Batanga is a language spoken by the people of Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, but online it’s the name of the leading Latino Website that streams music and video to an audience that has quintupled to 4.5 million unique visitors from August 2005 to August 2006. Batanga.com, the Coral Gables, FL-based company’s site, streams 100 million songs and 20 million videos a month. It’s the fastest growing Website targeting Latinos in the U.S., who are the nation’s fastest growing population, with more than 40 million residents.
Rafael Urbina, Batanga’s CEO, who’s been with the site since its 1999 launch, is happy with its success, but worried that agencies haven’t mastered the strategies and techniques involved in playing broadband video ads.
Urbina spoke about the broadband advertising Batanga plays and the challenges it faces with agencies in an exclusive interview with iSPOT.
iSPOT: What kind of broadband video ads appear on your site?Urbina: We’re a streaming media site, so we can do the in-stream ads that you see from the rich media providers, but the bulk is in-stream pre-roll and post-roll videos and we have a very significant radio component with pre-roll videos in front of the radio content. It’s standard pre-rolls between 10 and 20 seconds with one or two synchronized banners. They perform extremely well for us. I’ve seen the debates in the industry about pre-rolls and whether consumers will embrace them, but we’ve seen very good response with high click through rates because we’re a more targeted site, a site for Latin youth that makes the advertising more relevant. Of course, there’s a trade off for the user who understands that the free content comes with a marketing message.
iSPOT: But isn’t a lot of your content paid? Is there advertising associated with the music downloads?
Urbina: We have some promotions with General Motors where we’re giving away downloads and there’s advertising associated with that, but that’s not the norm. Generally, there’s no advertising with the music downloads.
iSPOT: Do your ads appear in English or Spanish?
Urbina: Both, depending on what part of the site and the advertiser. We’ve seen both work well. It depends on the brand. For some, they get away with English. For other brands, Spanish may be more appropriate, you have to look at their strategies, the language is a tactic. From our perspective, we can target people who prefer English or Spanish but that doesn’t mean they don’t understand the other language because most of our audience is bilingual.
iSPOT: How do you target your ads?
Urbina: By content, geography, demographics and day part. We’re looking at behavioral, but it’s not rolled out yet.
iSPOT: Is most of the audience in the U.S. or Latin America?
Urbina: The U.S. is our biggest market.
iSPOT: How do you think broadband video advertising works with a Hispanic audience?
Urbina: There is a difference. The majority of the Hispanic market is U.S. born, so they’re educated here in the U.S. They might be fluent in Spanish, but not comfortable reading or writing it. In video you can get away with Spanish language creative and English language creative and maybe do ads in Spanglish, a mix between the two that might be 80 percent English and 20 percent Spanish. Spanglish works well with Latino youth because it’s the language you hear on the streets. Coors recently ran a number of ads in Spanglish, they’re one of the leaders in that trend. Broadband video is the best medium for the advertising because of the language issue. Static banner ads are much more limited because a lot of people aren’t comfortable reading copy in Spanish. But Spanish is a language that reminds them of home and family, so if they can hear it on a video it’s a winning situation.
iSPOT: Have you had any problems running broadband video ads on Batanga?
Urbina: TV is by far the bulk of the Latino market and a lot of video is created for it, but agencies are just now understanding they can take it and repurpose it for online use. An issue that comes up too often is the agencies haven’t cleared the rights to do it with the talent and we’ve had to pull campaigns at the last second because the actor didn’t sign a release. Agencies are not 100 percent there yet. In the general market they’re farther along than the Hispanic market. As far as repurposing goes, we’ve taken :30 second ads for Ford and reduced them to :10 seconds, but not all the agencies can do it. Our goal is to get them down to 10 or 15 seconds, because they work best in front of our content that way. Our rule of thumb is to play an ad in front of every few videos you see. You can get 10 minutes of content with no interruption before you see another ad.
iSPOT: Advertising to the Hispanic market in the U.S. is growing substantially. How does Batanga’s broadband video advertising reflect that trend?
Urbina: Batanga is at the point of convergence of two fast-growing markets: the online ad market and the Hispanic ad market. We are accelerating the inflow of dollars into the Hispanic online ad market thanks to our drive to reach bi-cultural Latinos regardless of language preference, something that in the past has been difficult to achieve through Hispanic sites, which tend to be Spanish-only.
