Endeavor is looking to take the Latino market seriously.
Its in-house data insights firm, Endeavor Analytics, presented a report on recent U.S. Hispanic and Latino entertainment consumer trends during a Hispanic Heritage Month-themed Endeavor Impact session on Thursday. Titled “Movers of Culture,” the report makes the case for why brands and marketers should be mindful of this demographic, which, if it were its own country, would be the fifth-largest economy in the world (ahead of the U.K., India and France) and the third-fastest growing, after China and India.
One in five Americans is Hispanic – one in four when it comes to Gen Z – and the terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” categorize people with ties to more than 20 Latin American countries with different cultural identities and linguistic preferences. For example, those who hail from Central America showed the strongest preference for Spanish, while just under half of Mexican Americans – by far the largest of the Latino populations in the U.S. – said they tend to pay more attention to Spanish-language advertisements and Puerto Ricans responded more strongly to ads in English.
“Despite these nuances, reaching this consumer segment is actually not hard or complicated,” said Endeavor Analytics director Cristina Andrade, who presented the report. The majority of Hispanics surveyed say they are more likely to consume content and respond to advertising featuring someone from their identity group, “so a win-win marketing strategy to reach Latinos is to increase Hispanic representation in mainstream content and advertise Hispanic-led content to all ethnicities.”
Latinos continue to over-index at the domestic box office. While they represent one in five of the U.S. population, they purchase one in four movie tickets – and one in three on opening weekend. Given their proven turnout, “what’s the need for targeted marketing or more representation?” Endeavor Analytics vice president Albert Acosta rhetorically asked WME head of client marketing in film Anu Bhatia during the Q&A talkback following Andrade’s presentation.
“When you see the translation of focused efforts with certain projects delivering even greater returns – if you look at genre films that typically lean into that space — you see a greater level of return and a higher indexing. If you look at content consumption on streaming and SVOD services, it’s the same thing. When you actually lean into representation and telling stories from specific audiences, you see a greater return against that audience,” Bhatia replied. “While they’re certainly a prominent force within the marketplace now, that doesn’t mean that is the limit of their impact or the value they can bring to the business.”
As Bhatia mentioned, the Latino market is also growing on streaming. Compared to the national average, more Hispanic households have subscriptions to the majority of SVOD services – a statistic of which U.S. streaming platforms are clearly aware, as they commission more and more Latin American productions each year. The number of such projects grew from 3,370 in 2021 to 4,801 in 2022, an increase of 42%. And 5,040 distinct titles have already been released in the first six months of this year alone.
Latin music is the fifth most popular genre in the United States, and growing at what Endeavor Analytics calls “an unprecedented rate.” According to data from Luminate, on-demand streams of Latin music jumped from 48.7 billion in 2018 to 70.3 billion this year to date – a 44 percent five-year leap, higher than the growth rate of hip hop, says the report. This increase in popularity is driven by an ever-broader audience, as 48 percent of adults who picked Latin as their favorite music genre do not speak Spanish. (In fact, 64 percent of non-Hispanic millennial and Gen Z listeners enjoy music in languages they don’t speak.) And the major subgenres of music within Latin are each experiencing growth, with Regional Mexican catapulting 49.4 percent in U.S. audio streams since last summer, mostly driven by millennial listeners.
“Subgenres that exist within Regional Mexican have existed for decades or centuries, and they have rarely appeared on the overall U.S. pop rankings until now,” said Andrade, crediting recent crossover collaborations like those between Fuerza Regida and Snoop Dogg, Fuerza Regida and Shakira, and Bizarrap and Peso Pluma with building momentum.
Of particular interest to Endeavor, which recently merged UFC and WWE into TKO Group, is Latino enthusiasm in the live events space. More Hispanics (75 percent) than non-Hispanics (68 percent) said they were willing to pay full freight for concert tickets despite recent price hikes. And when it comes to Endeavor brands, 29 percent of UFC fans, 28 percent of WWE fans (Monday Night Raw is the No. 1 show among Hispanics across all NBCUniversal English-language cable networks) and 19 percent of PBR fans in the U.S. identify as Hispanic – again proportionate to or over-indexing their share of the population. Endeavor has already begun to capitalize on this knowledge, with its partnership between WWE and Bad Bunny (a UTA client) selling out merchandise lines among Puerto Rican and non-Puerto Rican fans alike, and its Noche UFC event becoming ESPN+’s most viewed fight night of all time.
“Endeavor Analytics has been studying the U.S. Hispanic consumer segment for years and recognizes how important it is to understand their behaviors,” a spokesperson for the company said in a statement. “As this consumer segment continues to grow in the U.S., these findings help our colleagues at WME and across Endeavor more effectively engage the audience.”
