Lakers Key To NBA’s Latino Marketing Strategy

Latinos across the country — and even outside of it — love the Los Angeles Lakers. So much so, in fact, that the NBA’s Latino marketing strategy is centered around the team, which recently was at the center of a 20-year agreement with Time Warner Cable to create the first Spanish language regional sports network. Wow.

The NBA has started a Spanish language campaign, a la éne-bé-a, and this new Lakers-centric sports network will likely be another huge step in that direction. Remember that, as we’ve reported several times, the Latino market in this country is worth over $1 trillion dollars. The NBA isn’t doing this because it cares, it’s doing it because it wants to make money, The Los Angeles Times reports:

The NBA, which has seen attendance drop for 14 of the league’s 30 teams this season, has reached out to Latinos since 1995…

Early returns suggest the NBA’s campaign is working. The league says about one out of six NBA fans is Latino and this season the NBA’s Latino TV audience has grown nearly 20%, drawing more than 9.7 million unique viewers on the six national networks that carry NBA games.

Viewership is particularly strong when the Lakers play, a fact that was instrumental in bringing the Time Warner deal together. During last spring’s NBA Finals between the Lakers and the Boston Celtics, the middle three games were seen in nearly one of every five Latino households watching television, according to Nielsen Media Research, and the audience for the seventh game was nearly twice as large.

I personally know plenty of Latinos who love the Lakers, but there’s also tons of Spurs fans out there, it will be interesting to see where the NBA takes this campaign. If they play their cards right, they could do groundbreaking work in Latino sports marketing, and also lay the foundation for lots of money for many years to come.