An interesting thing happened on Thursday morning at the New York Athletic Club during the annual Cynopsys Sports Media Awards breakfast.
Amongst the usual parade of media accolades…various entities in the FOX SPORTS world took home 12 winners on their own…there were two excitable tables who seemed to also be trading winners every few minutes as well. They are certainly big competing media outlets who have built solid storytelling and production reputations over the years, but they weren’t who you may think of first, especially if you are English language speaking.
They were Telemundo and Univision, and between them (Telemundo four, Univision two, along with another half dozen nominations), they served another message that the Spanish speaking Latino sports fan s becoming more and more savvy, more discerning and more disruptive as this very fluid media marketplace continues to unfold. Now to be fair, the awards won by both revolved around one of the three sports that are key to Latino and Hispanic culture in America (that being soccer, with the other two being basketball and baseball, with boxing not that far behind), and we were coming off a World Cup year.
However, as I have noted in our writing for Portada, the Latino/Hispanic audience continues to be a force to be reckoned with; brand loyal, digital savvy, passionate fans who are becoming more and more engaged not just across generations, but with a fast rising female demo as well. They are also not just Spanish speaking, as the popular site La Vida Baseball has found out; they enjoy storytelling from their cultural roots in both English and Spanish, and can toggle back and forth between both, something which a large swath of English speaking audiences cannot.
Now this is not to say that engaging with a Latino or Hispanic audience is easy. Those words mean many things to many cultures, and appealing to Brazilian and Dominican and Puerto Rican, or even Spanish or Mexican, is not one size fits all. Each presents an issue that needs to be addressed as a segment of the population, but analytics is making that a bit easier and much more quantifiable. It has been a long process, and risk adverse brands not willing to make the time to understand and engage in the space may have missed out on a wave, but the wave is still rising.
So amongst the Bleacher Reports and the WWE’s who were also honored Thursday were two Spanish first powerhouses whose creative, insightful and groundbreaking storytelling did not go unnoticed.
It wasn’t the first time these to have shared a stage of honor, but it was perhaps the most impactful, at least on the sports media side where we see much of the same old collecting the honors.
Another evolving space to watch.
