I received an interesting tip from the folks at QuieroLatino.com, a Latin dating site. According to this post on their site, Microsoft AdCenter won’t accept Spanish ads or ads that go to pages with Spanish on them.
To clarify this a bit further, the issue appears to be with running these types of campaigns in the US itself. Here is the gist of Microsoft’s communication with the site owners:
The reason for the disapproval is because of the use of a foreign language on the landing page. You are using the English US distribution channel and targeting the US and so you must use only the English language on the landing page.
Here’s the kicker:
Also, note that the words tu media naranja in the ad will need to be changed to English.
The site owner also reports that campaigns with Google and Yahoo went ahead with no problem. It seems to me that this is an oversight on Microsoft’s part. It looks like they are trying to ensure a higher degree of relevance for the US audience, but simply missed the mark on this one.
The US Census Bureau reports that there were more than 44 million Hispanics in the US as of 2006. That’s more than 10% of the US population. As I covered in a recent post on Search Engine Watch about Hispanic Search Marketing, marketing in a culturally sensitive way to specific ethnic groups is really a market requirement these days.
I will ask Microsoft for a comment on this. Unless I misunderstand what’s going on here, I have to imagine that they will fix this.
