Appealing to the Hispanic audience is a complex process, but if there’s any company that knows how to do it effectively, it’s Spanish-language media company TelevisaUnivision. Donna Speciale, TeleviaUnivision president of advertising sales and marketing, and Alessandra Agurcia, VP of sales marketing solutions, sat down at the Variety Studio presented by Canva at Advertising Week in New York City to discuss what it means to cater to the diverse Hispanic community at large.
First and foremost, Agurcia emphasized that the Hispanic community is not a monolith. Producing content in the Spanish language, for a Spanish-speaking audience, isn’t just a matter of translation. It’s about being careful to understand cultural context and their audience.
“We want to be spoken to authentically, so our consumer and our audience really deliver back trust and loyalty to a brand that speaks to them extremely authentically, in a way that resonates with them, that listens to them, because that’s how you’re going to drive your maximum brand impact. It never has been, really, ‘one-size-fits-all,’” said Agurcia.
“It’s important to connect with the consumer beyond just translating something,” Agurcia added. “It is making sure you’re paying attention to those cultural nuances, that you’re understanding the audience and what they want and what they crave and how they like to be spoken to.”
Speciale echoed Agurcia by drawing a connection between both language and culture, saying that at TelevisaUnivision, the objective is to get across both.
“A lot of our audience is bilingual, and Spanish is their first language,” said Speciale. “They like to get their content in Spanish, in culture, in [a] language [that] resonates more with the Hispanic audience, with marketers. There’s a loyalty when we’re speaking to our audience in their language, literally speaking in their language, their culture, that makes this connection that you can’t make when you’re doing it in English.”
As for a technique like dubbing, Agurcia wants to make sure that it’s done in a “purposeful” manner. For Agurcia, dubbing has to similarly focus on expressing cultural context rather than simply maneuvering the language.
“We do dubbing, but it’s not a direct translation ever,” Agurcia expressed, bringing up “food” and “music,” among other cultural elements she describes as being significant to the Hispanic community. “We want to make sure that we highlight those [elements].”
From a business perspective, understanding those elements means understanding the audience. From a social perspective, producing content with those elements sends its own message.
“Hispanics are proud, more so now than ever,” Speciale said. “Now, speaking Spanish, being Latino, Latina, is a powerful, powerful statement.”
