Spanish speakers watch TV in English too!

So it seems that Vehix.com, according to this Washington Post article, is finally waking up to a reality that most of us who are halfway interested in the topic and have some knowledge of the community are already well aware of.

While the Spanish-speaking, Spanish-consuming market (meaning both monolingual Spanish-speaking market and those who prefer to have their news served up in Spanish, watch telenovelas in Spanish, etc. while using English in day-to-day life while still fancying a Thalia Hershey's candy) is a  highly lucrative market segment, many -- millions of Latinos, bilingual or not, are watching English-language TV as well. Why? Some speak English fluently and can alternate back and forth, receiving entertainment in English while still welcoming messages from marketers in their native language.

And there are more channels in English. Spike TV's typical lineup of wrestling and car chases doesn't alienate anyone, since they cater to the universal language of "guy". A monolingual Spanish speaker can easily be found perusing the likes of Spike or ESPN, so Vehix.com's decision to advertise on these networks was, in my opinion, a sound one. One interesting thing is that Vehix.com doesn't have a site in Spanish (HELLO! Vehix's business is an online business! Why waste advertising money on targeting Spanish-speakers when there is no information given in Spanish?), so the welcoming message of "en tu idioma" ends when you get to the site.

Here's the intro to the story:

On a recent Monday night, during the back-to-back wrestling shows "WWE Raw" and "WWE Raw Zone" on the cable's Spike TV, David Carcamo saw a commercial. The for-the-boys programming on Spike, it must be said, is in English. The 30-second commercial, touting the auto Web site Vehix.com, however, was in Spanish.

"I was like, ' What?!' " says Carcamo, 18, a senior at Cardozo High School in Northwest Washington. He understood the commercial, no problem there. But a Spanish spot on an English-language channel? "Maybe the antenna was off. Or something. Maybe it was just a mistake," he wondered.

A TV commercial for Vehix.com, featuring a Hispanic couple and with Spanish dialogue, has been appearing on English-language cable channels in the area. (Morey Evans Advertising)

"I was confused when I first saw it," says his friend, Sergio Romero, 19, also a senior at Cardozo. Like Carcamo, he's bilingual. "I thought I accidentally changed the channel to Telemundo."

They laugh.

Vehix.com., a one-stop shop for car buyers, is using the Washington area -- home to an affluent, diverse, growing Latino community -- to conduct an experiment: running a Spanish-speaking commercial on cable channels such as Spike, Nick at Nite, FX and Sci Fi, to name a few. The first ad, put on the air in February, features a bald, chubby actor and a Spanish voice-over. Three weeks ago, it began to be replaced by an ad featuring Latino actors speaking in Spanish. Either way, the result is more eye-catching than reading a flier in English on one side and Spanish on the other about a yard sale in Columbia Heights. Andrew Ward, a vice president at Comcast Spotlight, the advertising division of the nation's largest cable provider, says these are the only Spanish ads on English channels of which he knows.

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