Lele Pons. Jennifer Lawrence meets Jennifer López

By Gonzalo López Martí       LMMIAMI.COM

• I was socializing with some colleagues from our industry the other day, shooting the breeze.
• Just to make conversation I broached a subject I considered professionally relevant to my interlocutors and I
• The dialog went something along these lines:
• Gonzalo: How about that Lele Pons, huh?
• Colleagues: >awkward silence<
• Gonzalo: You know, the Vine star, @lelepons…
• Colleagues: >blank stares<
• Gonzalo: You don’t know who Lele Pons is?
• Colleagues: >crickets<
• Gonzalo: Gimme a fxxxxng break!
• Surprised at the blatant ignorance and inexcusable pop culture oblivion of my peers -some of them higher ups holding cushy jobs at big multinational corporations- I proceeded to pose the same question to other colleagues in the Hispanic marketing, media & advertising rackets.
• Out of 15 people I polled, only two had a vague idea of who Lele Pons is.
• Now this is unacceptable.
• It is not news that our industry tends to dwell in a mental ghetto and operate on inertia.
• Sometimes, lemme tell you, our professional solipsism becomes alarming, almost suicidal.
• It is not enough to go around repeating a litany of PowerPoint-born manufactured catchphrases.
• #becausemillennials
• #becausemillennials
• #becausemillennials
• We gotta do our homework too or one of these days the rug will be pulled out from under us.
• So you don’t know who Lele Pons is either?
• Well, you are quite uninformed about those darned Millennials’ media consumption habits.
• Let me save you a Google search and enlighten you here & now.
• Her name is to be pronounced in Spanish, Leh Leh Pons.
• Not Lee Lee.
• Due to the fact that her real name is Eleonora.
• She was born in Venezuela in 1996 (yes, she is 19) and moved to ‘merica at the age of 5.
• She is one of only two Hispanic persons to be found on Vanity Fair’s New Establishment / Disrupters list.
• The other one is actor & businesswoman Jessica Alba in position #36, who’s proven to be a marketing wizard with her consumer packaged goods enterprise The Honest Company.
• But we’ll leave Mr. Alba’s case for another column.
• Mark Zuckerberg is #1 on said list and Jeff Bezos, who to some extent has a certain adopted Hispanicity in his background, is #3, should you be intrigued.
• Ms. Pons was featured in position # 49.
• Let me give you a little perspective: Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecommunications tycoon and minority shareholder of the New York Times who occupies the second place in Forbes ranking of billionaires by personal net worth, did NOT make Vanity Fair’s New Establishment / Disrupters list.
• Amancio Ortega, number 4 in Forbes net worth ranking and founder of clothing retailer Zara, the company that revolutionized the world of lifestyle marketing and retail logistics, did NOT make Vanity Fair’s list either.
• Neither did Emilio Azcárraga (de facto owner of Univision) nor Gustavo Cisneros (the Venezuelan media maven).
• Jorge Ramos, our feisty and thickly accented version of Anderson Cooper, is nowhere to be found on the list either.
• True, those insufferable snobs at Vanity Fair are beaucoup biased and rarely pay attention to anything that happens outside of the rarefied atmosphere of Park Avenue’s Four Seasons restaurant (talk about solipsism).
• However, whether we like it or not, they still set the cultural agenda we all follow like lemmings.
• According to Wikipedia, Ms Pons is the first Vine user to have surpassed the 1 billion loop mark (loop is Vine vernacular for views or hits, as in YouTube views).
• As of September 1, 2015, Pons’ account remains Vine’s most looped of all time with over 6.7 billion loops.
• In addition, Pons’ Vine feed ranks 8th in terms of followers, with over 8.2 million.
• Vine, for those of you who live in a Tupperware® container, is Twitter’s answer to Google’s YouTube: a social platform that allows users to webcast six second long videos.
• Video with sound of course.
• On the side, Pons has two million Instagram followers.
• And her own app on Apple’s App Store.
• Now that’s what I call an influencer.
• It looks like Lele has allegedly left her Miami hometown and moved to LA to pursue a career in Hollywood, as per some big shot agent’s recommendation.
• How & why did @Lelepons happen?
• To be continued next week.