There are roughly 54 million people of Hispanic origin in the United States, according to the 2013 US Census Bureau (likely, that number is even larger now), making them, at 17% of the general populace, the nation’s largest ethnic or race minority.

Where this group fits in to the increasingly important realm of multicultural marketing is complicated. On one end of the Hispanic spectrum, there are newly located immigrants who don’t speak a lick of English. On the other end, you have fully “accultured” Hispanics whose families have lived in the US for generations. For some, Spanish-language programming and marketing is a requirement for any engagement at all. For others, Spanish-language programming may not even be desired. Still others fall somewhere in the middle, relating to Hispanic-targeted programming but craving many other kinds of programming as well.

One thing’s for sure. Whether accultured to the US or not, Latin-Americans “are inherently more social,” said Oscar Mendoza, interactive media buyer for Acento Advertising, in the Digital Hollywood session “Successful Marketing Means Multicultural Marketing: The Strong Case for Mobile Media.”

The session’s moderator Alberto Pardo, CEO and founder of Adsmovil, concurred. “Latino America is among the world’s highest for average minutes per month,” he said. “Latinos are crazy about their cell phones.”

For many Hispanics, “mobile is the primary way of accessing the Internet,” said Vanessa Vigil, associate director for OMD entertainment. Which is ideal in many ways for marketers targeting Hispanics because “mobile presents a really great canvas for storytelling,” enabling deeper interaction with characters and talent, gaming opportunities and plenty of other fun ways to engage with a brand. Such efforts increase brand loyalty and when it comes to Hispanic audiences, particularly moms and second-generation women, “we have a lot of awareness to their spending power and to their loyalty, said Jill Byron, SVP of communications for Glam Media.

Byron was speaking on a panel at the session titled “Why Successful Marketing Means Multicultural Marketing,” where the lasting sentiment seemed to be that, regardless of its size, “The concept of a Hispanic marketplace is a moment in time,” said Michael Schwimmer, CEO of NUVOtv. “Multicultural America is where we’re moving toward.”

That’s not a diminishment of the collective power of Hispanic viewership so much as an acknowledgement of great content’s power to transcend language and culture across all platforms. In fact, warned Schwimmer, whose company happens to be the premiere English-language entertainment network targeted specifically to Latinos, “you can’t market yourself as a Hispanic network with Hispanic programming for a Hispanic audience” at all. “It’s overwhelmingly negative.”

To that end, said Zach Rosenberg, EVP and chief growth officer for Horizon Media, a tipping point is coming where “there will no longer be multicultural marketing and general marketing” as two separate entities, but that it will all merge together under the concept of “total marketing.”

In this bold new frontier, said Monica Gadsby, CEO in the Americas of Starcom MediaVest Group, anyone has “as much a chance of owning a piece of the new market as anyone… The challenge is uniform across the board.” Those who will rise to the top, she continued are “those unafraid of change” and who are willing to commit to bringing aboard the technology developers, researchers, software engineers and other personnel who are capable of enabling a “depth of knowledge” in a field increasingly fueled by data and hyper-targeted marketing.

“I didn’t join this field to be an engineer,” said Gadsby, “but that’s where things are going.”

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