The census will reveal the extent of several well-documented trends, such as the growth of America’s Hispanic population [...]. Cesar Conde, president of Univision Networks, a Spanish-language media company, says it will be a “wake-up to marketers”. Once the results are in, firms are likely to invest more in marketing to minorities, to develop more products to appeal specifically to them, to advertise in languages other than English and to hire more racially diverse models.

Basically, this new census will further cement the importance of ethnic-oriented marketing.

And hand-in-hand with this switch in marketing, comes the even bigger change: the move to hyper-targeting that marketing is experiencing, through ethnic and community media, to specialty media and content-targeted Internet advertisement:

Peter Francese, a demographer at Ogilvy & Mather, an advertising agency, thinks the 2010 census will permanently change marketing. When companies analyse the census data, they will see that cities, and even some neighbourhoods, are so diverse now that broad advertising campaigns are no longer suitable. Mass-market advertising, he says, will become “extinct”. Marketers will instead have to focus on reaching specific households—just as the Census Bureau is preparing to do.