The shriek was heard in the hallway outside the movie theatre.
Inside, the unthinkable had just happened to the actress on screen and the audience erupted in fright. As I looked around to scan the crowd, I saw a very diverse Hispanic group watching in terrified delight. As I drove home I wondered if the mostly Hispanic audience was a coincidence, or if there was something larger at hand.
Through my research I found that Paramount Pictures had indeed catered this movie, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, to the bicultural Latino audience. Paramount knew already that Hispanics over-indexed watching their movies, as up to 33% of ticket purchases for their latest movie have been from Hispanics. Additionally, they know that Hispanics go to the movies more often; 9.5 times per year compared to 6.1 times per year for white Americans.
The movie itself was good, and as the shrieking girl could attest, quite scary. Â But for a marketer, it was more than that. Â There are real lessons to be learned from this movie about how marketing to Latinos has evolved in 2014. Â The movie studio demonstrated these lessons visually which for a marketer is a treat, and I have endeavored to detail them here.
The Top 3 lessons provided by the movie for Hispanic Marketers:
1. Have culturally relevant content
A central issue in the movie is in the newly found possession of the star, Jesse, and his family’s struggle to free him of this possession. Â For Mexican Americans, this means a trip to the botanica, and possibly a visit to a curandero (healer). Â In The Marked Ones, they had both. Â By doing this, the movie provided a story that was very real for many Hispanics and something that they can easily relate too.
Read Hispanic marketing lessons 2 and 3 on the Nativa blog.