Fundamentals of Management 6th Edition by Ricky Griffin

Exercise 24

¿Qué Pasa in the Ad Agency?
• A contemporary Toyota television ad: A father is explaining Toyota's hybrid engine to his son. "[The car] runs on gas and electricity," he says. " Mira. Mira aquí. [Look. Look here.] It uses both." The son replies, "Like you, with English and Spanish." " Sí ," replies the father.
As the makeup of U.S. society changes, organizations have realized that they need to change the ways in which they communicate with diverse customer bases. It might come as something of a surprise, but this Toyota TV spot reflects a virtually revolutionary change in the way American companies address potential buyers from different cultures. Once, for example, they assumed that Hispanics living in the United States were immigrants, spoke no English, and clung to old-world values. Today, however, they're well aware of the fact that over half of the country's 45.5 million Hispanics were born in this country. Like the father and son in Toyota's depiction of Hispanic life, most Spanish speakers know English and mix elements not only of both languages but also of both U.S. and Latino culture. "This group is not about nostalgia for the home country," says Jaime Fortuño, managing partner of Azafrán, a New York-based agency.
There was also a time when advertisers relied on mainstream ads-ads aimed at the center of the market where they expected to find the "typical" consumer. But as the purchasing power of minorities has increased, companies have put more energy into developing targeted ads-ads aimed at specific groups of consumers and often delivered through language-targeted media. Today, for example, a corporation thinks nothing of budgeting $100 million a year for Hispanic-themed ads. Since 2004, about one-third of ads targeted to Hispanics have been presented in Spanish, and that proportion is growing-for good reason. The buying power of Hispanics is growing at a compound annual rate of 8.2 percent, compared to 4.9 percent for non-Hispanics. From $220 billion in 1990, Hispanic spending will reach nearly $1 trillion in 2009-an increase of 347 percent, compared to 148.5 percent for all consumers. (Spending by Asian Americans, incidentally, will also increase by 347 percent.)
• A contemporary Energizer battery ad: In Spanish, a man says, "When I lost my arm, I got a new one. From a Japanese guy. Now I can't stop taking pictures." He compulsively takes pictures everywhere-of himself in the shower, in bed, in the men's room-until a fight ensues.
Advertisers also recognize different segments of Hispanic customers, just as they've long recognized segments of the mainstream market. Another sign of the times: When it comes to offbeat, sometimes irreverent humor, ads targeted to Hispanic audiences are catching up to mainstream ads-which is to say, mainstream advertisers are getting more comfortable communicating to minority consumers.
• A contemporary Verizon ad: A young woman is trying to download a music-video clip using a slow dial-up connection. To add to her frustration, the song, José José's "La Nave del Olvido" [The Ship of Oblivion] gets stuck on the line "espera un poco, un poquitiiiiiiiii" [wait a bit more]. In Spanish, an announcer extols the virtues of Verizon High Speed Internet.
"A high percentage of Hispanic consumers," explains Marquita Carter, director of multicultural marketing for Verizon, "still use a dial-up connection." The spot ran on Spanish-language TV and radio in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Tampa, and Washington, D.C., as part of a campaign that also includes newspaper and online ads in Dallas and Los Angeles. Verizon is one of the country's top-ten advertisers in Spanish-language media, having spent $73.8 million in the first three quarters of 2008 (up 20 percent over the same period in 2007).
Other companies in the top ten include number-one Procter Gamble ($133.2 million for the first three quarters of 2008, up 13 percent), AT T, General Motors, McDonald's, Toyota, and Johnson Johnson. Total spending for the period topped $4 billion, an increase of 2.7 percent over 2007.
The Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies (AHAA) thinks it should be even more. "The Hispanic advertising industry," reported the organization's website in 2009, "is growing four times faster than all other sectors of advertising." Spending on Spanish-language advertising by 500 major U.S. companies represented 5.6 percent of the total spent in all media, but Hispanics, observes the AHAA, represent 15.1 percent of the total U.S. population.
About 9,000 members of that 15.1 percent are illegal aliens, but as far as John Gallegos is concerned, companies should direct advertising to them, too. "The guy who just came across the border with a coyote, do I want to go after him, too?" asks Gallegos, who runs Grupo Gallegos, an L.A.-area agency. "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. Advertising is aspirational. I want to aim ahead of where my audience is. Unless it's the equivalent of beef to Hindus, I always say, any product and any service should be sold to Latinos in this country."
• An old Milk Board ad: As a grandmother is preparing tres leches cake in a crowded kitchen, a slogan appears on the screen: " Familia, amor, y leche [Family, love, and milk]." A new Milk Board ad: Commuters hold on to train steps by their teeth. The slogan says, " Toma leche [Have some milk]."
Grupo Gallegos created the new Milk Board ad as well as one set in a town where gravity comes and goes. Locals aren't the least bit surprised to find themselves floating along 30 feet in the air or suddenly plummeting to the ground with bone-crushing impact. Fortunately, they drink a lot of milk, so they have exceptionally strong bones and walk away unscathed. "You have to put something out there that hasn't been seen before," says Gallegos art director Juan Pablo Oubiña, who didn't much care for the old " Familia, amor, y leche " Milk Board ad on more than one level. It reminded him of what's known as " Abuelita advertising," after a Spanish term for "grandma." It's better than traditional advertising for Hispanics dreamed up by non-Hispanic agencies (think businessmen in sombreros), but it's steeped in its own clichés-particularly Hispanics as cheerful suburban homeowners living in warm multigenerational families. "On any team I lead," vows Oubiña, "there is never going to be a kitchen with somebody exclaiming, 'Mmmm, how delicious.'"
Grupo Gallegos, which also has accounts with companies such as Fruit of the Loom, Comcast (high-speed Internet service), and Bally fitness centers, was careful to reconsider the Spanish wording of the Milk Board's well-known "Got Milk?" slogan. To many Spanish speakers, the easiest translation-" Tiene leche? "-apparently came across as something like "Are you lactating?" The replacement phrase-" Toma leche " ("Have some milk")-seems like an obvious solution, but as one journalist pointed out on her first viewing of the ad, "I appreciated what the challenge had been.… I was pretty sure that asking people in Spanish whether they have milk is a bad idea, since I had once learned the regrettable way that if you use Spanish to ask a male Mexican grocer, 'Do you have eggs?' you're inquiring as to his testicles."
• An ad for Southwest Airlines: A virile young Hispanic rollerblades up to a parked car to admire his image in the tinted window. The window unexpectedly rolls down to reveal two men inside the car who are also admiring him. "Want to get away?" reads the punchline, which is followed by a low airfare price.
"In advertising," observes Oubiña, "it's not easy to be different. It takes ten times as much work." And getting the language right isn't really the hardest part of making Spanishlanguage ads. Like this Southwest ad from the Hispanic-owned agency Dieste Harmel Partners, many of the latest-vintage Spanish-language ads have succeeded in appealing to Hispanic audiences by playing with and against stereotypes, but as one Hispanic marketing consultant observes, it's a tricky balancing act. "Not only are Americans comfortable with positive stereotypes as a means to be politically correct," says Jennifer Woodard, "but so are many Hispanics." The problem of stereotyping, she reminds us, is usually twofold: Advertisers tend to rely on stereotypes because they assume that they're somehow reflective of the mainstream, and the consumers being stereotyped tend to settle for stereotypes because they dominate the images of themselves that are available to them in the media.
• An ad for Fox Sports Net: Returning home from a shopping trip, a Hispanic woman detects an unpleasant odor in the house. The camera follows her as she follows her nose from room to room until she reaches the living room, where she realizes that her husband is so thoroughly immersed in a televised soccer game that he's been watching through the open door of a nearby bathroom.
This ad-another Grupo Gallegos creation-does a good job of playing with and against stereotypes because it bounces off the stereotype of the soccer-obsessed Latino in what Woodard describes as "a great example of taking a slice of life from a husband and wife, no matter the culture, and pushing the ad into entertainment." Contrast this ad, however, with the far more common appropriation of the same stereotype in TV advertising aimed at Hispanics. "[W]atch a few hours," suggests agency executive Tommy Thompson, "and count how many soccer-themed spots you see. And I'm not talking about World Cup season or during the airing of soccer matches where contextually it makes sense. It almost seems that soccer is the only way to connect with [Hispanic viewers]. What does soccer have to do with life insurance, for example? Are there really no other insights as relates to Hispanics' need for life insurance that can be communicated without soccer?"
Thompson, founder and president of Dallas-based iNSPIRE!, argues that advertisers should focus on "what makes the target [market] tick as it relates to [a] particular brand or category." It's advice that's already been put to good use in ads such as the Verizon and Energizer spots described earlier. For the Energizer ad, for example, Gallegos was originally given the task of making the brand "iconic" for Hispanic consumers-giving it immediately familiar symbolic value so that Spanish speakers would think of perpetual motion and say, " como el conejito Energizer ," the same way that English speakers think of perpetual motion and say "like the Energizer bunny." At Grupo Gallegos, brainstorming on a new account always starts with "Okay, aquí está el problema que tenemos when we really start looking at the brand," and the Gallegos team realized early on that most Hispanics don't associate batteries with perpetual motion (or anything else): For them, a battery is a battery. So Gallegos came up with an ad in which a Mexican man walks down the street and shares his realization that he's immortal-whereupon a two-story commercial sign falls on his head. Being immortal, he explains, he needs a very long-lasting battery for his camera.
• Ad for Virgin Mobile Telecoms: A man with cocker spaniel ears flapping in the wind drives his girlfriend in a convertible. A tagline appears: " No Soy Normal " [I'm Not Normal]."
You're a top manager in a large factory whose workforce is approximately 40 percent Hispanic. Business is down because of the recession, and you've learned that there's a rumor about layoffs circulating in the grapevine. In particular, a lot of Hispanic-speaking employees seem to think that they'll be laid off first. How should you deal with the rumor?