Thread: Cynthia Gorney: Selling America en español

As Hispanic spending power continues to grow, U.S. companies rely on savvy marketers to peddle brands with just the right translation


09:14 AM CDT on Sunday, October 28, 2007

"That boy over there?" John Gallegos said. "Straddler. His mother is a Learner. She's going to be talking to him in Spanish. Watch."

Mr. Gallegos stood quietly, in the wide central part of a mall, pretending to look at nothing. The mother and son passed close by. Mr. Gallegos was right. The mother was chatting amiably in Spanish. Mr. Gallegos tilted his head toward four teenagers shambling along. "Those kids? All Straddlers," he said. "Well, the guy with his cap backwards – he might be a Navigator. He's probably more English-media-consuming."

The mall was in the city of Downey, part of Los Angeles. It was an ordinary California midrange shopping center: clean floors, Starbucks, hip apparel chains. Mr. Gallegos had come in to examine a clothing store he thought might become a client. He's a publicista, an adman. He runs a 60-person agency called Grupo Gallegos in Long Beach. His agency wins awards for its commercials, which are funny, edgy and require translating into English when international judging committees study them.

This particular week, Grupo Gallegos work was advertising leche, transporte de autobuses, pollo, ropa interior, servicio de Internet de alta velocidad, gimnasios and pilas. That would be California Milk Processor Board milk, Crucero bus lines, Foster Farms chicken, Fruit of the Loom underwear, Comcast high-speed Internet service, Bally fitness clubs and Energizer batteries, which the Gallegos people had decided to promote via a long-faced Mexican man who walks down the street explaining that as he has figured out that he's immortal (scenes of him being mashed by a plummeting second-story sign, impaled on a spear in a museum, etc.), he requires an especially durable battery for his camera.

Grupo Gallegos advertising runs on Spanish-language television, Spanish radio, in Spanish magazine pages and on Spanish or bilingual Web sites. Some of these enterprises are housed in places you might expect: New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Houston. Many are not. There's full-time Spanish television broadcasting now in Anchorage; Salt Lake City; Little Rock, Ark.; Wichita Falls, Tex.; Indianapolis; Savannah, Ga.; Boston; Oklahoma City; Syracuse, N.Y.; and Minneapolis.

And the spending power of the Hispanic demographic is exploding. The estimate worked up by the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies for 2007 is $928 billion. Those are dollars spent inside this country by Hispanic consumers, American-born citizens as well as green-card residents and the undocumented, on things they want or need: iPods, laundry soap, motor oil, Bulova watches, new-home loans. It's $200 billion more than was spent two years ago.

Propelled by continuous immigration and larger family size, the dual factors making the Hispanic population multiply faster than any other in the United States, the spending figure is expected to top a trillion dollars within the next three years.

In comparison with some of his colleagues in Hispanic advertising, John Gallegos runs a moderate-size shop. There are more than a hundred U.S. ad agencies, not including Puerto Rico, that now work almost exclusively in Spanish. The bigger agencies have accounts like McDonald's (Me encanta, which roughly translates to "I'm lovin' it"), and Chevrolet (Súbete, "Get in"). Wal-Mart reportedly spends more than $60 million a year to reach Hispanics.

From this vantage, the grim admonitions of anti-immigration groups are hard to hear distinctly; they're drowned out by the sound of cash registers. At the Grupo Gallegos office there's a closet full of display cards on which fragments of information, such as household size, have been written out in black ink. The cards are frequently rifled through and arranged onto poster boards, and the first time I visited the Gallegos offices, the boards from the most recent presentation were still leaning against a wall. The boards said things like:

LEARNERS: foreign born, Spanish dominant, 3 av kids, 65% rent

STRADDLERS: immigrated young, 4 av HH size, blue collar/semi prof, bilingual/mostly Spanish

NAVIGATORS: English dominant, some Spanish, 78% at least some college, semi prof/prof, 60% own home, HH inc $76K

"You ask: The guy who just came across the border with a coyote, do I want to go after him, too?" Mr. Gallegos once said to me. "Well, he's going to get a job. He's going to work. He's going to start buying products and contributing to the economy. So while he might not be viable for a Mercedes today, I can introduce you to people who came here, illegally or legally, with nothing and are now driving a Mercedes.

The Grupo Gallegos office stretches across the sixth floor of a building one block off the beach. It has conference rooms and odd corner spaces that are enclosed by red curtains so the creative guys on deadline can go slouch inside on stuffed chairs and stare at their open laptops, looking desperate. The preferred Gallegos term for this state is en el fondo del mar, at the deepest depths of the sea.

The office chatter eddies around the Gallegos workspace in Mexican Spanish, Argentine Spanish, Colombian Spanish, Puerto Rican Spanish, Cuban Spanish and the lispy Castillian Spanish of Spain, which is spoken fluently by, among others, a woman of Korean ancestry who grew up near Barcelona. It's all extremely modern and confusing.

Mr. Gallegos, who is 40, was born in Los Angeles to a family from the Mexican state of Zacatecas; he and the other United States-born Hispanics at the agency slide back and forth between languages, frequently midsentence. "OK, aquÃ* está el problema que tenemos when we really start looking at the brand."

One morning I walked into a red-curtained corner as Curro Chozas, one of the art directors, was saying in Spanish: "Tutankhamen, Charlie Chaplin, Mozart, George Washington – whatever. Anyway, whoever he is, he rips open his shirt. Vrrooom! It's a bird! It's a plane! No! It's George Washington!"

Mr. Chozas is from Madrid. On the stuffed chairs were a copywriter named Saúl Escobar, and one of the creative directors, Juan Pablo Oubiña. They had spent the previous days imagining a set of Dadaist spots placing famous characters from history in interesting situations with speedy things, strapped-on rockets and race cars and so on; this was promoting high-speed Internet service from Comcast.

Mr. Escobar and Mr. Chozas were tag-teaming now, waiting for a reaction.

"Napoleon Bonaparte, for example," Mr. Chozas said. "Lassie. Mahatma Gandhi."

"That would get my attention, Gandhi with the race car," Mr. Escobar said.

"Napoleon's too hard," Mr. Oubiña said.

"You think more people will recognize Gandhi than Napoleon?" Mr. Chozas asked.

"Pancho Villa," Mr. Escobar said.

Mr. Oubiña has a college degree, owns his home, has a wife-one-child HH size, is more comfortable speaking Spanish than English, would be white-collar if he actually wore collars and at 38 has lived in this country for less than a third of his life; for these and other reasons, he is a Straddler, he told me, with certain Learner/Navigator undercurrents.

At Grupo Gallegos, they all think this way.

It was Mr. Oubiña who led the preparation for the first Grupo Gallegos ad I ever saw, last spring, during one of my telenovela binges. The tagline was Toma leche, "Have some milk." The counterpart English campaign was "Got Milk?" and Grupo Gallegos' challenge was how to sell more milk to as many kinds of Hispanics as possible without alienating any of them or boring all of them.

Also, as a point of creative honor, they didn't want to look lame alongside the English "Got Milk?" campaign, which is internationally regarded as one of the brilliant ad runs of the last 20 years.

That campaign's big idea, to use adspeak, was deprivation; the San Francisco agency Goodby, Silverstein, stumped about how to draw attention to a product as familiar as milk, had decided to play with the comic horrors inherent in discovering the milk carton was empty. In one of the most celebrated ads, a history buff who knows the name of Alexander Hamilton's killer grabs the phone to answer a radio quiz question, but he can't make himself understood because his mouth is jammed up with a peanut butter sandwich and he's completely out of milk.

But this would have been a gross misfire in Spanish – and not simply because an El Salvadorean immigrant, for example, is probably unfamiliar with both Aaron Burr and peanut butter sandwiches. The whole theme was wrong, especially for people who have abandoned their home countries to migrate hundreds of miles north for work.

"There's already enough deprivation," Mr. Oubiña told me. "It wasn't funny."

Everybody at the agency wanted to be memorable and sharp, though; they were not going to stick Mamá in her kitchen lovingly pouring milk for the children while exchanging smiles with Abuelita, as grandmas are called in Spanish.

For some years now, that has been the standard these-are-Latinos cue when Hispanic agencies are doing the work. You don't see dumb Anglo-generated clichés in these ads, like strategically placed tortillas or businessmen wearing sombreros. In Hispanic-made commercials, the clichés are homegrown; the U.S. appears as a cheerful, up-by-the-bootstraps sort of place, full of suburban homeowners and hardworking men with pickups. An impressive amount of the time, somebody figures out how to stage all this amid a warm multigenerational family, with Abuelita helping demonstrate the merits of the product.

The milk problem sent Mr. Oubiña, Mr. Escobar and Mr. Chozas into the deepest depths of the sea for a while, until it occurred to them to improvise with the opposite of deprivation: maniacal consumption.

They thought up a town where gravity is unreliable, causing the locals to float matter-of-factly along 30 feet in the air until they suddenly crash to the ground; their bones are exceptionally strong, though, because they drink so much milk, so they get right up and stroll away. Same thing with powerful teeth (a town where bus riders bite the straps hanging overhead) and hair with the strength of steel. Big success: satisfied client, international award.

The agency had won awards for its Energizer ads, too, but now they had a new campaign to develop, and Mr. Oubiña was grappling; he had to write a 15-second television spot that was eye-catching, praised the battery, contained a comic punch line that would make perfect sense to Hispanics and allowed el conejito –the little rabbit – to do its marching act across the screen.

He was also supposed to try to help make the brand iconic for Spanish speakers. They had discerned that in English, people will use "going and going, like the Energizer bunny," but that nobody makes como el conejo Energizer references of a similar nature, which means that in Spanish the battery is still a battery, not an icon.

You can track part of the modern history of U.S. Hispanics, in a way, through the proliferation and escalating ambition of this country's publicistas.

Forty years ago, they were mostly a small group of Cuban-exile ad executives in New York and Miami, talking American agencies into letting them translate ad copy into Spanish. Then all-Hispanic agencies started opening up here, trying – often to no avail – to persuade clients that there were enough Spanish speakers in this country, with enough disposable income, to merit whole campaigns aimed directly at them.

Then the 2000 census data began going public, and in its wake came the rattling headlines: At 15 percent of the present United States population, or 44 million people (factor in an estimated 9 million Latin American illegal immigrants), Hispanics now outnumber African-Americans.

Their populations are multiplying so fast in certain parts of the country – nearly a 1,000 percent increase in Atlanta, for example, between 1980 and 2000 – that one recent report used the term "hypergrowth."

One of the first tasks the Gallegos researchers undertake when the agency begins a campaign is clarifying who the "bull's-eye target" is – whether the ads should be aimed most directly at Learners, say, for whom some clever reference to their newness in the United States might help. (They did a beer ad recently in which a young working man named Basilio puts up politely all day with mangled English versions of his name – "Hey, Basedo!" "Hi, Basyloh!" – and finally walks into a bar full of Latinos, where everybody, hoisting Tecates, gets it right.) Bull's-eyeing a Straddler in Spanish made intuitive sense, too: You're here, you're acquiring and nos entendemos, we understand each other.

But Spanish advertising aimed at a person like Mr. Gallegos, who lives fully and prosperously in the English-speaking United States – why make the effort? Why wouldn't a company regard him as a frequent-flying, golf-playing Lexus driver and assume they've got his attention every time he picks up an airline magazine or watches college football on English-language TV? Whenever Mr. Gallegos and I talked about this, he'd ask why anybody should bother targeting ad campaigns specifically at women. "You can see the same ads the men see," he would say.

During his "Galaygos" period, the years in elementary and middle school when teachers regularly mispronounced his surname , Mr. Gallegos – it's supposed to sound like gah-YEH-gos – stopped speaking Spanish to anyone outside his family, desperate to blend in. It was in his parochial high school that he began to "reacculturate." There, in the early 1980s, ethnic-identity badges had become chic, and the Anglo kids got his name right. "Then I became John Gallegos again," he said.

There are certainly Hispanics in this country who know no Spanish – born-heres who were never chewed out by their elders in Spanish, never curled up with a favorite aunt to watch the telenovelas. But the percentage who have had the language assimilated out of them completely is strikingly small. A national survey last year found that fewer than 5 percent of U.S. Latinos say they can neither read nor converse even a little in Spanish. Mr. Gallegos regards this as their loss.

Mr. Gallegos' agency will, on occasion, do work in English as well as Spanish. But if there's any single net that can be draped across the length and breadth of American Hispanics, it's the Spanish language. And, like his publicista colleagues, Mr. Gallegos is perplexed at American insistence that bilingualism in the U.S. is something to be overcome on the path to success.

At a recent family dinner at Mr. Gallegos' house, the conversation ricocheted between his wife, who doesn't really speak Spanish; his grandmother, who doesn't really speak English; his children, who understand Spanish but respond in English; his mother, who speaks both languages but prefers Spanish; and his father, who speaks both languages but prefers English. Nobody found this disorienting.

I asked Mr. Gallegos: When your children are sitting at their own family dinner tables, what language will they be speaking? There was a lengthy pause.

"Both," he finally said – referring to the languages they'll work in, what they'll dream in at night, how they'll live. "Everybody will speak English," he said. "I think it's not going to be either-or. I think we might become a bilingual nation. And I don't think that's a bad thing."


Cynthia Gorney teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley and is a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine, where a longer version of this essay appeared.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... 3ec88.html

I can introduce you to people who came here, illegally or legally, with nothing and are now driving a Mercedes.

Spanish only advertising firms KNOWINGLY perpetuate illegal immigration by selling lies to illegal aliens.

the only illegal aliens driving mercedes are Piolin and drug dealers.