Giving Ads Local Color : Latinos, in Particular, Feel Lack of Visibility

Take a collection of mainstream TV commercials created by the top ad agencies in Southern California. Splice them together. And what do you get?

White-bred.

That is what ad executives concur is one of the biggest hurdles that the local ad community--try as it might--must overcome: How to get ads that are created and filmed here to truly reflect the area’s diversity. The invisibility of minorities in ads is particularly acute among Latinos, who make up 38% of Los Angeles County’s residents and 26% of California’s residents, but whose faces show up in just a fraction of the general-market ads.

It’s not that local agencies are not trying. In fact, some of their recent actions may put them on the leading edge nationally. A number of agencies have recently signed on to internship programs that at least temporarily place young minority talent in creative posts. And several mainstream agencies--most notably Santa Monica-based Kresser/Craig Advertising--have taken unusual actions to broaden multicultural awareness, even sponsoring ethnic exhibits at their own agencies.

But critics say much more must be done.

The exclusion issue came to a head last week when several dozen of Southern California’s top ad agency chiefs--trying to lay the groundwork for better relations with the city of Los Angeles--made a presentation to city officials. After watching a flashy reel of multiple ads created by the biggest Los Angeles agencies--featuring images of everything from Barbie dolls to Nissan cars--one Latino City Council member rose to his feet and objected. Not one of the ads on the reel prominently featured a Latino.

“As I sat here watching the reel,” said Councilman Mike Hernandez, “I didn’t feel like I was included.”

Top ad executives attending the session offered no excuses--just apologies.

True, many of the ads were for national advertisers whose customer base is predominantly Anglo. But these days, it often makes good business sense to create ads with ethnic and cultural diversity. There are no statistics on the ethnic breakdown of the people who appear in locally made ads, but ad executives conservatively estimate that Latinos are featured in fewer than 5% of the general-market TV spots filmed here. Executives say the problem is, in part, that their agencies employ few Latinos.

“Advertising reflects the people who make the ads,” said Jack Feuer, a Thousand Oaks-based Latino market consultant and former associate editor at Adweek. “If ads run in Los Angeles and they don’t have Hispanics in them, they’re not reflecting the community.”

But several smaller, minority-owned agencies are starting to get their ads seen by mainstream audiences.

Earlier this month, the Santa Monica-based Spanish-language ad agency Anita Santiago Advertising translated into English an anti-smoking public service spot it had created in Spanish for the California Department of Health Services. The ad, which had appeared only on Spanish-language TV, has since aired for the general market.

“When’s the last time you saw Hispanic actors featured in general-market ads?” posed Anita Santiago, owner of the agency. “They’re painfully absent.”

Indeed, Barbara Lauren, a commercial casting director who specializes in casting Latinos for ads on Spanish-language television, said the division is clear. Over the last 15 years, the number of Latinos that she places in ads that appear only on Spanish-language stations has tripled, but there has been only a very tiny increase in Latinos cast for general-market ads.

“We as marketers are experts at finding out everything we can about a client’s product,” said Mavis Cordero, managing partner at the minority-owned agency Muse Cordero Chen in Los Angeles. “But we haven’t taken the time to become experts at the demographics of our own city.”

Her agency, which primarily creates specialty ads aimed at Latino, Asian and African-American consumers, has also recently placed a few ads into the mainstream market. A print ad aimed at African-Americans that the agency created for Nike, for example, ran earlier this year in Sports Illustrated.

“As advertisers, we need to develop our cultural intelligentsia,” Cordero said. “And we’d better understand that we’re no longer living in a hermetically sealed, white Anglo-Saxon country.”

While top executives concede they need to improve, they insist they have come a long way.

At Kresser/Craig, agency president Jean Craig said she has been searching for months for qualified bilingual ad writers who are also bicultural. And the agency ranks among the leaders of Southern California’s mainstream agencies in the hiring of minorities and minority interns.

“We’re doing an infinitely better job than we did five years ago,” said Rich Edler, managing director of the Los Angeles office of Foote, Cone & Belding, whose agency routinely casts minorities for ads. “And we’ll be that much better five years from now.”

Briefly . . .

The $4.5-million ad business for the Sacramento-based California Trade and Commerce Agency’s Office of Tourism, formerly handled by Venice-based Livingston & Co., has been handed to the San Francisco office of J. Walter Thompson. . . . Denny’s Inc., which has been hit with racial discrimination charges, is about to air a new TV spot that features company Chairman Jerome J. Richardson stating, “Everyone who comes to our restaurants deserves to be treated with respect.” . . . Los Angeles-based Haller Schwarz Marketing & Advertising has picked up a combined $1 million in business from three new clients, including one of South Korea’s largest shipping company, Hanjin Shipping Co. . . . Redondo Beach-based Nelson & Gilmore Advertising has added to its client roster the Manufactured Housing Group of Fleetwood Enterprises. . . . Two Glendale ad and design firms, Jordan Crane Co. and Artime Associates, have merged to form Artime, Crane & Co. . . . Miss America 1993, Leanza Cornett, has completed two infomercials promoting a book on AIDS awareness.