12002: Milking Cross-Cultural Crap.

The New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott reported on a new campaign for the California Milk Processor Board that demonstrates cross-cultural marketing—yet ultimately displays cultural cluelessness. It’s a total market approach that’s total bullshit. Or cow shit, since the commercials are trying to sell milk.

BTW, the commercials suck, which hardly helps promote the cross-cultural/total market propaganda. The only thing tying the spots into a campaign is the injection of the iconic “got milk?” tagline. The individual executions—“Champion” and “Brave”—are contrived, clichéd and crappy. Seriously, these could be the worst installments in a collection that has featured breakthrough ideas for many years. If this stuff is indeed representative of cross-cultural thinking, one could easily argue in support of sticking with segregation. That is, let the Whites and minorities continue to toil in their respective advertising agency silos.

What’s most bewildering is that the two shops responsible for the commercials—Goodby Silverstein & Partners and Grupo Gallegos—typically do award-winning work. Did the cross-cultural collaboration lead to committeeism? Or could it be that deliberately catering to all markets waters down the milk?

California Milk Processor Board Executive Director Stephen James explained, “This is the first time our agencies have worked as a cohesive team on creative strategy, creative execution and media planning. … It’s happening now as a result of a coming together of trends, in California especially, that seem to be getting more and more pronounced. … Terms like ‘the Hispanic market’ and ‘the general market’ seem so quaint at this point because you’re seeing such a cross-pollination of media, language, food, culture, you name it. … We’re looking at Californians as they evolve into one market.” Wow, James has obviously been drinking something much stronger than milk. If the Hispanic market and the general market seem so quaint, why does James continue to employ separate shops? Why was collaboration necessary? Couldn’t one agency have handled the total market solo? Hell, a roomful of monkeys could have outperformed GS&P and Grupo Gallegos on this initiative.

According to the NY Times story, Jeff Goodby “was the lead creative director for the campaign, overseeing creative employees of his agency and Grupo Gallegos.” Um, when did Goodby become qualified to lead such an endeavor? Handing him the reins is like asking Donald Sterling to emcee the ADCOLOR® Awards. Goodby’s role underscores how the cross-cultural/total market trend is essentially a thinly veiled attempt to give complete control to the White agencies. It’s not progressive; rather, it’s absolutely regressive, as well as repressive, oppressive and depressive. Besides, Goodby failed to establish harmony in a White coalition, so believing he could run a multicultural affair showed utter ignorance and insanity.

Goodby stated that in the “Champion” spot, the Black mother, Black girl and Black decathlete were cast so they could “easily be Caribbean Hispanic.” Huh?! Anyone who has ever produced work for Caribbean audiences knows Goodby’s culturally clueless contentions are laughably incorrect. The man deserves a sixth appearance in the C’MON WHITE MAN! series.

“We flew [Grupo Gallegos] teams up [to San Francisco] and vice versa,” Goodby said, “to work together in the same room on the ads.” Why? Grupo Gallegos has historically hatched spots that nabbed Cannes Lions, as has GS&P. This team-up resulted in awfulness that stinks worse than grossly sour milk.

To wrap up, somebody owes Pepper Miller an apology—and kudos for being downright prophetic.

Selling Milk to All Audiences, With a Unified Campaign

By Stuart Elliott

THE California Milk Processor Board, like many marketers, has one agency creating campaigns for the general market and another creating campaigns for ethnic audiences, in this instance Spanish-speaking consumers. Now, in a shift indicative of a movement on Madison Avenue known as cross-cultural marketing or a “total market” approach, the board asked its two agencies to collaborate on a campaign encouraging all Californians, regardless of ethnicity or the language they speak, to buy and drink more milk.

The campaign is to begin on Wednesday with two television commercials, each with soundtracks in English and Spanish; plans call for the spots to be followed by radio ads, digital ads and social media content. The ads are the result of the teaming of the board’s general market agency — Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, part of the Omnicom Group — and the Hispanic agency Grupo Gallegos in Huntington Beach, Calif.

The board has worked since 1993 with Goodby, Silverstein, which created the familiar “Got milk?” slogan that the board licensed for national dairy marketing efforts from 1995 until earlier this year. Ads from Grupo Gallegos, the board’s Hispanic agency since 2005, carry the theme “Toma leche,” or “Drink milk.”

“This is the first time our agencies have worked as a cohesive team on creative strategy, creative execution and media planning,” said Stephen James, executive director of the board in San Clemente, Calif. “It’s happening now as a result of a coming together of trends, in California especially, that seem to be getting more and more pronounced.”

“Terms like ‘the Hispanic market’ and ‘the general market’ seem so quaint at this point because you’re seeing such a cross-pollination of media, language, food, culture, you name it,” he added. “We’re looking at Californians as they evolve into one market.”

That expresses a philosophy of those who advocate the total-market approach: As the American population becomes more diverse, they prefer to focus on the similarities among consumers rather than the differences.

“Total market is where things are headed,” said Michael Fernandez, chief executive of Factory 360, an agency in New York not involved in the milk campaign. “You’re marketing in a ‘Modern Family’ world, not an ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ world.”

The commonality celebrated in the campaign, Mr. James said, is that “the most important job” for the target of the ads — parents who buy milk, particularly mothers — “is making sure their children have a healthy future: a universally powerful force that transcends culture and language and ethnicity.”

In one commercial, a bedraggled woman speaks to a girl in a shopping cart in the milk aisle of a supermarket. “I’m you, from the future,” the woman tells the girl, who replies disappointedly, “You’re me?” The woman says: “I know. Drink this.” As the girl drinks milk, the woman exclaims, “It’s working, keep drinking,” races out of the supermarket and transforms into a champion decathlete. “We did it,” the woman shouts to the younger version of herself back in the store, where the girl’s mother is frantically filling the cart with milk.

The mother, the girl and the decathlete, who are black, were cast so they could “easily be Caribbean Hispanic,” said Jeff Goodby, the co-chairman of Goodby, Silverstein. He was the lead creative director for the campaign, overseeing creative employees of his agency and Grupo Gallegos.

“We flew their teams up” to San Francisco “and vice versa,” Mr. Goodby said, “to work together in the same room on the ads.”

The other commercial also plays with the passage of time. It begins with a firefighter of no discernible ethnicity pouring himself a glass of milk as a mother is heard talking to her young son, who is scared of the dark. “Let’s think about some people who make you feel brave,” she says, and when the boy replies, “Firemen,” the firefighter is shown rescuing a boy from a house fire and reuniting him with his mother. The commercial ends with the on-screen words “What you say with a glass of milk lasts forever.”

A lot of the “soulful, emotional tone” of the commercials “came from working with the guys at Grupo Gallegos,” Mr. Goodby said.

The lead strategic director for the campaign was Andrew Delbridge, chief strategy and engagement officer of Grupo Gallegos; he oversaw employees of his agency and Goodby, Silverstein.

“For milk, what we and Goodby had done was to take parallel paths toward the same goal,” said John Gallegos, president and chief executive of Grupo Gallegos. “This is about today’s market, and tomorrow’s, recognizing that in California we’re on the front edge of what’s happening in the rest of the country.”

“There’s a fine line” in adopting cross-cultural marketing, Mr. Gallegos said, in that “if you try to say too much to everybody, you wind up saying nothing.” Still, “our philosophy has always been that it’s one marketplace,” he added. “You have to go forward with one collective voice.”

To that end, Mr. Gallegos is making Marty Orzio the agency’s chief creative officer; Mr. Orzio, who had been serving on an interim basis, was chief creative officer of general market agencies like Energy BBDO and Gotham.

“You’ve got to put the best talent on client assignments,” Mr. Gallegos said, “talent that understands the U.S. as a whole.”

The budget for the campaign is around what the milk board typically spends, a bit more than $10 million on an annualized basis. Plans call for the ads to run through January, Mr. James said, “and then we’ll see what the results are” before deciding whether to ask the two agencies to collaborate again.

11238: Latino Lions.

From Advertising Age…

Hispanic Shops Alma, Gallegos, La Comu, Lapiz And LatinWorks Win At Cannes

Pan-Latino New York Restaurant Comodo Run By Agency Execs Picks Up Lion In Mobile Category

By Laurel Wentz

In a good year for the U.S. Hispanic market, five Hispanic agencies won eight Lions at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Independent Grupo Gallegos won two prizes for a long-running campaign for the California Milk Processor Board to encourage Hispanics in California to drink more milk. A Silver Lion in the film category recognized TV commercial “Battle,” depicting a child’s fantastical dreams from drinking a glassful of milk before bedtime. A Bronze media Lion went to the “Bedtime Stories” campaign children to bed with a bedtime story. The agency also created a series of bilingual story books, distributed through pediatricians’ offices as well as downloaded from a website, that feature milk in a heroic role in the narratives.

Alma DDB won two Silver Lions, in the outdoor and promo & activation categories, for “The Glad Tent.” Alma tackled the issue of sustainability, developing giant Glad trash bags in the form of tents. Ten Glad Tents were distributed at SXSW to attendees who promised to live in them and then use the tents as a giant trash bag to dispose of rubbish at the end of the festival. The Glad Tent was perfectly targeted to millennials who care about the environment but wouldn’t normally feel a connection to Clorox’s Glad brand.

Omnicom-based LatinWorks won a film Silver for “Pool,” a spot promoting a parental control bar for the internet offered free by nonprofit WRAAC. And Cine Las Americas, an Austin, Texas festival for Latin American films that garners creative awards for LatinWorks every year, picked up a radio Bronze for “Maduro.” The campaign features absurd but genuine speeches by Latin American leaders, and always ends with the tagline “If this is our reality, imagine our films.” This year the presidential campaign by Nicolas Maduro after the death of Venezuela’s former leader Hugo Chavez was a gift to LatinWorks. The agency seized on one of the most absurd moments of Mr. Maduro’s campaign, when he started making bird calls on the campaign trail and claiming he had been visited by Mr. Chavez in the form of a little bird.

Miami-based independent La Comunidad, run by Argentine brothers Jose and Joaquin Molla, picked up a Bronze outdoor Lion for Converse shoes’ “Converse Highways”, a series of outdoor art installations that brought life and culture to otherwise dismal spots such as space under bridges. The installations were done in three countries in Latin America.

Lapiz, Leo Burnett’s U.S. Hispanic agency, a frequent award winner for its Procter & Gamble work for the Latino market, took home a bronze Press Lion for a print campaign for P&G’s Gain With Oxi, for ads “Soccer”, “Horror Movie” and “Zombie”.

In a surprise win, two former ad-agency executives from Latin America who quit their jobs and opened pan-Latino restaurant Comodo (Spanish for “comfortable”) in New York in July 2012 won a Bronze Lion in the mobile category with an Instagram menu. To generate buzz for the new restaurant, promote the cuisine and highlight the eatery’s playful personality, the hashtag #ComodoMenu was added to the restaurant’s real menu. Guests were invited to add and browse different dishes.

Although Comodo’s agency is not Hispanic, Comodo’s owners Felipe Donnelly and Tamy Rofe met while working at Ogilvy Mexico—Ms. Rolfe is from Mexico City and Mr. Donnelly grew up all over Latin America. The campaign was done and entered at Cannes by Romanian friends who formed Brooklyn-based creative collective Raul X Mihai X Mihnea.

The U.S. had one Hispanic-agency judge at Cannes this year. Sergio Alcocer, LatinWorks’ president and chief creative officer, was on the film jury in his second stint as a Cannes juror.

10255: Latino Lions Lollapalooza.

Advertising Age reported four U.S. Latino agencies grabbed six Lions at Cannes last week. Three of the agencies won for radio work. Not sure why the medium is so prominent. Could it be because minority shops don’t receive as much money and/or opportunities to do TV and even digital? Radio is a favorite choice of many multicultural marketing clients, as it’s cheap to execute. There’s no denying the top Cannes winners worked with big production budgets. Plus, minority shops are burdened with the demand to be blatantly targeted with creative—soccer, salsa and sombreros, por favor—which can hamper breakthrough attempts. On the flipside, agencies like LatinWorks and Grupo Gallegos show that the way to move beyond the barriers and stereotypes involves setting higher standards. It starts with the agencies.

U.S. Hispanic Market Wins Six Lions at Cannes Festival

LatinWorks Gets Gold for Cine Las Americas Radio Spots

By Laurel Wentz

Four U.S. Hispanic agencies picked up six Lions at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity last week, with a particularly strong showing in radio, a category U.S. Latin shops often excel in.

LatinWorks’ long-running and much-awarded campaign for Cine Las Americas, which introduces Latin films to the U.S., won both a gold and a bronze Lion for the latest radio campaign from the Austin, Texas-based agency. The basic idea is always the same in the radio and TV spots for the film festival: LatinWorks unearths footage of real Latin American leaders saying imbecilic things, and the punch line is “if this is what our reality is like, imagine our films.”

The agency adds a new twist every year. This time, it’s to add sound effects to make the leader’s idiotic pronouncements sound like part of a movie, and then gradually take them away until only his ridiculous words are left. In the spot “Action,” a man is denouncing America amid explosive noises. The voiceover says “If we remove the helicopters from this action movie … if we remove the shooting … and the explosions … we’re left with [Venezuelan president] Hugo Chavez, expelling the ambassador of the U.S. on a national TV broadcast …If our reality sounds like an action movie, imagine our films.”

In another spot, likened to a porn flick, Uruguay’s president gives an interview on live TV while dead drunk. “Yes, he’s the president of Uruguay,” the voiceover says sadly after that spot’s clinking ice cubes, giggly girls and tacky music are removed.

Also in radio, Leo Burnett’s Hispanic shop, Chicago-based Lapiz, won a silver for an unusual effort for Procter & Gamble in which a woman can listen to one of two different versions of the spot by turning on the audio for either the right or the left speaker while listening to the radio in the car.

The spot “Stork,” for P&G’s Clearblue pregnancy test, lets a woman hear about Clearblue through the filter of her own feelings about possibly being pregnant. In the version played through the right speaker, the product message is delivered by a woman who wants to be pregnant, while the woman in the left-speaker version does not.

Young & Rubicam’s Hispanic agency, Bravo, won two bronze Lions for radio spots for Leica’s V-Lux 20 camera with a zoom feature. In each spot, an announcer tells a story between clicks of the shutter denoting that pictures are being taken of the memories created. But there isn’t always a happy ending. In “Grand Canyon,” a couple get engaged at the Grand Canyon, return every summer and always eat at the same Mexican restaurant, where the wife falls in love with a waiter named Miguel.

In the only award not in the radio category, independent agency Grupo Gallegos won a bronze Media Lion for “Forgot Your Password,” a simple but very effective message for the Alzheimer’s Association. The campaign linked the sensation of memory loss due to Alzheimer’s with the common frustration of forgetting your password on a website. Users of Spanish-language site Univision.com who requested a new password were also sent this message: “If something as insignificant as forgetting your password complicates your life, imagine what it’s like living with Alzheimer’s.” A link to the Alzheimer’s Association website was included, and traffic increased by 400% during Alzheimer’s Awareness Month in November 2011.

5011: Ad Age Multicultural Agency of the Year.

From AdAge.com…

Pop Culture With a Twist
Multicultural Agency of the Year: Grupo Gallegos

By Laurel Wentz

Grupo Gallegos figures out how to interpret popular-culture icons such as the pink Energizer Bunny, Fruit of the Loom’s fruit guys and “Got milk?” for Hispanic consumers who didn't grow up with them -- and wins creative awards doing it, along with more sales for its clients.

“The key thing is ensuring you keep the same personality and DNA as the general market and find ways you can make them part of Hispanic culture,” says Esther Soto-Schwartz, Grupo Gallegos director-planning and research.

That approach led to the award-winning Hispanic “Toma leche” (“Have some milk”) campaign that captures the quirky humor of “Got milk?” but reverses the English-language campaign’s concept of being deprived of milk in favor of rampant consumption in fictitious towns where people drink nothing but milk. They have bones so strong that they're unharmed in a place where gravity comes and goes, their fantasies are fulfilled in soporific milk-induced dreams, and their dazzling teeth are bared in happy smiles no matter what disaster strikes.

“We made the creative decision that milk deprivation is not humorous to the Hispanic consumer,” says Steve James, executive director of the California Milk Processor Board. “Grupo’s spots are quirky, witty and humorous. Before Grupo, [our ads] were very earnest. Now, the general market and Hispanic are more in alignment in tone.”

And milk sales to Hispanics have stopped sliding.

Contender from the start
In addition to generating the best creative in the U.S. Hispanic market, the agency is stepping into a challenging and strategic role as a change agent for marketers trying to succeed with Latino consumers, and its growth never dips below double digits. Superlative creative and exponential growth -- 25% in 2007 -- have made Grupo Gallegos a contender for Advertising Age Multicultural Agency of the Year almost since the independent agency opened in Long Beach, Calif., seven years ago.

[Read the full story here.]

Essay 4494

From The New York Times…

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How Do You Say ‘Got Milk’ en Español?

By CYNTHIA GORNEY

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

Gallegos stood quietly, in the wide central part of a mall, pretending to look at nothing. The mother and son passed close by. She had dark red hair and was leaning on the boy’s arm; he was 14 or so, and in blue jeans. Gallegos was right. The mother was chatting amiably in Spanish. 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, which is part of Los Angeles. It was an ordinary California midrange shopping center: clean floors, Starbucks, hip apparel chains. Gallegos had come in to examine a clothing store he thought might become a new 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, in the middle of summer, Grupo Gallegos work was advertising leche, transporte de autobuses, pollo, ropa interior, servicio de Internet de alta velocidad, consultorios médicos, 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, Quick Health medical clinics, 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 them to be: 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. The area encompassing Portland, Ore., now has 10 Spanish radio stations, while four years ago it had only 3. The July issue of ESPN Deportes, with Hugo Sánchez on the cover, had a Gallegos underwear ad inside; so did the gossip magazine ¡Mira!, with Angélica Rivera on the cover; and a People en Español with RBD on the cover; and a Men’s Health en Español, whose cover article promised that James Bond would show readers how to be an hombre de acción.

If the only name on that list that sounds familiar is Bond’s the others are, respectively, the Mexican national soccer team coach, a telenovela star and a wildly popular pop-music group then Gallegos is interested less in selling you products, since you are likely not Hispanic, than in pointing out the exploding spending power of the demographic that is. 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: batteries, iPods, laundry soap, lawn chairs, motor oil, Bulova watches, new-home loans, Volvos, takeout pizza, cellphones, power saws, swimming pools, deodorant, airline tickets and plasma TV’s. It’s $200 billion more than was spent two years ago. Propelled by continuous immigration and larger family size, the dual factors that are 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, in fact, John Gallegos runs a moderate-size shop. There are more than a hundred United States ad agencies, not including the publicistas in Puerto Rico, that now work almost exclusively in Spanish. The bigger Hispanic agencies have accounts like McDonald’s (Me encanta, which roughly translates to “I’m lovin’ it”), and Chevrolet (Súbete, “Get in”). Bounty’s slogan in English, “The quicker picker-upper,” appears in Spanish as Con Bounty sí puedes — “With Bounty, yes you can.” T-Mobile does Estamos juntos, “We’re all together.” Toyota does Avanza confiado, “Advance confidently.” Wal-Mart reportedly spends more than $60 million a year on reaching Hispanics, and for some years the Wal-Mart Spanish tag line, composed by a Houston agency called Lopez Negrete Communications, was Para su familia, de todo corazón. Siempre. Which lofted the blunt English “Low prices, always,” into a line enduring enough for a tombstone: “For your family, from the heart. Always.”

[Click on the essay title above to read the full story.]