A Q&A with Alicia Morga, CEO of Consorte Media and Jeff Weness, Director of Hispanic Initiatives at Best Buy, an advertiser in the new network.
The electronic retailer used Consorte’’s lead generation services to find bilingual employees for its stores around the country. Best Buy is now planning to expand into general Hispanic online advertising with Consorte.
Portada: What media are included in your network (websites)?
Alicia Morga: Consorte’s network includes hundreds of high-quality targeted websites that reach millions of Hispanic consumers every day. Currently, Consorte’s network has a reach of 900 million impressions and 12 million unique visitors per month, and gets 600 million monthly page views. These numbers are growing quickly, and we expect to be at a reach of over one billion impressions per month by the end of the year.
Consorte also builds and manages targeted lead-generation sites for advertisers. As a third pillar of our offering, Consorte also owns four targeted content sites on which we sell direct ad inventory and generate targeted leads. These sites differ from our third-party ad network, in that we own and operate them ourselves. Consorte’s showcase sites offer advertisers another way to reach high-quality Hispanic consumers. Currently, our content sites receive over 1 million monthly unique visitors.
P: Jeff what results are you getting from your online advertising campaigns targeting Hispanics?
Jeff Weness: Consorte delivered a highly effective, focused lead generation and advertising campaign for Best Buy. We first tapped into Consorte’s ad network to place ads with their targeted publishers. We also used their geo-targeting capabilities to deliver ads just in the areas where new stores were opening. These ads were optimized for results by Consorte’s team, so our click-through rate was quite high. Click-throughs were routed to a custom form site, offered both in English and in Spanish, which filtered candidates and delivered qualified candidates to us in real time. The result of this campaign was that BestBuy was able to attract some very qualified, bilingual candidates in our key markets – generating over 30 qualified applicants per day.
Portada: Alicia, what is the average CPM, CPC or CPA you charge?
A.M.:We offer our advertisers a combination of all of these options. In particular, CPA, or a pay-for-performance model, is increasingly compelling for advertisers looking to maximize ROI. The rate varies depending on the type of campaign.
P:What Latam websites are part of your network?
A.M.: We primarily focus on U.S. publishers for the time being (we’ll expand to Latin America in the near future), but we do have a number of Latin American publishers in our network for which we serve ads to their US Hispanic visitors.
P: Why is the network being launched? We thought Consorte had been in the market for a while?
A.M.: Consorte was founded in 2005, but we spent much of the first two years building a sophisticated, proprietary technology platform called Salsa, which serves as the “nerve center” of our advertising platform. Salsa is a highly scalable system that enables Consorte to precisely target the right ads to the right viewers, and to track and analyze ROI for each individual campaign.
Once we were satisfied with Salsa, we began pursuing our first major customers, and we landed advertisers like BestBuy, SendMe Mobile and Dealix.
P: Do you target Spanish-preferred, English-preferred or bilingual Hispanics?
A.M.: The answer is that we target all three – and other sub-sectors of the Hispanic market besides. We help our clients craft the most effective ads for highly targeted audiences within the wide-reaching Hispanic demographic, whether they want to reach 20-something Mexican-Americans interested in cars, or California homebuyers who prefer to shop for financial services in Spanish.
Many advertisers fail to understand that the U.S. Hispanic population is a complex demographic. While Spanish language advertising is very important, it is no longer the predominant factor in reaching this market. Many people who identify themselves as Hispanic have grown up in the U.S. and are more comfortable speaking English than Spanish. In fact, research has shown that only one-third of the U.S. Hispanic population has a preference for the Spanish language. We use sophisticated testing and optimization technologies, as well as behavioral targeting, to pinpoint exactly the ad that will deliver the highest click-through rate and conversion. For example, an English-language ad that makes a cultural reference can resonate more deeply with U.S. Hispanics than the same ad in Spanish.
P. : What % of your revenues is done through geotargeting (in relation to total online advertising)
A.M.: Almost every ad campaign today has a geographic targeting component – whether it be an advertiser just interested in US Hispanics nationally versus an advertiser interested in US Hispanics in Arizona.