Latin_KNOW: The Latino Marketing Report

Local Language Flubs: Muni massacres Spanish

I've often talked about the horrible language mistakes and translation tragedies of marketers' lame attempts to target the U.S Latino market in its native language. It's a symptom of marketers' belief that a) Spanish is just not important enough to do right or b) any "native Spanish speaker" necessarily speaks or writes the language well.

Here's a local example (an announcement by our beloved transit system, Muni) that is truly a massacre of the Spanish language, and in my opinion insulting to those it's attempting to target (click for larger image) sent to me by a Spanish-speaking friend:

    

Many of these are laughable, others just pathetic, but to some extent harmless. What's really worrysome here is that this is not an ad, but rather a public announcement. Granted, one can conclude what the messages are here, but what if the flubs were (and they certainly could have been) more serious, going beyond spelling mistakes to actually confusing or misleading the reader?

Not too surprising from an entity like Muni, whose "mistakes" aren't only in how they target Spanish-speakers but in their  mere day-to-day operations. What's also disturbing is a side-by-side comparison of the English sign and the Spanish one (click for larger image):



Apparently Muni believes that using double the words will make it easier for Spanish riders to understand the message, when in reality all it does is confuse. Shame on the poor soul who translated this, and all of the signs in the Muni trains. Just atrocious.

Spotted any language crimes on ads in your city? Snap a photo and we'll publish them here on Latin_Know!

I've often talked about the horrible language mistakes and translation tragedies of marketers' lame attempts to target the U.S Latino market in its native language. It's a symptom of marketers' belief that a) Spanish is just not important enough to do right or b) any "native Spanish speaker" necessarily speaks or writes the language well.

Here's a local example (an announcement by our beloved transit system, Muni) that is truly a massacre of the Spanish language, and in my opinion insulting to those it's attempting to target (click for larger image) sent to me by a Spanish-speaking friend:

    

Many of these are laughable, others just pathetic, but to some extent harmless. What's really worrysome here is that this is not an ad, but rather a public announcement. Granted, one can conclude what the messages are here, but what if the flubs were (and they certainly could have been) more serious, going beyond spelling mistakes to actually confusing or misleading the reader?

Not too surprising from an entity like Muni, whose "mistakes" aren't only in how they target Spanish-speakers but in their  mere day-to-day operations. What's also disturbing is a side-by-side comparison of the English sign and the Spanish one (click for larger image):



Apparently Muni believes that using double the words will make it easier for Spanish riders to understand the message, when in reality all it does is confuse. Shame on the poor soul who translated this, and all of the signs in the Muni trains. Just atrocious.

Spotted any language crimes on ads in your city? Snap a photo and we'll publish them here on Latin_Know!

Premio Lo Nuestro: Can't wait for the ads

Stuart Elliot wrote about Premio Lo Nuestro this week, which is  expected to have really high ratings and really big advertisers, in spite of the fact that no one outside of the Latino community knows what it is.

I'll be "live" (deferred, as I am on the West Coast) blogging Lo Nuestro tonight on VivirLatino, ads and all, starting at 8 pm PST. I just HAVE to see that Wendy's ad. Check it out.

Latino kids pull on the purse strings

Cross posted over at VivirLatino

Why is that television believes children can get down with Spanish while adults cannot? For whatever reason, prime time TV (with rare exceptions like Freddie Prinze's "Freddie") doesn't want to bother with bilingualism, even though Latinos are a perfect demographic: 600 billion in buying power, median age of 26, average household size of 4 members, yadayadayada...

There's a huge rise in the use of Spanish and bilingual dialogues in mainstream children's television programming. We've posted before about Dora La Exploradora, but she's not alone.

But now PBS Kids' has more Latino offerings. ''Dragon Tales'' was revamped last year to highlight Latino issues and include Enrique, an immigrant who is Puerto Rican and Colombian. ''Jay Jay the Jet Plane'' added a new bilingual plane named Lina. PBS Kids Go!, a 24-hour cable station to launch this fall, will include two hours a day of shows in Spanish with English subtitles, said Lesli Rotenberg, a Public Broadcasting System senior vice president.

The Disney Channel will debut ''Handy Manny,'' a preschool cartoon centered on a bilingual Manny Garcia and talking tools, later this year. The Cartoon Network, meanwhile, has ''Mucha Lucha,'' a Mexican wrestling cartoon, while the animated ''Maya & Miguel'' is produced by Scholastic Entertainment and aimed at Spanish-speaking kids just starting school.

At a time when Freddy Prinze's dad was the only "bilingual" character on TV, "Sesame Street" was emerging as the only multi-cultural option for children. The same seems to be happening now. Why?

Census 2000 showed that Latino communities are the nation's fastest growing -- and the biggest five-year Latino age group is infants to preschoolers. (Among non-Hispanics, the biggest group is 40- to 44-year-olds.)

Next time you think about how liberating it is that your kids have more Latino cartoons to watch, think also about whose dollars they are after: yours via your children. Smarter than targeting you outright, no?

Via HappyNews.com

Billboard and Microsoft Launch Latino Music Site

Very good call:

Billboard magazine and Microsoft Corp. are teaming up to target surging growth in the Latin music market with a new Web site devoted to Spanish-language artists, news and awards.

Billboard, a Manhattan-based publication most famous for its music charts, is responding to the popularity of Latin genres like reggaeton and artists such as Shakira and Daddy Yankee, said Scott McKenzie, a Billboard editorial director. The new site -- through MSN -- is Billboard’s first devoted exclusively to one genre.

I hope the actual product will be based on a better-informed study than that last sentence. Shakira and Daddy Yankee don't share a genre -- there is no one "Latin music genre", but rather a Latino music umbrella under which with countless genres live, as different between them as country and western is to gangsta rap. And no, I am not exaggerating.

Contrary to what Web 2.0 thinks of the Latino market (see previous post), Billboard has confidence in Latino spending power.

“The spending power of the Latino market is on many businesses’ minds these days,” Mr. McKenzie said, pointing to increasing demand from advertisers. “From a value point of view, I see numbers in the hundreds of millions if not billions.”

And rightly so. First (or better) one to the market gets the big fish.

Crain's New York Business         READ MORE

Web 2.0: Who's serving the Latino market?

Short answer: nobody.

I live in San Francisco, the heart of internet innovation, and on a daily basis I am barraged with emailed articles and blog posts from friends and colleagues raving about "the next killer app" in this thing dubbed "Web 2.0". And because of my line of work, I am also bombarded with data and news on the "illusive" and lucrative Latino market. It seems everyone is after a piece of the pie, except internet companies.

In researching for a post on another blog, I took a look at the Web 2.0 "innovation map" that Fourio came up with. This Google Maps-based app tracks companies around the world dedicated to some new Web 2.0 concept. While I was happy to see that there were "innovators" in Spanish-speaking countries, I was surprised that all of them (they are only located in, according to this very non-scientific map, Chile and Spain) have chosen to pursue a mainstream English-speaking m arket.

True: go where the money is. False: the Latino market worldwide has no money to spend.

No one has yet been willing to step up to the plate. Spanish-speaking users around the world have cheaply translated knockoffs of portals and search engines at their disposal, but nothing truly theirs. I wonder when the internet world will start to see value in a market that traditional marketers are fighting for tooth and nail.

Since when is technology slower to the game than corporate America?

Tortillas around the world

I was struck today by a piece of news that in itself was not very striking: a Mexican corporation acquires a tortilla company. It's the details that surprise:

GRUMA has acquired Rositas Investments PTY LTD, a company that manufactures tortillas in Australia; the closing of this acquisition was Friday, January 27, 2006. The purchase price was $17.6 million Australian dollars, or approximately $13.3 million U.S. dollars.

Rositas, with annual sales of approximately $22 million, manufactures tortillas primarily in the institutional segment, but also sells through retail chains. Its products are sold under the "Rositas" brand name, which has great acceptance with the Australian consumers.

An Australian tortilla company, no less. I had no idea that tortilla production was now an international industry. Especially when in places like Spain you are hard-pressed to find an edible tortilla. The tortillas made available to the Spanish consumers are either Old El Paso brand (previously only at certain supermarkets) or the new line of tortillas by Bimbo. Apparently the Spanish market is so unfamiliar with this food item (which, incidentally, shares the name of what is arguably the quintessential Spanish dish) that Bimbo has had to name them "Roll's" (why in English? no idea) and call them "bases de crepes" (like "crepe cakes").

Given this general lack of popularity of tortillas in a Spanish-speaking European market with a large Latin American immigrant population, it is surprising that large-scale tortilla production is happening Down Under.

"With this acquisition, GRUMA reinforces its presence in the international markets and, together with its next tortilla plant in China, it will be better suited to supply the Asia and Oceania markets."

I always thought that Mu Shu Pork wrappers were suspiciously similar to tortillas de harina.

Hispanic Business.com

Tags: latino market,tortillas, business,international marketing,food,mexican food

When branding goes wrong

A funny (or not so funny, depending on how you look at it) story in the NYT today about my hometown's new soccer team, its name and the harsh lesson in branding its organizers have had to stomach. At a time when cities are forming soccer leagues solely to satisfy a Latino market need, it's pretty amusing when the name of the team itself isolates -- even infuriates -- the very market it's meant to woo:

HOUSTON, Jan. 26 — What better way to honor the brash origins of this city, the owners of Houston's new professional soccer franchise reasoned, than to name their team "Houston 1836," a nod to the year when two entrepreneurial brothers from New York arrived here to build a city atop the swampy bayous of southeast Texas.

Many Latinos in Houston, though, greeted the unveiling of the team's name this week with a shudder. Eighteen thirty-six also happens to be the year that a group of English-speaking interlopers waged a war of secession that resulted in Mexico's loss of Texas, ushering in more than a century of violence and discrimination against Mexicans in the state.

Read the whole NYT article here. Highly recommended.

Happy Friday!

Technorati tags: latino marketing, soccer,hispanic marketing,branding

Losing the grandma

The California Milk Processor Board, the organization behind the "Familia, amor y leche" ads (the meaning of which, incidentally, has always eluded me) is revamping their Spanish-language ad campaign. Reading this piece of news I am optimistic because they seem to be pulling the "Familia, amor y leche" theme and getting rid of the recurring (annoying stereotype) grandma character.

Other changes: Grupo Gallegos is handling the new campaign and plans to incorporate some humor into the ads:

The Hispanic-focus campaign changes Jan. 30 when the new commercials, created by Grupo Gallegos, begin to air on Spanish-language TV.                                                                                                                         
These will be about family, but in a new and exciting way,'' said Veronica Flores with RL Public Relations.

The difference? Milk now will be humorously portrayed in the 30-second spots Contortionist,'' Amazon Hair Goddess'' and Teeth Town'' as the wonder tonic that can help build muscle, grow hair and strengthen teeth enough to pick up babies or open cans of food, as Teeth Town'' portrays.

"We recognize that Hispanic audiences are increasingly sophisticated and that our advertising needs to keep up,'' said milk processor board chairman Steve James.

Actually, Hispanic audiences aren't "increasingly sophisticated". They've always been "sophisticated", whatever that means. If it means that they are now smart enough to know that "abuela", "familia" and all of the typical elements of Latino advertising are shortcut clichés and don't resonate with most Latinos, you're right.

I have confidence that Grupo Gallegos will deliver something more relevant. Stay tuned.

Press-Telegram         READ MORE

New Forrester Report: Latino Tech Adoption

Fascinating new data from Forrester Research in their report, "Three Critical Factors Determine How Hispanic-Americans Buy And Use Technology".

I recommend reading the entire release, but here are some highlights:

Forrester found that Hispanics embrace technology, but prefer portable communication and music devices over PCs, home theaters, and video game systems. While fewer Hispanics are online compared to non-Hispanics, those who do go online are more likely than other groups to engage in entertainment activities like listening to Internet radio or downloading music and movies.

• Forty-one percent of Hispanics visit music sites, versus 18 percent of non-Hispanics.

• Sixty-one percent of Hispanics use email compared to 97 percent of non-Hispanics.

• Twenty-three percent of Hispanics said they watch Internet video versus only 17 percent of other American consumers.

Business Wire            READ MORE

Marketing the Arts to U.S. Latinos

Walking down 4th Street in San Francisco this week, I was struck by a type of campaign we aren't used to seeing. The image of Spanish artist Goya was staring back at me, with a message in Spanish:

No hay suficiente arte para nuestros niños

Con razón nuestros niños piensan que Goya es sólo una marca conocida de frijoles

(There isn't enough art for our children. No wonder our children think Goya is just a popular brand of beans)

Spanish language marketing in non-commercial sectors tends to be geared towards promoting social services, such as health care, disease prevention, etc. Seldom do you see culture-related messages targeting monolingual Spanish speakers.

Beyond this message of awareness, the ad boasts biographical information about Goya that one can read if he or she has the time. The call to action is: "Quiere más arte? Pida más!" ("Want more art? Ask for more!") and the minds behind this are those of the non-profit Americans for the Arts. The organization has also established a Spanish web site  to promote the cause of arts and arts education among Latinos.

Technorati tags: latino marketing, spanish,hispanic marketing,art