From Marketing y Medios - November 7, 2006
It’s been barely a year since the Davidson Media Group (DMG) acquired LatCom Communications Inc. in July 2005, and today a three-party release announced that Latin music portal Batanga will take ownership reins of the publishing and events company LatCom. DMG will redirect profit from the sale into buying more Spanish-language radio operations, the release stated.
LatCom CEO David Chitel says the acquisition has been in the works for awhile. “[Batanga] is an online player in the New Generation Latino [NGL] space, and we’re the publishing and [entertainment] events company in the space,” he says. “It makes it a very, very clean [merger].”
Financial details would not be disclosed, nor would ownership percentage breakdowns. But Chitel says, “Suffice to say that LatCom will remain, key personnel will stay on, and we’re converting LatCom stock into HMI,” or Hispanic Media Inc., the holding company that itself bought Batanga last year.
“The mentality of the relationship is we are all partners in this NGL space,” says Chitel, who has added Batanga LIVE/publishing president to his title.
All parties have known each other for years, when Batanga Founder Troy McConnell and Chitel were part of the dot-com boom. McConnell stayed on, while Chitel redirected his efforts to launching Latino youth magazines, such as iCaramba U., the 100,000-circ free title aimed at Hispanic college crowds, as well as the more recent high-school edition.
What’s planned is a cross-promotion of the properties to include social networking (Batanga.com), NGL magazines (including Batanga music magazine), and college, comedy and music events (Latino University college tour, the Más Risas Latino Comedy Series and programs such as GMAC’s Stroll & Roll Latino College Tour, Volkswagen’s Rhyme, Rhythm & Risas Tour and Jack Daniels’ Studio No. 7).
With more integrated programs for online, print and events, the goal is to give advertisers an opportunity to tap young U.S.-born Latinos, whose preferred language choice is English and who represent an estimated $400 billion in purchasing power.
It means “more than just a banner on Batanga or an ad in the magazine,” Chitel says.
Batanga.com is a quickly growing destination site that the company says reaches 4.5 million unique visitors worldwide, with the majority of users in the United States. Late last month, Rafael Urbina, the chairman and CEO of Coral Gables, Fla.-based Batanga, foreshadowed to Marketing y Medios of acquisitions to come before the end of year and cited the reasons for the 500 percent growth in monthly visitors compared to last year. “We started letting Batanga users take [our offerings] with them to places like MySpace, where they can share their radio stations.” Batanga also has more than 20 exclusive online radio stations and hours of streaming media.
Batanga will have approximately 70 full-time employees in offices from Greensboro, N.C., New York City and Los Angeles, and more than 80 active clients, according to the release.