Talk To The Brand

Pulsing, excited teens point their fingers in the air and scream to the beat of Rakim & Ken-Y in early March as the reggaeton duo perform in the Manhattan studios of MTV Tr3s' Mi TRL.Past red neon pillars, down a twisty hallway and behind a fuchsia door labeled "makeup" sits Leslie Cedeño, in the very chair where so many music stars, including Rakim and Ken-Y, have been prepped for their closeup on the Latino version of MTV's daily video countdown show TRL.Only days before, Cedeño was another high school Latina from the Bronx, studying for her SAT exams. But then she and Marvin Mercado, an aspiring dancer from Brooklyn, were selected out of the Mi TRL audience to receive a makeover courtesy of J.C. Penney and a big shopping spree at the store with MTV stylists. Cedeño shows off the "gorgeous, gorgeous" clothes she selected. Then, on cue, the duo hit the stage to talk with the show's sexy hosts, Denise Ramirez and Carlos Santos, about their Cinderella experience.Chalk up another advertiser client for MTV Tr3s willing to make a big enough commitment to go beyond traditional :30s and delve into the realm of integrated product placements."We're very excited to have this kind of relationship with the network," says Olivia Vela, multicultural marketing project manager at J.C. Penney. The retailer has had similar branded makeover segments with Telemundo and Univision, "but this is the first time out of the box with something that's more Spring Break focused," Vela explains.J.C. Penney is one of many advertisers that are involving themselves in integrated product placements or its more ambitious cousin, branded entertainment, on Hispanic-focused media outlets. The deals have accelerated markedly over the last few years and most especially over the last nine months, executives say. TV, radio and the Internet are all in on the act. In the realm of radio and more fledgling TV networks, there's a need to win some clients over to a new mindset: that integrations should not be a "value-added" proposition. "That's another word for free," says Bill Tanner, president of radio consultancy Bill Tanner & Associates.There's also a need for better research in the Hispanic market. Nielsen Media Research and TNS Media Intelligence track the number of times integrated product placements appear in mainstream TV shows. Other companies, such as IAG Research, track how consumers react to various integrations on general-market channels and which integration campaigns work best. But monitoring Hispanic TV is still on the "coming attractions" lists.Beyond the research gap, "the big challenge is that no one has a magic formula when it comes to the financials of these deals," says Oswald Méndez, managing partner and director of integrated communications for The Vidal Partnership, based in New York. A branded entertainment co-production devised by a media outlet and an advertiser "can't be a 100 percent media deal, or a 100 percent production deal," he says. "It can be quite difficult to source the funds."Lori Warren, national sales manager of broadcast channel LATV, notes that in some instances an advertiser uses two different agencies for promotions and media, and she's had to source funds from both for a given branded campaign. And that can be tricky. Despite the potential impediments, the benefits get everyone in a creative mind frame."The networks are coming in with much more of a partnership mentality," says Danielle Gonzales, senior vice president and media director at Tapestry-Chicago, the Latino-focused unit within Starcom MediaVest Group, in speaking of integrated or branded deals on TV. "If they come up with a great idea, [they know] they'll get a larger share of the advertiser's budget."But there's a flip side. "The biggest landscape change is a demand on the part of advertisers," says Steve Mandala, Telemundo senor vice president of sales and marketing. "Clients initially were hungry for any kind of placement, but now they want it to be highly creative, inventive and appropriate."By appropriate, Mandala refers to placing advertiser brands and logos in storylines in an organic way. An episode of the recently concluded novela Amores Mercado, for example, featured a soccer game played on a field with Coca-Cola signage around the perimeter. That product integration "was perfectly germane, because it was exactly what you'd expect to find at a soccer event," he says.There's hardly a novela on Telemundo that does not include some form of product integration. "Because we produce our own programming," Mandala says, "we have the ability to heavily influence the content."Univision may import a large share of its content from Mexico's Grupo Televisa, but it's also stepping up to the plate. Network executives did not respond to interview requests for this story, but Univision's presence in the integration and branded entertainment space is easy to spot, more so now on reality shows.The network's ratings winner, the Sábado Gigante variety show, has been doing integrations for more than two decades. "There probably isn't a Hispanic marketer out there that has not been a part of that show," Gonzales says. Her firm recently placed a 13-week sponsorship for Disney World on Sábado Gigante, which involved the show's host, Don Francisco, talking about, on several occasions, how fun it is to vacation at Disney World. That was in addition to traditional 30-second spots. And yes, those on-air mentions do come at a premium above and beyond the commercials. If Don Francisco showed or talked about a product just before a commercial break, that could cost between $25,000 and $50,000. And that's for a one-time placement.Tapestry and other agencies have been involved in much more sophisticated and ambitious Univision deals. Among them was a splashy concept devised last fall by Houston-based Lopez Negrete Communications for client Wal-Mart Stores. To promote the retailer's exclusive two-pack offering of a CD from the band RBD and a DVD of the Univision series Rebelde, from where the group got its start, Lopez Negrete partnered with Univision and record label EMI Televisa Music.Together, they produced an RBD concert in Houston sponsored by Wal-Mart, which was later broadcast on Univision alongside lots of promotional messaging for the two-pack. Simon El Hage, director of strategic marketing at Lopez Negrete, says the retailer sold "hundreds of thousands" of the two-pack, placing it in Wal-Mart's No. 3 position, when ranking Hispanic CD/DVD releases according to revenue.ESPN Deportes and Fox Sports en Español have also struck several deals, in both the integrated product placement and branded categories to appeal to Hispanic men. "It's somewhat inherent in the sports network business," says Lino García, ESPN Deportes' general manager. In addition to integration opportunities on mainstay shows such as SportsCenter, ESPN Deportes just rolled out traveling interactive exhibit "¡En Vivo!" in early March at Calle Ocho."It looks like a stadium, and inside there are various sports activities consumers can engage in, like kicking a soccer ball or shooting hoops," García says. The advertisers whose brand logos and products will be integrated into the exhibit vary from location to location. First up at bat, in Miami, was co-sponsor Dish Network's DishLATINO.Among the most ambitious projects with advertisers at Fox Sports en Español is El Reto Final, a branded entertainment series that starts its second season in April.The concept, devised by Vidal and created in partnership with Fox Sports and the Miami-based production company Zeal Television, is to pit former World Cup teams in a rematch. "This year it's exciting because one of the most controversial matches in the 2006 World Cup was between Mexico and Argentina," says Tom Maney, senior vice president of advertising sales at Fox Sports en Español. Episodes will feature various members of those two teams, as they're approached by El Reto Final talent, asking them to take part in the rematch. Some episodes will show the players in training. The finale is the actual game.Nissan is back on board for a second year as the lead sponsor. What's more, "many of Vidal's clients are involved in it [for a second season], so it's an agency sponsorship," Maney says. "It's like no other deal we have." He adds that other clients involved include Sprint Nextel, Wendy's and DirecTV.Vidal's Méndez notes that it was conceived as a one-season series, but the results were so stellar it's become a franchise. "It exceeded our expectations in terms of viewership by about 50 percent more impressions than were guaranteed," Méndez says. While the Home Depot Center in Carson, Calif., where the first season's rematch took place, generally attracts 4,000 to 8,000 fans for local league games, the El Reto rematch last year, between former U.S. and Mexican World Cup teams, attracted more than 14,000. Coverage of El Reto on Fox Sports en Español's Web site also "generated hand raisers for deals, so they were able to pursue [qualified leads]," Méndez says.MORE MEDIA OPTIONS AVAILABLEWeb-centric media brands are putting their own spin on opportunities. "The focus on integration and branded entertainment has been strong in the past nine months," says Mark López, publisher of AOL Latino. He expects 30 percent of the portal's revenue today is "tied to" branded entertainment deals, versus about 15 percent at this time last year.Among AOL Latino's current partners in the branded space is Verizon Wireless, which is integrating its products and logos into the portal's "Top 11" countdown show. "Verizon not only has media banner placement on the site, but, for example, the host of 'Top 11' will throw a [Verizon] cell phone across the page and highlight a certain Verizon plan," López says. That allows the portal to give more information about Verizon's offerings than can typically be conveyed in a 30-second spot.Similar deals can be spotted at Yahoo! Telemundo, which also sees a big growth opportunity for branded education. "We just did a partnership with GE Money, where they have Spanish-language content around financial information," says David Chandler, Yahoo! Telemundo's director of U.S. sales. Chandler predicts that financial companies such as GE, which offers credit cards.Integrations have always been popular in the radio space for Latinos. But the "value-added" conundrum has stymied possibilities of additional revenue from those deals. Out of every 10 times that an ad sales department proposes a stunt or contest at Spanish Broadcasting System's radio unit, "one time, it'll be like: 'Oh my God, this makes perfect sense.' Three times, it's like: 'Well, we'll budge.' And other times it's like: 'Guys, that's what you have sales inventory for,' " says Pio Ferro, SBS vp of programming.Value-added deals are an issue for some TV channels as well, particularly the nascent ones. Yet LATV has used value-added to good effect in the past, leveraging the deals to build its client roster, says Danny Crowe, president of the channel. The hip, young TV player becomes a full-fledged national network in April thanks to digital TV station deals with broadcast stations. It had been operating in a three-hour block on a local Los Angeles station.At the same time, LATV now is also constructing integrated deals that pull in extra bucks, such as the network's recent Chevy Concert Series, which involved not only branding music specials with the auto manufacturer's name, but throwing an on-air party where audience members could check out the latest cars from General Motors and mingle with the musical talent.Bottom line, executives on both the media and advertiser side agree that there's more upside than downside to integrated and branded deals. Chevy concerts and J.C. Penney makeover concepts are just for starters. "We're in the infant stages in terms of what we can do," says AOL Latino's López. "Things will get more interesting, from the idea perspective, as we get more experience."

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