O.C. Agency Helps Its Clients Crack the Latino Market : Advertising: Mendoza Dillon, winner of Nabisco account, knows what sells among Spanish-speakers.
When one of the nation’s largest cookie-makers decided to launch its first Spanish-language ad campaign, it turned to an Orange County agency to help it hablar espanol.
Nabisco Biscuit Co., a division of Nabisco Foods Group, awarded the account, worth unspecified hundreds of thousands of dollars, to Mendoza Dillon & Associados, a 15-year-old Irvine firm that has created Spanish-language ad campaigns for corporations as diverse as Miller Brewing Co., the Wendy’s fast-food chain, retailing giant Sears and Levi’s Jeans.
The agency “had the right balance of creative ideas, consumer promotions experience and strategic thinking,” said Mark Gutsche, a spokesman for Nabisco.
Among Orange County’s 50 or so ad agencies, Mendoza Dillon, which reports annual billings of $65 million, is culturally distinctive. In the lobby of the company’s airport-area high-rise is a small, pre-Columbian statue--a turtle-like creature whose concave back was used for grinding spices and grains. A coffee table book displays a self-portrait by celebrated Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.
The agency’s approach to business is to use a strategy pioneered by co-founder Richard Dillon: persuade the client how good a market Latino consumers are by using research and statistics.
“Clients usually think they don’t necessarily have to advertise in Spanish, that they can reach a good segment of the (Latino) population in English,” said Robert Howells, president of Mendoza Dillon. “We move them from the opportunity phase to the necessity phase.”
Paul Casanova, who left Mendoza Dillon a decade ago with Viviana Pendrill to form their agency in Irvine, said they have always kept that marketing formula in mind.
“Companies used to advertise in the Hispanic market out of political sensitivity,” said Casanova, president of Casanova Pendrill. “Dillon’s original approach to proving the effectiveness of the market to the client has proven very useful.”
Richard Dillon and Nicholas Mendoza formed their company in 1979. Dillon brought with him several accounts from Johnson & Johnson and General Foods, where he served in top marketing posts. By 1980, the agency was posting annual billings of about $2 million.
Howells, who also worked for Johnson & Johnson, joined the agency two years later. Howells learned Spanish as an adult, spending two years in Argentina as a missionary before finishing his undergraduate degree.
In 1987, a British marketing firm that owned ad giant J. Walter Thompson surprised the industry by purchasing Mendoza Dillon. WPP of London paid $25.5 million for the Latino agency.
“Those of us who had already thought of ourselves as visionaries began to wonder if our visions were big enough,” said one ad executive, Carl Kravetz of Ferrer/Ad America, at the time.
The vision has not been realized as rapidly as some had hoped.
No more than 2% of advertising budgets are targeted to Latino consumers, who make up about 9% of television watchers, according to Broadcasting & Cable magazine.
But the U.S. Latino market is expected to number 31.5 million by the end of the century--a growth of 41%, compared with 5% growth predicted in the non-Latino population, which Mendoza Dillon and others use as a selling point. It is a particularly strong point in Southern California, where a fast-growing population of 3.9 million Latinos accounts for 34% of the total population in Los Angeles and Orange counties.
In addition, recent studies show that Latinos and African Americans watch very different television shows from the general market, and that a simple mass-market approach will not effectively reach either group.
“The Simpsons” tops the chart among Latino TV watchers, for example, but it is 27th among general-market viewers, according to a study by New York ad agency BBDO Worldwide.
Mendoza and Nabisco have determined that they will target eight separate markets in the United States. Radio ads will be tailored to the local culture and idiom--Puerto Rican in New York, Mexican in Los Angeles, Cuban in Miami. Different Spanish-speaking countries answer the telephone differently, for example: “Bueno,” “Hola” or “Diga.”
TV commercials on Univision and Telemundo, Howells said, will be in “what I call ‘Walter Cronkite Spanish.’ ”
Latino Spending Habits
A 1993 study shows that Latino households spend more on certain items than non-Latino households. Items for which Latino households spend more than the average for the general U.S. population:
FOOD
* 37% more on beef
* 21% more on cereals
* 20% more on fresh and processed fruits and vegetables
* 9% more on nonalcoholic beverages
CLOTHING
* 76% more on apparel for children younger than 2
* 30% more on apparel for children age 2 to 15
* The study also found that Latinos buy more used cars, have larger telephone bills and spend more on laundry and cleaning supplies than non-Latinos. The difference in spending is attributed to Latinos having larger and younger families. Latinos were found to spend less on life insurance.
Source: DRI / McGraw Hill
Researched by ANNE MICHAUD / Los Angeles Times
