Mindshare launches Hispanic-focused private marketplace

“The goal of the ‘Inclusion PMPs’ is very focused on driving dollars to publishers,” said Rachel Lowenstein, Mindshare’s global managing director of inclusive innovation.

In her view, much of the marketing world’s push for equitable representation and diversity “has been hyper-focused on the creative side of things” while somewhat ignoring media players, which she hopes to change with Mindshare’s three PMPs, driving “good growth” for its clients in minority-focused media spaces.

Mindshare’s new Latinx venture won’t be the last of the agency’s “Inclusion PMPs,” Lowenstein said, confirming that there are others in the works but declining to give specifics on what marginalized group or groups they may address.

Overcoming keyword exclusion

“We have been very vocal about the need for the advertising industry to fund Latinx and Hispanic media in a way that reflects the importance of Latino communities in this country,” said Iván Adaime, CEO of ImpreMedia, which publishes titles like La Opinión and El Diario, and is one of the Latinx PMP’s 20 publishing partners.

The Latinx PMP, live this month, follows inclusive private marketplaces in support of LGBTQ+ and Black audiences, brands and publishers that launched in February and July of 2020, respectively.

The first of the trio, which saw pieces of creative run across LGBTQ+ news sites like The Advocate and Out, was supported in its beginning stages by Skyy Vodka, another Campari-owned brand, which harnessed the marketplace as a springboard to promote its “Proudly American” campaign.

That PMP was also developed to counter ongoing setbacks that some publishers have faced amid the rise of keyword exclusion lists—a feature of programmatic buying that allows marketers to avoid placing their ads alongside potentially harmful content, but that also can be overly broad and filter out words such as “gay,” regardless of context.

Programmatic keyword exclusion lists have resulted in as much as 73% of neutral or positive LGBTQ+ online content being incorrectly flagged as harmful, according to a study by the University of Baltimore and cybersecurity firm Cheq conducted prior to the LGBTQ+ PMP’s launch.

Circumventing keyword exclusion lists is also a partial goal of Mindshare’s Latinx PMP, Lowenstein said, highlighting some “politicized” words and phrases relevant to U.S. Hispanic communities, such as “immigration.”

In the summer of 2020, shortly after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police and the renaissance of the Black Lives Matter movement, Mindshare followed that PMP’s success up with one dedicated to Black communities, engaging Kimberly-Clark feminine hygiene brand U by Kotex as its launch partner. That initiative was designed to remedy harm caused to Black-owned publishers and creators largely by keyword exclusion lists, which last year faced a new wave of no-go phrases related to the Black experience.

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