Newport Agency Steers Ford’s Latino Strategy
When representatives from Mendoza Dillon & Asociados fly to Detroit next week for their first creative meeting with Ford Motor Co., you can bet there will be more in their portfolios than a translation of the auto maker’s jingle from “Have you Driven a Ford Lately?” to “ Ha Manejado un Ford Ultimamente? “
The Newport Beach advertising firm has recently been tapped to help the Detroit auto maker persuade the large and lucrative Latino market to purchase Probes and buy Broncos.
On Nov. 10, after 2 months of discussion with Ford, the firm will unveil its initial plans for a Spanish-language battle for business.
Ford folks don’t know what’s in store yet, and Robert Howells, the agency’s senior vice president for client services, isn’t talking.
But Howells will say that Ford’s current Spanish-language slogan--” Ford: De Familia a Familia “ or “Ford: From Family to Family”--could go the way of all aging ideas. Straight out the window.
“In this creative process, we’re reviewing everything,” Howells said. “Family is important to the Hispanic community. It’s a culturally driven issue with Hispanics. It is an important area in communicating emotion, etc. But it is not essential.”
The agency creates ads exclusively for the U.S. Latino market and is considered the largest firm focusing on that specialty.
The agency came by the Ford account through a twisting acquisition pipeline. When British marketing giant WPP Group PLC bought the J. Walter Thompson ad agency in June, 1987, WPP got JWT’s Latino division, the New York-based Hispania, as part of the package.
But just 6 months later, WPP bought Mendoza Dillon. Since then, Hispania has been absorbed into the Newport Beach agency, which gained all of Hispania’s accounts, closed its New York office and “consolidated” staff, Howells said.
Ford had hired Hispania in the early 1980s to create a marketing program that would help the auto maker penetrate the Latino market, said John Vanderzee, ad manager for Ford Motor Co.’s Ford Division. The same mission was passed on to Mendoza Dillon in midsummer.
The latest available Ford statistics show that Latino families bought $5.2 billion in new cars and trucks in 1987, Vanderzee said, about 4% of all the vehicles bought that year. While that number is relatively small, Latino population growth is rising more quickly than the national growth rate.
Offering an Emerging Market
“The Hispanic population growth rate between ’80 and ’87 was 30%,” Vanderzee said. “Nationally, it was 5.5%. What they are offering us is an emerging market that we want to be Ford.”
In addition, the median household income for Latino families is nearly comparable to the national figure, which makes the Latino market an attractive one for manufacturers.
The Census Bureau places the median family income for households nationally at $24,897. California Research Consultants of San Diego specializes in marketing research about the Latino community. Glenn T.A. Higgins, the company’s vice president, places the national median income for Latino households at $22,000 to $25,000.
But the auto company has some work to do to tap those dollars. For while Ford has a market share of about 15% nationally, Vanderzee said, the company’s share of the Latino market is only about 11.5%.
“It’s pretty obvious that we’re out to make the Hispanic share of market at least comparable to the national share,” he said. “That’s why we’re spending more time and money going after the Hispanic market.”
Among Agency’s Top Five
Neither Ford nor Mendoza Dillon will divulge the size of the account, but Howells said it is among the ad firm’s top five. Included in that lofty list are Johnson & Johnson, Miller Brewing Co., several Heinz subsidiaries and General Foods.
According to Vanderzee, Ford spends about 7% of its ad budget trying to reach two ethnic markets. Black-focused ads account for about 4% of Ford’s budget, while Latino ads make up about 3% of the budget.
“We started a good 8 years ago in efforts to go after Spanish-language advertising for the Hispanic market,” Vanderzee said. “Those households are growing so rapidly, it’s clearly becoming a more important target each year.”
