Wonder if Olivier Francoise should be identifying and targeting opportunities for Fiat to share under the radar advertising/marketing content in the U.S. market?

The rally like driving would have been a lot more appealing to football fans than J-Lo car chase...probably a lot less expensive too. Hope this wasn't a veiled attempt to tap into the NFL's strong interest in the Hispanic market.

A thought provoking keynote presentation by Ralph Santana CMO of Samsung at this years Ad Age Digital Conference...

Samsung's approach looks for the intersection of a brand's DNA with contemporary cultural trends and values so as to engender culturally relevant approaches. Such an idea, which Samsung calls "culture casting," need mass sensibility, so by utilizing a mix of media platforms, it's possible to begin to target specific audiences accordingly using relevant tools.

This "transmedia" approach gets interesting because it allows for the depth of storytelling to expand into various cultural trends, perhaps even those that we know little about.

If you are able, watch Mr. Santana's video presentation...

First mentioned the role that digital technology would have on the action sports category back in Nov. of 2008. It wasn't too hard to see where things were trending. It become obvious that mobile devices would lead the charge in introducing digital content, like snowboarding, to urban youth. Thus digital would introduce a new generation of enthusiasts to the ation sports lifestyle and culture.

Fast forward to today, and the business opportunities are still there. Apple released the Ipad2 this week and there are some sleek new features for marketers to leverage. And again, why does this matter in relation to the youth market, especially Hispanic? Well look at who's buying all these consumer electronics. Proof I've been right for a few years now...

Interestingly the AdAge article highlights retail transactions in all of this, which is increasingly valuable for the action sports industry.

Hispanics' engagement with the digital world comes full circle when analyzing e-commerce transactions across all categories during the month of June 2010. Hispanics in general spent $103.19 per transaction, compared to $90.82 for non-Hispanics.

I'll refrain from claiming ownership of the term cross-cultural, but assure you that Equipo Roca is an early adopter of the idea, since 2007 actually.

The term seems to be popping up more and more these days. Yet, it seems nobody knows what cross-cultural marketing means. This is why I found The Big Tent post by Ken Muench pretty interesting. He makes a good argument for developing a manifesto...

Cross-culturalism is, essentially, the leveraging of ethnicity and culture in "general market" advertising. It's about the African-American, Hispanic and Asian voices not being relegated solely to a special channel or publication, but also treated as authors of the main play, as they already are in pop culture.

Recently we released the M.A.S. Snow Report, and our approach really embodied the above statement. We sought to understand what is already taking place in the Millennial youth market. So we captured analytical data of the market size and supported them with voices of Hispanics that were already engaging with snowboard lifestyle. It was about framing things up in a cultural context. We did it because the general agency/brand snow market approach wasn't addressing the urban market right, while the multicultural agency/brand side is not well versed in the action sports space. The opportunity to fill the void presented us with a tiger style test...

The challenge of embracing cross-cultural marketing is going to largely depend on the agency/brand gatekeepers. You are the one's who have to acknowledge and move away from traditional thinking. Muench addresses this well with his four point sniff test.

1. Cross-culturalism is not an advertising melting pot. It's about each culture's innate uniqueness coming across as such. That's exactly what makes things interesting to today's consumers.

2. Research is essential. Cross-culturalism requires people intimately familiar with the groups. Period. Otherwise the resulting hollowness will be counterproductive. Solid, methodical multicultural depth in planning, media, account management and creative are absolutely essential. Anything else is simply a sham.

3. Cross-culturalism does not negate the opportunity of creating an African-American, Hispanic or Asian-specific program. And if the "general market" campaign was done with these consumers in a central role, then the tailoring won't have to be so severe that you end up with a schizophrenic brand.

4. A total-market advertising agency can do it -- if it meets the criteria in point No. 2. A multicultural agency can do it -- if it sees beyond the confines of its own silo.

AdAge's "Why Marketers Should Care About a Mexican Kid Falling Into a Stream" really resonated with me this morning. Immediately, it had me thinking of about magical realism's power in telling a brand story. Its as if Juan Carlos Onetti was the writer behind "La caída de Edgar"...uno de sus cuentos.

Joe Kutchera, the author of "Latino Link: Building Brands Online With Hispanic Communities and Content," is convinced that targeting Hispanics online is no longer possible without building -- and maintaining -- a continuous relationship with consumers on social networks. Perhaps that is why Kutchera, a former Time Warner executive, loves to tell the story of Gamesa, a PepsiCo-owned company that turned a viral sensation into its own advertising pitch in Mexico.

I've viewed the digital marketing realm as ripe for telling new stories to tell for quite some time now...Edgar's story should serve as a creative springboard.

Kutchera, who is already working on a second book (or perhaps a "vook," a "video book") is confident there will be plenty more stories to tell, and not all about falling kids and cookie heroes.

"Latino Link: Building Brands Online With Hispanic Communities and Content"

In 2006, nobody was looking at Latin action sports culture with much interest. It was undefined and raw. Using digital curation, I've been able to determine and record urban youth marketing trends as they unfolded on a real time basis. Basically I paid attention to what was going on around me, online and offline.

This is why I am very intrigued by the book 'Curation Nation' by Steven Rosenbaum. - via AdAge

Curation is about selection, organization, presentation and evolution. While computers can aggregate content, information, or any shape or size data, aggregation without curation is just a big pile of stuff that seems related, but lacks a qualitative organization.

The "qualitative organization" is made possible by individuals who have the ability to identify and communicate the cultural movement being documented. Four years ago, nobody knew a Latin snowboard culture existed. But Equipo Roca changed that via digital media.

See, curators are the influencers of the future...

Somewhere Out There, Someone Is Creating Genius -- How Will You Find It?