U.S. Audience: 3 Big Growth Demos Trump RevealedHis populism transcended demographics. Now Hollywood has a chance to shake its own assumptions about viewers. Today: Bicultural Latinos
Editor’s note: Today, we resurface a series that first ran in late July, at the same moment Kamala Harris was anointed to replace Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee (the role was formalized a few weeks later). Before the election, different demographics were a focal point of the media, with endless analysis of what messages appealed to women, older voters, younger voters, Christians, Jews, Latins, Blacks, Arab- and Asian Americans . . . and so on. Now, in the wake of Nov. 5, it has become clear: Labels and presumptions about the American voter are increasingly reductive and tragicomically wrong. Donald Trump built a coalition across groups that reflected the majority of the popular vote — and one that has left many in entertainment scratching their heads. We start with this piece on Bicultural Latinos from Cultique’s Linda Ong and Sarah Unger’s Opportunity Audiences series, exploring huge pivot groups in the election. Trump won 43 percent of the Latino vote, according to the AP, and 48 percent of Latin men. This has been cited as surprising, yet Ong’s piece reveals all the ways in which it shouldn’t have been — and how entertainment can better cater to the group most responsible for driving such hits as varied as Inside Out 2 and Terrifier 3 yet wildly underappreciated and misunderstood in Hollywood (and apparently the Democratic Party as well). In addition to the Opportunity Audiences series, for the next week we’ll also be sharing the Entertainment Strategy Guy’s American Viewer series from 2022, an incredibly prescient dive into the misunderstood data around everything from religion to political views to gender identity — aspects that all contributed in some form to Trump’s victory and that are also not internalized based on what what we see at the multiplex and on our streaming home pages. Herewith, the first in Cultique’s three-part series that originally ran on The Ankler on July 23, 2024:
Linda Ong, with cofounder Sarah Unger, runs Cultique, a strategic advisory that analyzes and translates culture for businesses and brands — including major media and entertainment companies on all platforms.The entertainment industry is a largely homogeneous ecosystem. Put more academically, Hollywood runs on mimetic desire — a desire built through imitation of others, as defined by business guru Luke Burgis in his book, Wanting. In other words, people in Hollywood want what other people in Hollywood want, whether those are streaming services, superheroes, sports rights or A-list stars. As a result, the industry has become an ouroboros of culture — sequels, spin-offs, remakes, reboots and “re-imaginings” — that continually rehashes IP to save on marketing costs and spike short-term shareholder value. Although that strategy has produced this summer’s box office hits and staved off disaster for the theatrical business (for now), is this a sustainable, long-term approach strategy for Hollywood? Not really. As cultural analysts, we look down the road for business trends and opportunities, and we see three sizable U.S. groups that live outside the confines of the industry’s current mimetic desire:
We call them “opportunity audiences,” as they represent a chance for Hollywood to expand its range and reach, but more importantly grow its businesses. Over this series, we’ll explore these audiences, hungry for Hollywood storytelling but overlooked, or perhaps just misunderstood, by the industry. We’ll start with the group whose power is too big to be ignored — Latinos, specifically the massive Bicultural Latino audience: huge entertainment consumers with intercultural, cross-generational superpowers, making them the key to both the wider Latino audience and mainstream America as well. In today’s column, we will unpack:
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U.S. Audience: 3 Big Growth Demos Trump Revealed
November 14, 2024
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