U.S. Latinos are bilingual, your ads should be too!

By Irina Skaya

Today mun2 and Yahoo! Telemundo relaunch a live bilingual show similar to MTV’s TRL on pepsimúsica.com, a two-day old interactive multiplatform Website used to target bicultural Latino youth within the U.S.

In the vast swaths of America where only Español is required to function, there is often a misconception that only Spanish is spoken amongst our Latino amigos. Certainly, Latino youth is proud of their heritage and are in-tune with their cultura – second and third generation Latinos may speak Spanish en sus casas, but they are just as immersed in the American culture. Anyone who has immigrated to the U.S. as a child, like myself, knows that after a few years of being on the mainland, you don’t speak perfect English nor your native tongue. Latino youth speaks Spanglish, the most important contemporary linguistic phenomenon in the U.S.

However, Spanglish is more than language, it is a lifestyle, dictating what kind of música, películas, and events Latinos are interested in. Take a look inside the music industry – top rated Latino artists such as Daddy Yankee and Fat Joe have been rapping in both, Spanish and English for years. Then, why do multicultural advertisers still advertise only in Spanish to target Latinos? That is the biggest mistake Hispanic advertisers can make, particularly because all Latin American countries have diverse dialects. Besides, Latinos navigate back and forth from Spanish to English. Remember, they hablan inglés, too.

Now, with the Hispanic trends indicating that Latinos spend more time online than the general market, multicultural advertising has increased in the Internet space. Even though most advertisers have moved away from directly translating ad copy from English to Spanish, a lot of ads remain written entirely in Spanish. Pepsi is among the first (including Sí TV) to target bicultural Latino Youth and to speak to them in their language - Spanglish. Recognizing that technology is crucial to this group because it helps connect them with family and friends, and flaunt their pride in Latino identity, the initiator of sponsorship for music has created an interactive and user-generated site that will allow users to vote for their artistas favoritos, post comments, upload their photos and videos, influence the top 20 countdown and more.

This is going to be viral and cutting edge– it puts consumers in the driver’s seat, giving them the content they want, when they want it and most importantly, present in it in the way they understand it. Tune in today at 5 p.m. to watch the premiere of the Pepsi Música. I will - soy admiradora de Pepsi Música!

Technorati tags: user-generated multicultural marketing Latinos Hispanic marketing Spanglish