Outside the Hispanic ad agency community, the story these days is how much the television work out of those agencies has improved in recent years. Inside the community, the story is that there is ample room for further improvement.
Top executives at leading Hispanic agencies cite a number of factors that have led to better work. The Hispanic population has grown significantly, making it now the largest minority group in the country. According to the 2000 census report, Hispanics represent 13 percent of the U.S. population. Advertisers have taken note of that fact and are putting more money into trying to reach Hispanic consumers. Increasingly, TV spots aimed at the Hispanic market are being produced in English and are running on channels like MTV instead of just the Telemundo or Univision networks, two of the larger Spanish-language networks. And Hispanic ad agencies are bringing new talent and new approaches to the market.
"There is a new wave of agencies that started in the mid-’90s that are really going for advertising that goes beyond the stereotypes," says Sergio Alcocer, VP of creative services at LatinWorks, founded in ’99 in Austin, Texas. "These agencies are much more informed about the creative tendencies in advertising, with new people coming from Latin America and new generations of Hispanic-Americans who are truly professional creatives and ad people."
New Ideas
Jesse Díaz, creative director at Dieste Harmel & Partners, Dallas, attributes much of the improvement to clients who now realize the importance of the Hispanic community. "Clients are recognizing the buying potential of the Hispanic market, and they are putting a lot of resources behind it," he says. "It’s not a stepchild any more. The old thinking was, ‘You’ve got to put a family in there, you’ve got to put grandma and grandpa in there and you’ve got to have mariachi music.’ Fortunately we’ve shed those stereotypes. The world has opened up."
While some clients still resist new approaches, Díaz says many are open to the agency’s ideas. Far from being a typical Latino spot, Dieste Harmel’s "South Pole" for Clorox’s Gladware food containers opens with an ice-fishing Eskimo. Directed by John Lindauer of bicoastal/international Believe Media, the spot begins with a Gladware container popping to the surface in front of the Eskimo. The image freezes, then reverses and follows the container underwater, through storm sewers and back to a New York City gutter, where it has fallen from a rushing woman’s handbag.
"That’s saying that these containers are very durable," Díaz notes. "It was very different for Clorox to approve something like that. You don’t see a Hispanic mom or grandmother. You see an Eskimo and a businesswoman who drops her lunch on a street in New York."
Juan Jose Quintana, VP/creative director at La Agencia de Orci & Asociados, Los Angeles, agrees that marketers are paying more attention to the Hispanic market. "[Clients] are asking for better stuff every day," he says. "And they are investing a little more money in it."
A recent spot the agency created for Verizon is "Postcards," which opens on a rack of postcards picturing various Spanish-speaking countries in Central America, the Caribbean and South America. The camera zooms in and out of the postcards, which have been broken into layers and reassembled in a computerized 3-D space, while long-distance phone rates to the countries are highlighted. Massimo Martinotti of Miami-headquartered Mia Films directed the ad.
One of the new Hispanic agencies making waves is la comunidad, which has offices in Miami Beach, Fla., and Buenos Aires. The agency caused a splash at last year’s awards shows with their MTV Latin America campaign, which included the ads "Baby," "Smells Like Britney" and "Porn." Creative director Jose Molla, who founded the agency two-and-a-half years ago with his brother Joaquin, honed his craft working on Nike ads at Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore., a shop famous for breakthrough creative.
"The Hispanic consumer is becoming more sophisticated these days and more blended into the American culture," Molla points out. "The old-school approach to Hispanics is not as effective today. If you talk to them in the old way, you’re missing a lot of possibilities. We believe in account planning, finding insights in the consumer. Just our being Hispanic isn’t enough. There are many things about consumers that you don’t know. That’s why you go out and ask the people and find out. That’s how you come up with the most interesting stuff."
Molla recently finished a multimedia campaign for Citibank that included spots directed by Jake Scott of bicoastal RSA USA "[The package] works on little insights that many Americans aren’t going to get," relates Molla. "Many Latinos spend years here without opening a bank account. They don’t have a credit history and they can’t take advantage of many of the great things about being in the United States. Citibank is saying, ‘We understand how you feel, being here. There is a downside to being in the United States. There’s nothing we can do about that, but we can do a lot to help you on the upside of being in the U.S. so everything is worth it.’ "
Youth Factor
One of the key factors in changing advertising aimed at Hispanics is the pursuit of younger demographics. The traditional Spanish-language networks in the U.S. don’t attract those viewers in large numbers. They’re highly bilingual and more into MTV than Sabado Gigante on Univision. But reaching Latinos on English-language media can be tricky. Fidel Arizmendi, associate creative director at La Agencia de Orci, offers evidence that it can be done. "We do concepts that hopefully play with issues of language that a Latino can identify and think, ‘That’s talking to me,’ " he says. "To the general market, it will just look like an ad and it will work for them as well. But there’s an element in the ad that resonates with Latinos so it has a second layer of meaning for them."
He cites a ’02 Honda Civic spot, "Color Me Mine," directed by Steve Fong, then with Copper Media, Los Angeles. (Fong is now with kaboom, San Francisco.) The spot features two Civics driven by young men—wearing face paint and jerseys in the colors of the Argentine and Brazilian World Cup soccer teams—who have a confrontation of sorts on the road. A third Civic and its driver, all in red, intercede and the situation is defused. "To any general market audience it would just look like a rivalry between two teams of any kind of sport," Arizmendi explains. "To a Latino consumer, the colors represent Brazil and Argentina, which is one of the biggest rivalries in soccer worldwide. It’s a subtle thing, but they will pick it up. The guys in the middle are just Honda fans. Its message was: It doesn’t matter what team you support or what kind of lifestyle you have, there is a Civic for you."
Alcocer of LatinWorks says a challenge is to find the voice of the Hispanic experience in America. "We need to reflect the experience of Hispanics living in America, which is totally different from that of Hispanics living in their country of origin," he says. "We see a lot of people who are Hispanic in name and looks, but who don’t speak Spanish. For that kind of target, especially in Texas, we designed some campaigns with Miller’s general market advertising with Hispanic insights."
LatinWorks has done Miller Lite spots in English and in Spanish with subtitles using directors who work in both the Hispanic and general markets. "San Fermin," for example, uses a running with the bulls theme to lead into an English conversation among young Latinos over a few beers. The ad was directed by Norman Christianson of Cuatro y Medio, Mexico City.
"Tuna," on the other hand, is in Spanish with subtitles and was directed by Erich Joiner of bicoastal Tool of North America. In the spot, a guy feeds his girlfriend’s cat a long-expired can of tuna, causing its hair to fall out. The tale is related to friends over Miller Lites.
The Future
Alcocer and the other creatives say director choice is based on the board, not ethnicity. "It’s creative-driven," Alcocer says. "It depends on the board. If it’s very dialogue-driven [and in Spanish], it can be good to have a director who understands the language."
Quintana of La Agencia de Orci leans toward Latino directors and mentions that some clients have a policy to hire minorities. "If you’re going to have dialogue, you focus on Hispanic directors," he says. "The thing is to find the right person to tell the right story."
While all the creatives agree that Hispanic advertising has come a long way in recent years, they also say it has a way to go still. "The future is all going to come down to ideas and interesting ways to communicate with people and establish relationships," Molla says. "In the last five years, there has been a lot of improvement in that area, but we’re not there yet."
Molla says he still runs into clients who give la comunidad a week to develop a project while they may give their lead agency three weeks. "I tell them it takes the same amount of time to come up with good ideas in Spanish as it does in English," he says. "They agree. Sometimes it’s just a matter of questioning things."
Arizmendi says some clients have outdated perceptions of the Hispanic consumer. "When you’re selling an idea, even though you may be the expert, some comment always comes back to you that reflects [the client’s perception] of who the Latino consumer is," he says. "You don’t get to push it to the level you would like to push it, but we’re making inroads. That, to me, is the big difference from a couple of years ago."
Alcocer notes that while Hispanic creative is better than ever, he thinks it’s still in transition. Or as Molla puts it, "It’s not there yet."
