Creative awards without borders. Part 3

By Gonzalo López Martí  –  LMMIAMI.COM

• I’ve been ranting as of late about a certain isolationism hindering the creative output in the US Hispanic market.
• It is true though that coming up with disruptive creative work in the US Hispanic realm can be awfully hard.
• Let alone selling it to some clients, mostly monolingual folks who usually don’t understand the insights and the in-culture concepts.
• Hence a lot of good ideas get lost or mortally wounded & watered down in translation by the time they manage to see the light of day.
• If they ever do.
• US Hispanic creatives confront lots of constraints.
• It’s a strategic, creative & cultural minefield.
• A linguistic one too when the task at hand requires executions in Spanish.
• It is hard to generate a breakthrough concept when you spend most of your time debating the proper translation of a word among folks of over a dozen nationalities.
• Playing second fiddle to so-called “general market” agencies doesn’t help either.
• Mainstream agencies do the sexy “branding” efforts and their Hispanic counterparts are just left with the regional &/or retail leg of the campaign where there’s little room for flourish.
• No new news here.
• We’ve been bitching about this for decades.
• Ginger Rogers comes to mind when she said something like “I had to do everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and wearing high heels.”
• Yet Mr. Astaire took pretty much all the credit.
• A great analogy to what it feels like for creatives working in the US Hispanic market vis-à-vis the general one.
• A great comparison too to what it might feel like if one is a female creative in the Hispanic market.
• By the way, when was the last time you saw a female of our species occupying a seat on the Círculo jury?
• Or when was the last time you saw a client among the judges?
• As far as I know, I’ve never ever seen a single client present at the award ceremony, let alone in the jury.
• How come?
• Creatives must cozy up with clients.
• It is suicidal not to do so.
• IT IS THE ONLY WAY TO OPEN ONE’S OWN AGENCY.
• Another lesson to learn from them Eurotrash at Cannes.
• Those bastards are always ten years ahead of the game.
• They literally give clients the red carpet treatment.
• You see them roaming the Croisette like children who broke curfew, visibly hungover yet with big smiles on their faces.
• So.
• Where was I?
• The US Hispanic Market is a vibrant business community created from scratch in a matter of decades by a handful of daring pioneers.
• We thrive on –and duly advocate for- the rights of immigrants and their kin.
• Yet we officially demand that all the work submitted to our creative competitions be created on US soil?
• Come on.
• Sounds like a Ted Cruz dystopian wet dream.
• OK.
• Let’s look at the bright side.
• US Hispanic creativity enjoys lots of advantages to stand out on the global stage.
• The resources are here (we have access to exactly the same vendors as, say, Crispin Porter & Bogusky or Wieden & Kennedy).
• We can also use resources from Latin America or Spain (namely, film directors and such.)
• Compared to most markets in the world the budgets our clients put at our disposal are ample & generous.
• We attract talent: an awful lot of marketing & advertising professionals are plenty curious about the US Hispanic market.
• I get resumes pretty much everyday from ad people in México, Spain, Argentina, Colombia, even Brazil, who’d love to move to America and take a job in the US Hispanic market.
• Particularly now that a lot of US agencies (Hispanic and otherwise) are off-shoring their creative human resources.
• They will keep doing so more and more.
• Makes all the sense in the world (pun intended).
• Still, our creative output tends to fall short.
• “Our target audience is undereducated, mostly rural or blue collar, which hurts the ability to create fresh, original work,” I heard someone say once.
• This pretext, if you ask me, is the flimsiest of them all.
• Brazil, for instance, has large swathes of illiterate consumers living below the poverty line.
• How do they deal with it?
• They create visual ideas and rake in awards nonetheless.
• By the truckload.
• Last year, by the way, the global CMO of Havaianas was at AHAA’s conference.
• Just so you now, Havaianas –yes, those colorful overpriced flip flops- might be the most successful 100% Latin brand in the world.
• Their sales are staggering.
• It has swept global award shows for two decades now with its campaigns.
• It might have been the most important conference ever given at an AHAA gathering.
• The room was half empty.
• Talk of isolationism.