By Adam R Jacobson
Fantástico, which rolled out in June by multicultural marketing and promotions firm Schramm Marketing Group, will be rolling out an extensive out-of-home and experiential marketing campaign in parts of New York City next week.
The effort aims to promote Fantástico as a free, hyper-local Spanish-language portal providing users an alternative to platforms such as Ticketmaster, which are geared toward users who are comfortable with searching for events and making purchases in English.
Strategically placed advertisements will appear on select New York City Subway platforms, based on Hispanic population data, and on the No. 7 line, which connects Midtown Manhattan to Flushing, Queens and travels through what is now a heavily first-generation Hispanic borough. In recent years, Bud Light advertisements on the train line appeared in Spanish. Roosevelt Avenue, a major transit junction just south of LaGuardia Airport, is now heavily populated with Mexicans from Puebla state, in addition to Central Americans. The No. 7 line also travels to Citi Field, home of the New York Mets, and the tennis facilities used for the U.S. Open.
The subway ads will be accompanied by digital advertisements in key Hispanic media; specific platforms were not disclosed by Fantástico.
Street teams will also be employed to target Hispanic consumers and show them how the Fantástico platform works. These individuals are set to be deployed for New York Cosmos home matches at Hofstra University’s James M. Shuart Stadium, and at select Hispanic cultural and sporting events across the Tri-State area.
The Fantástico platform—www.Fantastico.nyc—is advertiser-supported, and advertising currently features a contest with weekly prizes of tickets to popular events.
“Our strategy is to communicate Fantástico’s message in places where our consumers are most likely to have a smartphone in their hand,” said Joe Schramm, founder of Schramm Marketing Group. “The campaign was designed to reach sports and entertainment fans where they live, work and commute and in their native language.”
Despite research that shows a diminishing number of Hispanics who only read Spanish, Fantástico does not have an English-language platform. As Schramm Marketing Group explains, Fantástico is designed to serve Spanish-dominant ticket buyers who have had to resort to waiting in line at a box office or in a local ‘tienda’ retailer to get tickets to an event.
Furthermore, Schramm Marketing Group claims Hispanic consumers contribute to a high drop-off rate in ticket transactions once they reach the English-only checkout page of all other ticket sites.
In comments made exclusively to Hispanic Market Overview, Schramm said, “There are a number of reasons for a Spanish-only site, but the most compelling is that there is a true business opportunity here to serve a consumer segment that is currently unserved by the leading online ticket retailers.”
He added, “Our years of experience in promoting ticket sales to Spanish-speaking Latinos showed us that there is a significant portion of ticket buyers who are uncomfortable making an online ticket transaction in English. So, Spanish speakers must resort to buying tickets at the box office or from a local walk-in retailer. It is not very convenient, and denies them an equal opportunity to get the better choice of seats when tickets first go on sale.
“On the other hand, Bilingual Latinos who are comfortable with English have a wide variety of English-language options for online ticket transactions,” Schramm noted. “So, to have developed a bilingual site would have increased the number of competitors as well as the cost for marketing in two languages when, in fact, our core target provides us with enough potential customers to sustain a profitable business. We simply looked at Spanish-language TV, radio and print media as a barometer of our potential success.”
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