Hearst’s Cosmopolitan brand is looking to make headway into the strong and growing Hispanic market through the launch of the new English-language Cosmopolitan Latina.

The standalone magazine, set to launch in May 2012, will be published in both print and digital format twice a year, starting with a distribution of 545,000 and with plans for an increase in frequency and distribution in 2013, according to Cosmopolitan publisher Donna Kalajian Lagani. The brand will have a “content hub” on Cosmopolitan.com for now, adds Lagani, but may eventually move to its own site. Former managing editor of Studio One Networks’ LasFabulosas.com. Michelle Herrera Mulligan will edit the product, along with a freelance and internal staff.

Cosmo “looked seriously” at its Latina readership following the “huge jump in the U.S. Hispanic population” revealed by the 2010 census, says Lagani. It found, as a result, that one in four Latina women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four already readsCosmo but that this reader demographic “would love to see content even more tailored to her specific needs, cultural identity and beauty and fashion sensibility.”

The brand’s 103,760-circ Cosmopolitan en Espanol is published only in Spanish, through a joint venture between Hearst and Virginia Gardens, Florida-based ET Publishing International LLC.

Bolstering Cosmo’s strategy is data from the Carat Hispanic Consumer Connection Study, which finds that 28 percent of Latina women are not served by the traditional strategy of marketing to Hispanic consumers in Spanish. “They are connected to their cultural roots, but are much more engaged with general market media,” says Lagani. Reaching them through general market channels “makes the most sense,” she says, but “there is a need to identify and amplify cultural cues and incorporate relevant Latina type content” within this realm.

Cosmo Latina expands an increasingly healthy Hispanic magazine sector, which saw a 26.5 percent bump in ad revenue year-over-year for the first ten months of 2011, according to Media Economics Group’s HispanicMagazineMonitor (HMM). This number suggests a rapid acceleration of growth compared to a 3.9 percent increase in ad revenue between 2010 and 2009 and a staggering 27.1 percent drop between 2009 and 2008.

Time Inc.’s Spanish-language People en Espanol tops HMM’s list of Hispanic titles, with revenue up 43.4 percent to $53.1 million compared to the same period 2010, followed by English-language title Latina and Spanish-language Siempre Mujer with $25.4 million (up 15.4 percent) and $15.5 million (up 58.7 percent) respectively.

Cosmo en Espanol ranked ninth with revenue at 3.8 million, a 42.7 percent increase from the same period 2010.

via Hearst to Launch Biannual Cosmopolitan Latina in 2012 – Consumer @ FolioMag.com.

The social media landscape is fragmented.  People use Facebook to interact with friends and family, Twitter to follow influencers and share opinions, LinkedIn for their professional network, and Gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail to communicate directly with contacts, finds a recent study by Janrain,  Combined, these networks boast over 1.5 billion accounts.

Secure social login can be used to speed up registration on sites across the web, says the report. According to an analysis by Janrain of online users across 365,000 websites of identities people prefer both for sign-in and content sharing, Facebook is the most popular option at 42% of online users, though a majority use a different social identity, such as Google, Yahoo! or Twitter. Facebook’s share of social logins has increased over the past two years, mostly at the expense of Google.

A sampling of sites in some industry verticals to measure trends in consumer login preferences shows that, while the overall story arc is similar, there are disparate preferences within each vertical.

Facebook’s popularity for social login on eCommerce websites has plateaued at a shade less than 50% for the past four quarters.  Its popularity can be partially explained by the explosion of social commerce during the past year.

Increasingly, retailers are offering social shopping experiences on their eCommerce sites that leverage a consumer’s Facebook social graph.  The report says that the opportunity to incorporate friends into the online shopping experience will continue to influence the proclivity to choose Facebook when registering on retail sites.  Yahoo!’s share of social logins on retail sites has plummeted since 2009, mostly at the expense of Google and Facebook.

On media websites, Yahoo! and Google are running strong as the second and third most popular providers.  Despite a modest decline over the past two quarters, Yahoo! continues to perform best in this vertical.

On mobile applications, Facebook and Google lead in popularity, followed by Yahoo! and Twitter.

People are sharing comments, purchases, reviews and other content from the web to their social networks more than ever, says the report. Facebook and Twitter are far and away the most popular sharing destinations, but Yahoo!, LinkedIn and MySpace maintain preference on niche sites that are catered to their audience (B2B sites for LinkedIn and music sites for MySpace).

Social login opens the door to collecting a rich amount of profile data from a user’s social network account. Each social network provides a different set of profile data on their users, which can help speed registration or enable more data-driven marketing and ROI from personalization and improved segmentation. A look at the user profile data contained within a social profile that users can choose to share with your site:

The report concludes by noting that social login helps solve the challenge of how marketers may collect more accurate data on users without sacrificing registration conversion rates. Social login shortens the registration process to a single click and gives marketers instant access to rich demographic, psychographic and social graph data on users which can be leveraged for content personalization or product recommendations and more tailored segmentation and targeting.

 For additional information from Janrain, please go here.

via MediaPost Publications Social Sharing Trends 12/05/2011.

It’s that time of year again, when people like me hold forth on where we’ve been as an industry this past year, and where we’re headed. When you think about it, of course, it’s a little silly to assume that come Jan. 1, the focus of a whole industry suddenly shifts at midnight when the ball drops. In my mind, the key themes and issues for digital advertising in 2012 look a lot like the ones we grappled with in 2011. The same things that excited us about digital in 2011 will see us into the new year. But, technology evolves at a breakneck pace these days, and with every new capability comes a new opportunity to engage.

After all, delivering good advertising (and by “good,” I mean relevant) is really about harnessing a moment. It’s about harnessing the user’s intent at the very instant he’s looking for information, looking to find an answer, or looking to solve a problem. We’re all at our most receptive to advertising when it’s consistent with what’s on our mind at a given time. And technology allows us to understand what’s on the user’s mind and match it with a relevant message from an advertiser. Making that connection – on every platform and in every context – will continue to drive the direction of digital advertising in the coming year.

There are other macro-level dynamics at work here, too.

SOCIAL ON THE RISE: Audiences are changing, for good: The so-called “digital natives” are growing up fast, and we need to change our approach to engaging them. This generation’s social-media adoption is broad and deep. Digital natives turn to friends and family as a primary source of authority, and call for transparency after witnessing a great deal of corporate and institutional incompetence and corruption (think Enron, Tyco, etc.). Digital-native consumers will expect that what is of most value to them will come to them, from friends or networks, rather than from sources they search out. As a result of this shift, social-media ad revenues have skyrocketed, and are predicted to reach $8 billion next year. But if brands want to make that money really work for them, they can’t just throw any old social-media strategy to the wall and see what sticks. They need new ad formats that push those Facebook pages and Twitter feeds to consumers in a relevant context, as opposed to pulling them away to social sites. In the right context, social can work with content to add significant value for the consumer, rather than eliciting useless “Likes” that advertisers struggle to monetize.

VIDEO IS ROLLING: As they say, when you’re looking for answers, you should always “follow the money,” and that definitely holds true in advertising. If your first stop on the money trail is social, then video is close behind. Video – beyond pre-roll and in-stream – is dynamically innovating our space. In 2011, we have seen online video emerge as the fastest-growing digital ad format. In 2012, we will see online video that is more creative, engaging, and useful. Advertisers are no longer simply taking what works on TV and placing it online. We are seeing a revolution in video, with more creative content coming directly from users, which helps brands develop a more meaningful engagement with consumers. At Vibrant, our approach is bringing sight, sound and motion together to deliver an immersive, user-initiated experience that is delivering compelling results for advertisers.

SMARTER ANALYTICS: Behind the scenes, as ads grow more dynamic and multifunctional every day, marketers who need to demonstrate ROI continue the search for better metrics. After all, the best campaigns are interactive, offering users utility and entertainment via search boxes, news tickers, and gaming portals. So advertisers are looking more closely at user behavior with pre- and post-click data that gives them more mileage from their campaigns. Finally, we’re seeing a burst of new technologies that can more clearly measure reader engagement and retention, and I think there will be a continued interest in gathering and analyzing data that can go beyond CTRs and counting clicks. With these results available, we will see that all content is not created equal, and that despite the recent increase of volume of content, results will come from placements in better quality environments.

Social, video, and measurement: That’s what I think 2012 will be about. These elements played an important role in what we’ve done in 2011 and drive the direction of the innovation and creative possibilities digital advertising is capable of achieving in the coming year. And we’ll be using technology to connect with consumers in better, more relevant, more sophisticated ways that serve both advertisers and consumers.

via MediaPost Publications 3 Online Advertising Trends To Watch In ’12 12/05/2011.

Everyone has seen the endless data and research on Hispanics and mobile:

• Hispanics have the highest penetration for mobile phones (eMarketer, 2011)
• Hispanics over-index the general market on their adoption of smartphones (Nielsen, 2011)
• Hispanics are more likely use their mobile device to download music, play games, access social networking sites (Scarborough, 2010)
• Hispanics are more receptive than other groups to receiving and trusting mobile delivered messages (THI, 2011)

Considering Hispanics are one of the fastest-growing market segments in the U.S., figuring out how to reach them through mobile will increasingly define the how brands are able to successfully engage this group of users.

Unfortunately, most of the data on Hispanics and mobile technology focus on basic penetration and usage data. While this is great for establishing that an opportunity exists to reach Hispanics via mobile, it does little to provide actionable insights to marketers looking to aggressively take advantage of the opportunity.  How should a consumer package group brand target Hispanics via mobile? How should a major retailer take advantage of the millions of Hispanics with smartphones entering their stores daily? Other than making sure your existing Hispanic (digital) marketing is mobile-friendly, there is very little to go on.

More and deeper data is needed.

A good place to start would be to look at the Hispanic mobile opportunity in-store. Specifically, identify opportunities for retailers to connect with Hispanic shoppers through new mobile experiences in stores. Considering Hispanics’ discretionary spending surpassed $129 billion in 2010 and seven of the top 50 Hispanic advertisers were retailers, a better understanding of this space would appear highly lucrative.

For instance, language aside, what specific opportunities exist for creating an in-store mobile strategy that appropriately reflects the norms and cultural priorities of Hispanic populations?

• What are the relevant differences between Hispanics and non-Hispanics in their use of smartphones that shed light on their different in-store mobile experiences?
• Do differences in ethnicity play any significant role in shaping in-store mobile experiences, or are the commonalities greater than the differences (i.e., Mexican-American vs. Puerto Rican)?
• What are new ways to leverage in-store mobile retail that will have special appeal to Hispanic shoppers?

Conversely, what are the risks in creating an in-store mobile strategy that fails to account for these norms and priorities? Are there any deficiencies – apart from language – Hispanics find with in-store mobile experiences designed for non-Hispanic audiences?

Looking at Hispanic in-store mobile behavior and opportunities is just the beginning. There no doubt exist countless opportunities to better understand Hispanics and their mobile behavior and activity vis-à-vis the entertainment, automotive, fast casual dining, and beer and spirits categories.

via MediaPost