Driving return on media investment with US Hispanics in the 21st century: The nativity-based view

Ever since the nativity-based view (NBV) was first introduced in 2015, business practitioners have been surprised to learn that there is a better way to target US Hispanics than by simply using Spanish-language media. This was a watershed moment for the US advertising and marketing industry — a paradigm shift that leading brands, advertising agencies and research companies did not see coming. Challenging the Hispanic marketing paradigm, the NBV proposes that nativity is more effective in driving media return on media investment than marketing to Hispanics in-language. To address recent concerns that the NBV, as a construct, lacks internal validity, this paper compares past NBV research spanning almost a decade versus 2023 data. This study continues to show that there are significant differences between US-born and foreign-born Hispanics on a number of dimensions, including demographics, language usage, media consumption and return on media investment. This new media model has strong implications for marketing to US Hispanics in the 21st century, providing brands and advertising agencies with a simple, and more effective model that has lived in the shadows of language-based marketing since the early 1990s. This paper suggests companies that follow the customer rather than the industry narrative are better positioned to win in an overwhelming US-born Hispanic marketplace.