It’s pret­ty impos­si­ble these days for any­one with media jobs in online adver­tis­ing agen­cies to ignore the grow­ing influ­ence of His­pan­ic con­sumers. Busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers who want to tap into this expand­ing audi­ence might do well to take note of a new devel­op­ment from the spe­cial­ist agency Jef­frey­Group, which is launch­ing a spin-off shop called Pin­ta to aug­ment its exist­ing empha­sis on Span­ish-speak­ing consumers.

The art of cross-cul­tur­al mar­ket­ing 

The new shop will oper­ate out of offices in New York, Los Ange­les and Mia­mi (where, like its par­ent Jef­frey­Group, it’ll be head­quar­tered). Any busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er who feels a blend of puz­zle­ment and intrigue over its cho­sen name will get an “Aha!” moment as soon as they real­ize it’s the Span­ish word for “paint” and is intend­ed to metaphor­i­cal­ly evoke “the art of cross-cul­tur­al marketing.”

Upon its launch, it will have 20 employ­ees who between them will work with a ver­i­ta­ble A‑list of brand names, includ­ing John­nie Walk­er, Face­book, 21^st Cen­tu­ry Fox’s “Fox His­pan­ic Media”, Dia­geo, Toron­to-Domin­ion Bank’s sub­di­vi­sion TD Bank and T‑Mobile US.

The senior VP of mar­ket­ing, brand and adver­tis­ing at T‑Mobile US, Peter DeLu­ca, said, “The His­pan­ic mar­ket for T‑Mobile is extreme­ly important.”

His com­pa­ny launched a “con­cen­trat­ed effort to the His­pan­ic com­mu­ni­ty” eight years ago chiefly because T‑Mobile could see that His­pan­ics “were among the ear­li­est to adopt smart­phones.” Even though they’re still con­sum­ing a big range of Eng­lish-lan­guage com­mu­ni­ca­tions and they’re one part of T‑Mobile’s broad­er audi­ence, DeLu­ca say his com­pa­ny needs to com­mu­ni­cate with them in Span­ish, the lan­guage they’re most com­fort­able with, too.

A uni­fied voice 

JeffreyGroup’s founder, chair­man and CEO, Jef­frey Shar­lach said that his agency had been think­ing about form­ing a new shop like Pin­ta for some time.

As savvy busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers will be aware, the suc­cess of online adver­tis­ing sales today increas­ing­ly rests on the cross-cul­tur­al or “total mar­ket” approach – craft­ing ads that car­ry appeal for a demo­graph­i­cal­ly diverse gen­er­al audi­ence instead of direct­ing par­tic­u­lar ads at par­tic­u­lar audi­ences like African Amer­i­cans or His­pan­ics. “The mul­ti­cul­tur­al cus­tomer is the new main­stream”, as Toy­ota Motor Sales USA recent­ly put it.

Pinta’s pres­i­dent and CEO Mike Valdés-Fauli says there will “no longer be one mes­sage for Ang­los and one mes­sage for His­pan­ics” but “one uni­fied voice and coher­ent strat­e­gy” instead.

We think this shop has got wings.