When Avocados from Mexico wanted to drive awareness and sales with Hispanic consumers in the United States, the Texas-based marketing association teamed up with digital marketing firm Undertone to identify "Nuevas Latinas" and target them with interactive digital ads with a varied approach to language.

The audience comprised 25- to 44-year-old Hispanic consumers who speak both Spanish and English and are interested in the health benefits of food, as well as a tasty and convenient way to eat healthily. To reach these consumers, Undertone developed two versions of the creative — one in English and another in Spanish. Both versions appeared on Spanish-language sites, as well as on English-language sites. One of the key takeaways from the Avocados from Mexico campaign was the importance of optimization when targeting ads in two languages.

"Oftentimes marketers don't know how to reach Hispanics online and they just assume that you should probably do it in Spanish," Victor Cornejo, director of multicultural strategy at Undertone, told Marketing Dive.

"Avocados from Mexico is an extremely sophisticated marketer and they understand that you simply don't make those types of assumptions, but instead you allow the consumer to tell you exactly what content they want to consume and what language they want to consume it in," he said. "That's why we distributed the content in both languages on English and Spanish language sites, and then we optimized against that behavior based on interaction rates."

The campaign kicked off in January 2018 and ran through September. While the Spanish creative delivered a higher volume of overall impressions — 519,665 compared to 429,565 — the English creative had a higher interaction rate — 2.47% compared to 1.91%.

Meal wheel

Avocados from Mexico's objective for the campaign was to promote avocados as a healthy and delicious part of meals, which was accomplished on a platform designed to make it easy for consumers to explore and share recipes featuring the popular savory fruit.

"Our task was to really engage Hispanic consumers and help build awareness around the versatility of the avocados from Mexico and the way we wanted to do that was to have them download recipes and to have that motivate the purchase of avocados," Cornejo said.

The creative showcased the health benefits of avocados by offering recipes for a variety of healthy dishes from traditional to modern fare. To engage the audience, Undertone developed interactive "high impact" and "page grabber" units, full page takeovers for both online and mobile websites. These ads featured a spinning carousel of recipes with avocados.

Readers viewing the takeover could simply click on one of the recipes to make the carousel stop. For instance, a reader could click on "avocado egg rolls," "crab, avocado, and cashew sandwich" or an animated avocado to the side of the spinning wheel, and then be directed to a landing page with the full recipe.

"We had to make sure that we provided an interactive and digitally arresting way to deliver the recipes to consumers," Cornejo explained of the design.

"I think the visually interesting nature of the campaign really helped. Avocados from Mexico has also done a really great job building their brand, so our ad units helped reach consumers who probably have already heard about Avocados from Mexico, which helps quite a bit."

Over-indexing on social

Undertone worked directly with Avocados from Mexico's media buying agency Ro2 on the media buy, and then distributed it to Undertone's in-house ad network, which reaches 76% of the U.S. Hispanic population. The takeovers ran on top-performing, premium sites that over-index for Hispanics both in English and Spanish.

On the recipe page, readers were encouraged to share the content through their social media networks. This strategy was selected for Hispanics' high propensity for interacting on social media sites.

"Whenever you are targeting Hispanics online, you have to consider social media as a primary source of information sharing," Cornejo said. "Hispanics over-index for every function in social media, whether it be for commenting, liking or sharing posts — they over index as compared to the general population in every single category including mobile devices."