Billboard lesson: Watch your language

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Billboard lesson: Watch your language
By Abigail Azote
Apr 2, 2006 - 9:40:00 PM

It’s the advertising equivalent of having egg on your face. It's having to yank an ad because you inadvertently used a word that your target audience found offensive. One might assume, with all the thought that goes into crafting ads to capture just the right nuance, that such moments would be rare. They are in fact more common than you might think.

There's the recent instance of a couple of Volkswagen billboards targeting the large Hispanic markets in Los Angeles, Miami and New York. Touting the automaker's new GTI 2006, the billboards bore a picture of the souped-up car and a tagline that read, "Turbo-Cojones."

CreativeOndemanD, the Miami agency that created the ads, wanted to convey the notions of guts and boldness. What they did convey was something else. Cojones is a vulgarism that translates as testicles.

Complaints poured in. Two days after the billboards went up in Miami’s Little Havana, they were taken down.

For Juan Faura, Hispanic marketing expert, the irate response from the Hispanic community was not surprising. The agency, wanting to be edgy, went too far, says Faura, who is author of the book “Marketing Grows Up: Exploring Perceptions and Facing Realities.”

“Remember that the audience is the public, not the creatives at the ad agency who think, how cool, how unconventional,” he says. “Even with perfunctory research, you would have gotten enough concern not to do it.”

He warns against what he considers one of the biggest no-nos in marketing to a Hispanic audience: the use of Spanglish.

“I have yet to find a single instance of a mix of English and Spanish that was successful,” Faura says. “It seems so contrived even to the most unsophisticated consumer. It seems like they’re trying too hard to show some cultural insight.”

But it’s a hard lesson to learn. Volkswagen has since replaced the billboards. The new taglines? “Here Today. Gone Tamale.” and “Kick a Little Gracias.”