MELISSA SANCHEZ/Knight Ridder Newspapers | Posted: Saturday, February 18, 2006 6:00 pm
FORT WORTH, Texas — A commercial during a recent break of “Will and Grace” featured an almond-eyed, olive-skinned family of five sitting down at the breakfast table to bowls full of Cheerios.
The family eagerly passes the milk, and a chubby infant looks on from a high chair.
“?Esta rico?” (Is it good?) the father asks the infant.
“Gracias,” the oldest son says as his sister hands him the cereal box.
To many viewers, the Spanish phrases may have been unfamiliar throughout the otherwise English advertisement. But they caught the attention of Oscar Barillas, a 38-year-old financial adviser who lives in Keller, Texas.
“I was like, wait, I am watching English TV, “ said Barillas, who moved from Guatemala 15 years ago and watches a mix of English and Spanish television. “The Spanish words really got my full attention.”
That is what advertisers had in mind. Known to marketing experts and linguists as “code-switching,” the technique is probing an undertapped market of bilingual consumers largely overlooked until recently, they say. That target audience enjoys the “Spanglish” blend of English and Spanish words and phrases.
During the Super Bowl, Toyota aired a bilingual commercial in which a Hispanic father is driving his young son in their new hybrid Camry.
When the father explains how the hybrid car switches between gas and electric power, the son compares it to the way his father can switch between English and Spanish. He tells his son that he bought the car for the same reason he learned to speak English: to better the son’s future.
“Overall, we are really trying to capture a creative voice for the Hispanic market,” said Catarino Lopez, chief creative officer of Bromley Communications, a San Antonio advertising agency. “The use of Spanglish is really taking off. Young kids are trying to create their own language.”
Sijefredo Loa, a sociolinguistics professor at Baylor University, calls the trend “the result of languages in contact,” a phenomenon similar to the German and Hebrew hybrid language known as Yiddish.
Wordplay happens when an English word is given a Spanish twist, or when Spanish words are used in a sentence with English words.
“The young have always influenced popular language, in vocabulary, word formation and sentence structure,” Loa said. “Thus, it is not surprising that the young who know two languages would blend these two to create their own expression of the times. …
“Using this blend is a social marker that says you belong to that speech community, and belonging is very important. Just like when Texans insist on that twang and word choice to let everyone know that they are Texans.”
Bromley — known for edgy advertisements, most of which are geared toward Hispanics — was the first to run a Spanish advertisement on an English television network.
The spot featured Latin pop singer Selena in the early 1990s after a Latin awards show. Slowly, networks and corporations became more open to the idea of Spanglish, Bromley spokeswoman Deborah Vallejo said.
Bromley played off the two languages in a 2004 ad campaign for Coors Light on a series of cryptic West Coast billboards that read, “What’s the wave ox?”
Two weeks later Bromley added a banner to the signs that translated the slogan literally into Spanish: “?Que onda guey?” or idiomatically, “What’s up, dude?”
The campaign illustrated the humorous clash among languages when phrases are translated literally.
“People thought it was a brain teaser, and were trying to figure it out,” Lopez said. “It created a huge buzz for Coors.”
Not all people appreciate it.
The language play is often rejected by the older “Puritan-type” generation of Hispanics, said Bromley’s chief strategy officer, J. Moncada.
For the purist, the Spanish word “guey” can be an insult and imply idiocy, but for many young Hispanics it is an everyday way to express camaraderie, experts say.
“We honor the audience by speaking in a code that respects them and is easy for them to embrace,” said Patti Alvey of the Temerlin Advertising Institute at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “Advertisers understand where audiences are and the languages that resonate with them.”
Yet the phenomenon may pass quickly. Moncada said advertisers are only successful as long as the ads feel “organic.” But within six to eight months, code-switching could be overdone.
“Once consumers feel manipulated, it’s better to find something else,” Moncada said. “Keep it very real, and don’t force-fit it.”
‘Esta rico,’ indeed
Advertising campaigns targeting young Hispanics aim to tap into the fastest-growing minority group in the country.
The Hispanic population is expected to reach 42 million by 2007. An estimated 96 percent of them speak Spanish. Their purchasing power was estimated at $700 billion in 2005 and is expected to hit $928 billion by 2007, according to the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies.