Creative awards without borders. Part 3
May 19, 2015
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.