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By Paula Parisi If you're in marketing, you've heard the numbers: Forty million Hispanics live in the U.S. and represent approximately $686 billion in spending power, an estimated $6 billion of it funneled to entertainment. Although they're only 13.4% of the population, they account for an estimated 20% of movie-ticket sales, some say that it's as high as 50% for an opening weekend in Los Angeles
Formidable by all counts, one would naturally assume the Latino community is being courted by the Hollywood power structure through strategic casting, choice of story material and targeted advertising. Yes and no.
There is a certain amount of national pride in Jennifer Lopez appearing in New Line's upcoming comedy "Monster-in-Law" and the success of filmmakers such as Robert Rodriguez and Alfonso Cuaron. And plenty of viewers are cheering Eva Longoria's sultry turn on ABC's "Desperate Housewives," the success of George Lopez in the sitcom arena and Jimmy Smits' emergence as a presidential hopeful on NBC's drama "The West Wing."
But, observers say, the industry still has a long way to go. At this point, Latinos just don't have the onscreen recognition they feel they deserve to accurately reflect their commercial and cultural clout.
While many studios and networks have created slots for executives in charge of Hispanic marketing, supported by a variety of independent consultancies, there are those who complain that the amount of money spent to back such initiatives is paltry compared to the prize at stake.
"Forty million Hispanics is the equivalent of the population of a country," says Concepcion Lara, senior vp business development and marketing at Ventura Entertainment, a home video firm that specializes in the U.S. distribution of Spanish-language films on video, and a former executive at HBO Ole and Fox Latin America. "When you think of something as a niche, you feel like you can get away with a product or two, a small simple line. When you think of something as a rollout to a whole country, it's like, 'Hold on! Let's put together a plan!'"
Carlos Garcia, whose Burbank-based research firm Garcia Associates works mainly with packaged-goods firms, agrees.
"They'll hire one or two very politically visible people, then spend a dabble of money here, a dribble of money there, making teensy-weensy little baby steps that seem to be motivated more from fear than excitement," he says of the mainstream entertainment companies. "They owe it to their shareholders to take this market seriously and approach it as a real business opportunity."
Some, however, are taking it more seriously than others.
NBC Universal's purchase of Telemundo for $1.98 billion in 2001 was a wake-up call for the media industry, though as of yet, no other companies have taken so deep a plunge.
A recent trade survey indicated there are 75 Spanish-language TV channels in the U.S., many of them Spanish-language versions of popular cable channels including Discovery Channel, MTV and ESPN.
On the broadcast side, the big players are Telemundo, Univision and TV Azteca.
But talk to the forces behind some of the newer entertainment services, and one gets the feeling that Spanish-only networks are yesterday's media, targeting an older generation of parents and grandparents -- immigrants hungry for homeland ties.
Newer networks are targeting the 24 million U.S.-born children of those viewers, an educated Generacion Next that accounts for an estimated 60% of the American Hispanic population.
In 2002, Telemundo took aim at the urban youth market with the largely English Mun2 (pronounced mundos) and two newer offerings, SiTV and Voy, targeted at acculturated, English-speaking Hispanics in the 18-40 range.
SiTV launched a year ago, and co-founder and chairman Jeff Valdez says it is now in more than 9 million cable households. Voy, the brainchild of marketing executive Fernando Espuelas and headed up by Fox veteran Andrew Thau, was scheduled to debut last summer but has yet to go on the air. Both business plans include original programming -- SiTV blending music video and magazine-format shows like "Urban Latino" (a joint venture with the magazine of the same name) with off-network acquisitions including "American Family," "Dark Angel" and "Resurrection Blvd." Voy's "lifestyle" programming will include reality and talk shows as well as series on travel and cooking.
"The U.S. Hispanic market is very complex. It goes from monolingual Spanish to monolingual English and includes everything in-between," says Santiago Pozo, whose Arenas Group has served as a marketing consultancy for more than 250 feature films.
At the same time, there are cultural divides between, say, Cubans and Mexicans, Guatemalans and Puerto Ricans. "The market on one hand is acculturating, and simultaneously, new flows of immigrants are arriving," Pozo says. "It's not like there's one answer or one market."
Yet, there are unifying themes that cross lines of generation and geography.
"The Hispanic market is not about language, it's about culture," Garcia says, adding, "that's one of the subtlest points but one of the most important points for a marketer to grasp. Kids are increasingly bilingual or English-speakers. That doesn't mean they're turning their backs on Hispanic culture, it means they're reachable in many ways." "They don't want to live to work, they want to work to live," Lara says. "It's important for them to have fun, which makes them great consumers of entertainment."
Knowing which cultural buttons to push can give a marketer a real leg up with this sizable but somewhat elusive group.
In terms of feature films, while the positioning for the general market on some releases will work just fine when directed at the Spanish market, others "can not only be inappropriate but will sometimes be very negative for the Latino market," Pozo says, using as an example Universal's family comedy "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas" (2000).
Although the Dr. Seuss character is well-known to most Americans, he was alien to the majority of Hispanics who, Pozos says, would have found the original ad copy, "If you think you know the story, you don't know the Grinch," off-putting. "If the studio had used that with the Latino market, especially the unacculturated market, they would be saying, 'This film is not for you!'" notes Pozo, who was brought in to work on the Spanish-language campaign.
The result: "He wants to ruin your Christmas. He's not your suegra (mother-in-law), he's not la migra (immigration authorities) and he's not even el chupacabra (a mythical Latin-American blood-sucking creature). He's THE GRINCH!" conveying a hipness to Hispanic life while remaining true to the film.
On the flip side, the studio's 2004 comedy "Meet the Fockers" took the marketing position, "Who hasn't been embarrassed by their parents?" which was deemed fine in translation.
According to Nielsen Monitor-Plus, the major studios spent $67.6 million, or about 2% of their marketing budgets, on Spanish-language TV in 2004. Although the number is small compared with regular broadcast TV ($1.2 billion), it's more than the total spent on the general interest magazine, radio and outdoor sectors.
In all, Hispanic TV networks tallied about $3.2 billion in advertising fees for 2004, reports Nielsen Monitor-Plus, which tracked $2.3 billion for broadcast and $93 million for cable. Again, while the number sounds impressive, it's only a fraction of the $73 billion total TV advertising pool.
"People always say this market is booming, but it's not there yet," says Beatriz Acevedo, who, with her husband Doug Greiff, is partnered in HIP Entertainment Group, a production company designed to bridge the gap between the English and Latin TV outlets. "As the market grows things will change, but right now, most advertisers feel they're getting a large part of the Hispanic audience when they run ads on the major broadcast networks."
With clients that include Discovery, Scripps and Spike, HIP last year opened a studio in Baja, Mexico, producing slick programs that often are telecast in both English and Spanish. "We shadow shoot using either a talent who is bilingual and can do the voice-over in both English and Spanish or use a stand-in who can come in and do it in Spanish so the network can dual-purpose the show and run it on both their English and Spanish networks," Greiff says.
Acevedo describes HIP as "new Latin" and says executives will sometimes look at its shows and say, "Can't you make it more Latin?" "But what does that mean?" Acevedo asks. "Dancing chili peppers? Cats in sombreros? We're like, 'The director was Venezuelan, the editor was Chilean, the graphics were created by a Mexican animator -- how much more Latin can you get?'" Among the many attributes of this diversified culture, Acevedo notes, "Latinos can be cool, too!"
By Paula Parisi
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