The "New" Latino Advertising + Latin-Know in Business Week
Business Week's David Kylie was kind enough to come to Latin-Know for an opinion on what seems to be a new trend in Latino advertising: a higher sophistication in Latino-targeted ads, especially with regard to humor. Bye-bye to the omniscient grandma and hello to real-life humor -- irony, sarcasm, the bizarre -- for the Latino audience. Imagine that! Advertisers are finally realizing that Latinos aren't children, deplore clichés as much as the next guy, and like funny stuff just as much as anyone else.
David does a really good job at delving into the topic and congrats to him for spotting a trend that many a journalist hasn't been savvy enough to pick up on. The article -- which, unfortunately, features a quote from me that I can't say that I actually gave (the second one, someone else must have mentioned George Lopez, because I sure didn't) -- is a very worthwhile read, and required reading for those who still believe that the way to a Latino's heart and pocketbook is through stereotypical advertising clichés. It's official publish date is 3/16/06 but it's already available online for the anxious.
Laughing Out Loud In Spanish
Warm-and-fuzzy Hispanic TV ads are giving way to the crude and funny
Until recently an evening of advertising on Spanish-language television was good for about as many laughs as a trip to the dry cleaner. But as the number of viewers watching Latino networks like Univision tops the likes of CBS some weeks, rates for TV spots are mounting -- and so is pressure to prevent the kind of ad-zapping that bedevils English-language channels. That's helping to spark a creative revolution in Hispanic advertising as clients take more risks to reach a fast-growing market of assimilated consumers with multicultural entertainment tastes. More and more, ads marked by slapstick, frat-house pranks and edgy humor are replacing the relentlessly earnest spots that have run on Spanish-language TV for more than two decades.
Witness the change in ads for that most wholesome of products: milk.
The California Milk Processor Board for the past four years has run TV
ads featuring heartwarming scenes of an extended Latino family,
complete with grandmother baking tres leches cake. The slogan was,
predictably, "familia, amor, y leche"
(family, love, and milk). That tack was in stark contrast with the
long-running "Got Milk?" campaign in English-language media featuring
such slapstick scenes as a man in a body and head cast being fed a
cookie through the mouth-hole by his hospital roommate and then being
left alone to grunt for some milk.
The new Spanish-language
campaign is much closer to the tone of the original. Conceived by Grupo Gallegos, a hot Long Beach (Calif.) shop, it shows mythic tableaus of
people who have extraordinarily strong teeth, bones, and hair. One ad
shows commuters holding on to train straps with their bare teeth. The
slogan: "Toma Leche" (Drink Milk).
It was Grupo Gallegos that suggested moving the Hispanic ads closer to
the jokier English-language ones. "That campaign is ranked as one of
the best 100 campaigns of all time, but the Hispanic work hasn't been
part of that, and that makes no sense to me," says agency President
John Gallegos. It didn't take much to win over Milk Board Chairman
Steve James. "We've seen a flat to declining sales line in Hispanic
markets for some time, and our Spanish ads were only speaking to
customers we already have," says James, who confesses that he had
deferred to his former agency and did not pursue a new strategy in part
because he doesn't speak Spanish.
More dynamic and entertaining fare in Hispanic advertising is a must as
that segment's spending power climbs along with education levels.
Agencies view today's Latino explosion as similar to the baby boomer
phenomenon in the postwar U.S., in which a generation of children who
grew up with different mindsets from their more cautious parents became
a driving force in a dynamic consumer period. Hispanic buying power is
projected to be $926 billion in 2007, up from $580 billion in 2002,
according to the Television Bureau of Advertising.
The four-year-old Grupo Gallegos has been a catalyst for advertisers
rethinking the conventional Hallmark-card style. Two years ago the
agency woke up Hispanic advertising with a TV spot for Fox Sports Net
Inc., depicting a Hispanic housewife returning from shopping and detecting
a bad smell in her house. Free of dialogue, the camera follows her
around the house and finally into her living room, where she finds her
husband so glued to a soccer game that he has been watching from the
nearby toilet with the door open.
"That was a great example of taking a slice of life from a husband and wife, no matter the culture, and pushing the ad into entertainment," says Hispanic marketing consultant Jennifer Woodard, who writes The Latino Marketing Report Web site and blog.
Gallegos recalls his excitement when the ad took on much coveted
viral status: He received a mass e-mail headlined "Why Women Hate
Sports" with a link to the ad. The agency also put Latinos in Fruit of
the Loom apple, grape, and banana suits. And last year, Gallegos won
awards for an Energizer battery ad showing a Hispanic man, with an arm transplanted from a
Japanese man, who couldn't stop taking pictures with his new hand.
Playing with and against stereotypes is at the center of the new genre.
It does not come easily, since "not only are Americans comfortable with
positive stereotyping as a means to be politically correct, but so are
many Hispanics," says consultant Woodard. She points to the work of
popular comedian George Lopez, known for successfully attacking
stereotypes of Mexican Americans through humor.
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