A recent article suggests that soccer marketing "still hasn't quite caught on in the U.S." However, an overwhelming number of viewers watched the games in Spanish. These particular US viewers are likely to be a lot more engaged with el "jogo bonito” than English-language audiences and research has shown that Spanish-language advertising engages Latino viewers, even the notoriously, culturally ambidextrous bilingual population.

Did AceMetrix look at Spanish language coverage of the World Cup? If so, we would expect to see some Spanish-language ads in the mix. For important games like Mexico-Germany, Telemundo had almost twice as many viewers (7.4MM viewers versus 4.4MM for Fox) and they averaged 2MM per game through the round of 16 (which is close to Fox’s number).

Powerade did an amazing job with their World Cup advertising, airing ads both on English and Spanish-language coverage, tweaking the talent slightly by featuring Spanish-speaking Afro-latino talent on Spanish TV and African-American talent on English-language TV, while at the same time universally hitting at the core brand message of how far you can go with “Power.” For the English-language ad, I would have used Afro-Caribbean talent or someone with an Anglo-African accent as it would have made it more credible from someone who is likely to have played fútbol.  At any rate, if AceMetrix had included the Spanish-language advertising, we’d probably see an entirely different list of spots including Wal-mart, Sprint, Sol and Pepsi and some very different conclusions.

Were Spanish-language ads from Telemundo included in this survey? Was a Spanish-language survey offered to respondents? Was the survey conducted with online panelists that are representative of Hispanics overall (country of origin, educational attainment, region of US, acculturation levels, language usage)?

Most online panel providers skew East Coast and South Florida and under-represent Mexican Hispanics (two thirds of the population) considerably. Caribbean Hispanics are typically over-sampled in East Coast and South Florida and less likely to be engaged with soccer, as it is not as popular in the source countries as baseball or basketball. If you only polled Hispanics in English and your sample is not balanced across US regions, countries of origins, language usage and acculturation, it is very easy to come to a very different conclusion.  I like to say it is like doing a nationwide survey where Rhode Islanders make up 30-40% of the sample and concluding that “stuffies” are starting to go mainstream.

This study raises important questions for those of us who work in Hispanic marketing and research as it seems to paint a picture of disengagement with soccer, when most research points to a higher level of engagement. If Hispanics were not properly designed into the sample, then I would be very interested in seeing this analysis done with the Spanish-language advertising.