ABC Ad Strategy Takes Aim at Latino Viewers

Mark Zakarin, ABC Entertainment’s vice president of marketing, remembers when he was a boy and his father would read a Jewish intellectual journal and point out the ads for Ford Motor Co.

“It was like Ford cared about Jews in America,” Zakarin recounted. “So he actually bought a Ford.”

Zakarin is putting that principle into practice and hoping to elicit a similar response for his television network with a first-ever pilot program to advertise selected ABC programs on Spanish-language television and radio and in print publications nationwide.

“There’s something that happens if you’re the first network to speak to a group of people,” Zakarin said. “It’s a demonstration that you care. . . . What we’re doing is, we’re speaking their first language and/or the language of their fathers and letting them know that ABC cares about them.”

Some Latinos would question whether the network truly cares about them, but clearly ABC cares to have this large segment of the population tuned in and watching its programs.

“To ignore the fragmentation of the network audience and to not go after that audience would be a marketing blunder,” Zakarin said. “So we’re going after them.”

ABC research shows that Latinos watch 32% more television than Anglos, Zakarin said, and it also shows that many of the television programs and movies watched are in English.

“Because of the amnesty program, there is an increased assimilation movement on the part of Hispanics, and if English is your second language, watching English-language television apparently is something you do,” Zakarin said.

The $250,000 advertising campaign, being put together by Los Angeles-based Carranza Group, which has created Spanish promotional campaigns for English-language feature films such as “Red Heat,” “Salsa” and “Romero,” will kick off the week of Sept. 18 and will last about one month. Thirty-second television spots will air locally on KWHY Channel 22, and 60-second radio spots will be heard locally on KTNQ-AM (1020), KLVE-FM (107.5), KWKW-AM (1330) and KALI-AM (1430).

Ads will also be placed in Spanish-language newspapers and entertainment publications. More than half of the budget will go to advertising in the Los Angeles area, where a substantial portion of the nation’s Latinos live. Heavy emphasis will be placed on the other top Latino markets--New York, Miami, San Antonio, Chicago and San Francisco.

Univision and Telemundo, the country’s two largest Spanish-language television networks, refused to air ABC’s spots, but Galavision, which owns KWHY, agreed to carry them.

“It was a simple business decision,” said Joaquin Blaya, president of Univision Network, the nation’s largest Spanish-language network with nine owner-operated stations including KMEX Channel 34 locally.

“The Hispanic market is becoming more and more competitive. We have a stronghold on the market and we want to do everything we can to keep it that way. It would be very much like CBS airing spots for NBC or vice versa. . . . We’re not going to be promoting competitive programs--with ABC or anybody else, for that matter.”

The idea to advertise in Spanish to the large and growing Latino market came from several sources. Zakarin said that a report for ABC by Strategic Research Corp. showed that Latinos preferred ABC over the two other networks and he wanted to capitalize on that preference.

“If there is a natural relationship that is forming,” he explained, “what we should do is encourage and enrich that relationship, and that’s what we’re going to try to do.”

The campaign will feature Venezuelan-born actress Maria Conchita Alonso as a spokesperson and a Latin-themed jingle with the refrains: “ABC es para mi! (ABC is for me)” and “ABC! Si!”

The ABC shows that will be promoted are Thursday night’s “Mission: Impossible” and the new Western “Young Riders,” and Saturday night’s “Mr. Belvedere” and a new sitcom about a modeling agency, “Living Dolls.”

“We picked ‘Belvedere’ and ‘Living Dolls’ on Saturday because ‘Belvedere’ has popularity among Hispanics, according to research, and it’s important to let the Hispanic TV watcher know it’s moving to Saturday,” Zakarin said. “The reason we chose ‘Mission: Impossible’ and ‘Young Riders’ is because both have strong action elements, and action seems to transcend language.”

Dennis McCann, Carranza Group’s vice president, said that his research showed that between 70% and 80% of Latinos in this country are bilingual.

However, such statistics tend to oversimplify the picture. Although more than 60% of the nation’s 20 million Latinos are of Mexican heritage, a sizeable number hail from a variety of Latin American countries. Research has shown that different advertising campaigns may have to be created for different groups, such as Cubans and Mexican-Americans.

Whether ABC will continue reaching out to Latinos will depend ultimately on the success of this campaign, which will be measured by ratings and word of mouth, McCann said.

“The research department will do follow-up studies and will try to determine if it makes sense,” Zakarin said. “I think it does. But in this world of very competitive marketing you have to look at every expenditure and look at it very hard and see whether it’s going to be worthwhile next year.”