Galavision Speaks the Language of Success

What do you get when you mix Gen X with Gen Mex? For television executives, the answer is a huge--and largely untapped--young bilingual demographic.

An attempt to reach that audience has rapidly become the driving force behind a programming strategy undertaken 15 months ago by Galavision, the nation’s top-rated Spanish-language cable outlet. Anchored by a pair of hip bilingual shows focusing on Latino culture, Galavision has seen its prime-time ratings shoot up 60% among Latinos aged 18 to 34.

“I don’t know if it’s age or circumstances or experience or whatever, [but] all of a sudden they try to go back and search for their roots,” Arturo Villar, editor of the Hispanic Marketing Weekly newsletter, says of young Latinos. “And if I’m trying to attract new viewers to a Hispanic format, then I would definitely use bilingual or even English-only programs . . . to get those young, acculturated Hispanics who may have lost their Spanish language but not their Hispanic identity.”

So, apparently, would Galavision, which is adding a new slate of original bilingual shows to its Sunday night prime-time lineup. “En Persona” premieres Sunday at 8 p.m. An hourlong show modeled after A&E;’s “Biography” series, “En Persona” will profile Latino celebrities, starting with Mexican singer and actress Lucero. It joins “Dimelo,” a half-hour celebrity gossip show that premiered in January featuring twentysomething hosts Anabella Yarto and Javier Galvan, a bilingual team that mirrors the program’s target demographic.

Next month the network will debut its most ambitious--and most expensive--bilingual project, “Kiki Desde Hollywood,” an hourlong variety show featuring Latinos in entertainment and American pop culture hosted by Kiki Melendez, a comedian, actress and radio personality with extensive television experience. The series will be executive-produced by Rick Najera, a screenwriter with episodes of “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” and “In Living Color” on his resume, and Paul Block, who has produced 5,000 hours of comedy and talk programming for general market television.

“We’re trying to focus on going from Los Tigres del Norte [the Grammy-nominated Latino band] to Garth Brooks. That’s the scope of the show,” Melendez says.

“We’re a bridge between two cultures,” adds Najera, a Mexican America who speaks little Spanish. “That’s what the show is all about . . . making sort of a common ground where the worlds can meet.”

For Some, Spanish Is ‘Secret Language’

And where those worlds meet, there are people like Lorie Campos, a Los Angeles attorney who was raised on tamales and “The Brady Bunch” and who has never defined her heritage by language.

For people like her, Campos says, “Spanish is a secret language.

“When my parents were growing up, they were [punished] for speaking Spanish in school, so they never taught it to us,” she says. “I went through [my youth] hating being Mexican American.”

In recent years, however, she’s begun rediscovering her parents’ roots, if not their language. And she’s not alone. Advertisers and marketers say so many acculturated Latinos are now exploring their cultural heritage as young adults, they’ve given the movement a name.

“The retro-acculturation process,” Villar says, “is a very strange and unique situation with Hispanics in this country.”

Galavision, which claims 10.5 million U.S. subscribers on more than 528 cable systems, made a cross-cultural connection with reruns of the 1970s PBS bilingual comedy series “Que Pasa USA.” But its first serious experiment at taking the network in a new direction began in November 1997, when it launched the comedy showcase “Funny Is Funny” and the talk/variety show “Cafe Ole With Giselle Fernandez,” programs that dealt primarily with Latino culture in the U.S. but done almost entirely in English.

In less than six months the shows, produced by Jeff Valdez and his L.A.-based company Si TV, more than doubled the network’s audience in some key demographics categories, at times outperforming basic cable networks TNT, USA, TBS, MTV, ESPN and Nickelodeon. So when Valdez decided to part ways with Galavision after reaching a budget impasse last summer, the network quickly moved to find replacements that would continue to draw a young, English-friendly audience.

“[Initially] we saw an opportunity and we took it,” Valdez says of the run his shows had on Galavision. “We needed to brand our programming and they needed a boost. Our shows did terrifically over there.”

But Valdez, whose company was among the nation’s first television programming services aimed specifically at English-dominant and bilingual Latinos, says he was losing money on the programs. And when Galavision wouldn’t up its price, the shows disappeared from the network lineup at the end of last year. Valdez is now preparing to take them into syndication.

Although Galavision refused all interview requests, the network appears to be sharpening its focus on the young, bilingual or English-dominant Latino demographic, one of the fastest-growing segments of the population. KWHY-TV, an independent Spanish-language station based in Hollywood, has also begun to challenge the conventional wisdom of one station, one language. Its Sunday morning public affairs show “Cafe California,” which is loosely modeled after ABC-TV’s “Politically Incorrect,” is done entirely in English while “Desafio Academico,” a Sunday afternoon academic competition featuring local high school students, is conducted in both Spanish and English.

“A lot of Latinos that are assimilated want to go back to Spanish television, but they don’t want to watch Spanish programming. They want to watch something that is new and innovative,” Melendez says.

Adds Block: “There are some members of the Galavision audience who don’t speak Spanish. And some who don’t speak English but who all belong to the same cultural background. [That’s] who [“Kiki Desde Hollywood”] is aimed at. The trickiest part . . . is to try to make it understandable to an English-speaking and to a Spanish-speaking audience.”

Galavision’s efforts to sell that idea to advertisers run counter to the strategy long employed by its parent company, Univision, which also runs the nation’s fifth-largest broadcast television network and dominates the Latino broadcast market.

For years Univision has been telling major ad agencies and their clients that the only way to reach Latino consumers is in Spanish. The network has a history of refusing lucrative commercials that contain even a few words of English. But now the company finds itself, through Galavision, arguing that bilingual, even English-only, ads provide the most effective entry into a lucrative segment of the Latino market.

“What’s happening,” says Rosa Serrano of Western Initiative Media Worldwide (formerly Western International), a major ad-buying firm that handles national accounts for such clients as Disney and Home Depot, “is as the Hispanic market grows, it’s becoming more competitive. More and more clients are accepting of that.”

It’s an attractive demographic for advertisers, which is why Galavision is pushing it so hard. Latino cable viewers’ buying patterns tend to mirror the general market: They are more likely to travel extensively, own computers and cellular phones and use credit cards than non-cable Latino households, for example. According to U.S. Census figures, bilingual families are as much as three times more affluent than families that speak only Spanish.

“The days of just writing two checks and sending one to Univision and one to [competitor] Telemundo are over,” says Si TV’s Valdez. “The marketplace is more diverse than that.”