By Sherri Dauskurdas
Just as newspapers and magazines across the Chicago market are slicing pages and cutting staff, one Chicago media company has launched Café, a Latino lifestyle magazine in English.
The first issue debuted in October 2008, with a circulation of 45,000 copies. The publication began as a bi-monthly magazine, and monthly publication begins with the March 2009 edition. About 40 percent of its free distribution is suburban.
Publisher Julian Posada came to open the Café Media business after a career in Spanish language media. In fact, the majority of his staff comes from backgrounds at such places as “Exito” and “Hoy,” where breaching the language barrier was the primary market niche.
“The fact is that most Latino media is Spanish-dominant,” said Alejandro Riera, Café editor-in -chief. “For a long time, we all made a good case selling that to the market. But today, the second and third generation are more English-dominant.”
But Posada said he noticed that the media industry was defining Latinos in two categories, those who speak Spanish and those who are mainstream. This definition was far too distinct. Posada himself was representative of a larger, more powerful segment of the Latino population, those who maintained their heritage and culture while still speaking English most of the time.
“Our target is the young, educated and affluent Latino community,” said Melissa Martinez, director of marketing for Café. “We are writing stories that no one is writing about so that we reach this captive audience.”
Topics have included raising a bi-lingual child, spending beyond one’s means, and how a working family can care for an elderly parent in a culture that does not embrace nursing homes.
“But we also cover the fun stuff—what to do, what’s cool, where to go,” she said.
To do so, Café Media created three advisory panels—on finance, education and family—that meet regularly with readers as well as business and community leaders to identify issues of importance for Hispanics, and translate those issues into content.
“We want to be an all-encompassing magazine, said Riera. “Our only focus is cultural relevance. It can be politics, business, shopping, beauty—but is it culturally relevant to our audience?”
That can be a tough call, especially when the market is made up of consumers from more than 25 different Latin American backgrounds.
“The Latino culture is not a one-dimensional culture. People from Cuba, Columbia, Guatemala, each bringing a different cultural condiment to the brew,” Riera said. “It makes it a little bit hard to market. You have to make sure you find a common language. We have discovered English to be that common language, even if we still watch the Spanish telenovelas at home.”
And if the delicate balance of culture and language is tricky for the folks at Café to master, imagine educating potential advertisers to the market segment.
“They (the readers) straddle two cultures, and see the world from a different point of view because of the fact that they were raised in a Hispanic culture grounded in family values, yet grew up in this country going to school and working in English,” Martinez said. “They respond more to an ad that is aware of that difference.”
Yet in the end, Martinez said it is the similarities and not the differences that make this market segment such a draw to potential advertisers on a regular basis.
“There is an entire population of Hispanics that is growing at a very fast pace and they are not being targeted,” said Martinez. “They have a high household income, are educated and speak English. I would like advertisers and marketers to reach out to us because we are a high quality publication, not because it’s Cinco de Mayo or Hispanic Heritage Month.”
Source: The Business Ledger