cynopsis

Using Nativity, Not Language to Reach Hispanic Consumers

Jake Beniflah, Head of Insights and Foresights at mitú, is a provocateur in the world of Hispanic media spend. He believes that “companies overall have misallocated as much as $1 billion,” in trying to reach the Hispanic consumer. His work on the impact of nativity (NBV, Nativity-Based View) on TV consumption disputes commonly accepted research that says that marketers need to advertise in-language in order to reach Hispanic consumers.

An average 75%, of Spanish-language TV does not reach Millennials, he asserts, basing his conclusion on the $1.5 billion spent in Spanish-language TV estimated from MAGNA’s report on media spend in the U.S.  “Seventy-five percent of $1.5 billion is about $1 billion,” he notes. “We are saying that companies are misallocating (overspending) about a $1 billion dollars in Spanish-language TV in reaching Latino Millennials, today’s coveted demo.”

Beniflah’s study used Nielsen C3 data by nativity (U.S. and foreign born), “which is the only way Nielsen conceptualizes nativity,” to rank the top 10 networks for Latinos, and then looked at spend for the three advertising categories (QSR, Telecom and Auto), using reported Kantar media spend by brand, analyzing their media plan by age and nativity. In this way he was able to answer the age-old question, How can advertisers drive media ROI?

According to Beniflah, “Language has been the dominant variable which has driven Hispanic marketing for more than 30-years. Nativity has lived in the shadows of language,” but it is an important indicator of media preferences.

Nielsen introduced language quintiles in the early 1990s that segment the US Hispanic television viewing audience across five language levels:

• Quintile 1 measures Hispanics who speak “English only” at home
• Quintile 2 measures Hispanics who speak “more English than Spanish” at home
• Quintile 3 measures Hispanics who speak an “equal amount of English and Spanish” at home
• Quintile 4 measures Hispanics who speak “more Spanish than English” at home; and
• Quintile 5 measures Hispanics who speak “Spanish only” at home.

But since the 1990s, new generations of viewers with decidedly different media consumption patterns have shifted usage away from linear TV to digital multi-platform. Younger viewers are more language-fluid and acculturated.

Language spoken in the home was an indicator of media preferences, and this has become generational. Nielsen reports that among first-generation Hispanics, 60.2% spoke “Spanish only” and “more Spanish than English.” Among second-generation, 61.2% spoke “English only” and “more English than Spanish,” while third-generation Hispanics, 90.4% spoke “English only” and “more English than Spanish.” “The significant difference in ‘language use at home’ across three Hispanic generational levels can be explained by factors such as acculturation, language proficiency, and years in country, to name just a few,” Beniflah concludes.

His study, “proposes that there is a better way to buy and plan media for Latinos. Rather than using language as a defining variable in Hispanic marketing, we found that nativity is so much more effective, predictive, and discriminating as a variable that helps clients drive insights and media effectiveness.”

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.