It’s no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic greatly impacted radio broadcasting companies across the latter half of 2020. For Hispanic-targeted AMs and FMs, the pandemic significantly altered the advertising landscape.
But, by how much? That was the first topic for discussion as the Hispanic Radio Conference kicked off Wednesday afternoon in Miami — making it the first broadcast media industry event held for a national audience since NATPE MIAMI in January 2020.
Pacing is up 7.6% in 2021, according to Patrick Quinn, CEO and Founder of PQ Media.
The good news for Spanish-language radio? At 16.3% growth, Hispanic audio is outpacing all other categories and is the fastest-growing advertising and marketing platform in 2021.
It’s a huge rebound for Hispanic audio, which suffered a 14.8% ad spend decline in 2020 to a total of $394 million.
Over-the-air advertising in 2020? That was off by 22.2% in 2020. For 2021, it is pacing up by nearly 17%.
“We’re looking at a number of positive trends here,” Quinn told the crowd, one of the largest for this conference, presented by Streamline Publishing’s Radio Ink.
While opportunities abound, PQ Media notes, challenges remain.
The main problem: Hispanic media is harder to buy programmatically, and there are two main reasons. First, many Hispanic-owned companies don’t collect vital demographic information needed for DSP systems to highlight. Second, some data in programmatic systems is derived from credit cards. Research suggests a gap remains between Hispanics and the total market with respect to credit card use.
With Entravision Communications/Sacramento SVP of Integrated Marketing Solutions Angie Banderas moderating a panel on which Quinn presented his findings, Banderas asked other key industry leaders if they were seeing increased interest in audio, and if spending growth has been seen.
For Eastman Radio President Tucker Flood, an industry veteran, “a lot of clients are focusing on audio, in general.” But, he adds, not all of the three segments — streaming, podcasting and Over the Air — are seeing advertising growth each segment equally.
For Flood, streaming and podcasting are “explosively” growing. For over the air radio? The growth is modest.
As such, he offered a divergent view from PQ Media on the growth trends for AM and FM’s linear ad dollars.
Jason Hall, the EVP/Advertising Sales at Estrella Media, a similar tale can be told. “The growth that we are seeing across streaming is incredible,” he said.
Programmatic and the expansion on the radio side — significantly within the next five or six years, Hall notes — also took up a large part of the panel discussion.
There’s still time to register and participate virtually!
