"Father" of Hispanic advertising steps aside

It's been said the Fidel Castro was the "father" of Hispanic advertising as it was the Cuban Revolution in 1959/1960 that exiled some Cuban advertising executives to the United States.

Here's an excerpt from Carl Kravetz talk when unveiling the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agency's Latino Identity Project back in 2006.

"It was the Cuban revolution that kicked off US Hispanic advertising. In 1959 and 60, a number of Havana advertising men suddenly found themselves in exile and they wanted to work at what they knew best. So they began the long arduous process of convincing American advertisers that that there was a vast, untapped market hidden away right under their noses. And the reason they were untapped? Because they didn’t speak English and couldn’t understand advertising in that language!

At first the advertising was local, targeting Cuban communities in Miami and New York, but the numbers weren’t significant enough to get traction with national advertisers.

Enter the US Government who combined Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans into something called “Hispanics,” and, together with prescient advertisers like Procter & Gamble and imported programming from MeTelevisa, national Hispanic advertising was born.

In many respects, we are doing the same thing here today that those early visionaries did. We are looking at the Latino consumer landscape and saying,“something here isn’t working the best it can. We are not connecting with Latino consumers because we are not speaking their language.”

The language I’m talking about, however, is not a language in the linguistic sense. It is a deeper, much more sophisticated and nuanced way of communicating and connecting with Latino consumers today … and in the future. If you take language…Spanish or English…. out of the equation, what makes a Latino Latino?"