Grupo Gallegos has crossed over the demographic divide to work hand in hand with one of the best-known agencies in advertising on the California Milk Processor Board’s new $20 million ad campaign.
The Huntington Beach-based agency has grown to about $25 million in annual revenue since its founding in 2001, with bread-and-butter assignments for mainstream brands anxious to reach Latino consumers. Its client roster includes the Comcast Corp., Clorox Co., and Foster Farms, among others.
The agency’s current assignment was a “full-throated collaboration” with San Francisco-based Goodby Silverstein & Partners to produce a campaign that will aim to woo English- and Spanish-language audiences with the same creative work.
The joint project reflects changes in the state’s population that have led the San Clemente-based board—funded by the state’s milk processors—to treat the Latino segment as something more than a niche market.
“Our role has expanded because (of) the significance of the Hispanic population to [the board’s] business,” said John Gallegos, the agency’s founder, referring to a trend which saw Latinos becoming the state’s largest ethnic group this year, making up 39% of the population.
The board encouraged agency collaboration “because it just makes sense, given the demographics in California,” said Steve James, executive director of the milk processors group. “Over the past several years, we’ve been allocating more and more of our dollars toward communications to our Hispanic consumers, just because there are more of them and they consume more milk per capita than the English speakers, and we just want to make sure we are not losing anybody between the cracks.”
The new strategy will also help address the varying levels of assimilation among Latinos in the state.
“There is a whole range of acculturations and demographics in California where the lines are just getting blurred—there is no longer this group that only watches Spanish media and (a) group that only watches English media; they are picking and choosing from both,” James said. “It just made more and more sense to us to speak with” a consistent voice and a consistent presence.
Goodby, a 21-year incumbent on the English-language account, created the popular “Got Milk?” tagline for the general market in the early 1990s. Grupo Gallegos converted it into “toma leche,” or “drink milk,” for Latino consumers in 2006.
‘Natural Evolution’
Last year’s ad campaign featured a shared theme of how milk influences a person’s dreams, but it was interpreted differently for each market—Goodby’s ads showcased nightmares of those who didn’t drink milk before going to bed, while Grupo Gallegos’ spots in Spanish highlighted happy, candy-filled dreams of those who did.
“The agencies were coming closer and closer together all the time anyway, so really it was a natural evolution of, ‘You know what? This makes sense for our business and for our target consumer,’ ” James said.
Universal
The new campaign is banking on several universal perceptions shared by various types of individuals, regardless of ethnicity—firefighters are seen as brave, and athletes are viewed as healthy, for example. Drink milk
to be like them, goes the bilingual sales
pitch.
Two TV commercials—both filmed in English and Spanish—are at the forefront of the board’s new advertising strategy and will launch in “every single market” in the state. They share a common theme of milk fueling a better future.
“Part of our takeaway from focus groups that we did with moms and dads was that there is this universal desire to give your children a good, healthy future, to set them up for successful life,” said James, “whether it is encouraging them to do something aspirational, like be a firefighter, or an astronaut, or whether you say, ‘You know what? I’m going to take that sports drink out of my child’s hand (and) make sure they drink some milk, because in the long run it’s going to be better for them.’ ”
‘Cross-Pollination’
The creative effort on the campaign was led by Goodby’s chairman, Jeff Goodby, who worked “very closely with creatives” from Grupo Gallegos, James said.
“They would be at each other’s offices for a week at [a] time and really try to cross-pollinate ideas,” he said. “And the strategy and the media was led by Andrew Delbridge from Grupo Gallegos’ side, but he worked very closely with media and strategy people at Goodby. It sounds like a cliché, but everyone left their egos at the door when they went to work here.”
The California Milk Processor Board spends about $10 million on agency fees, production and public relations each year, and another $10 million in media buys.
This year’s campaign also will include radio and digital ads, as well as appearances by Jose Hernandez, a former NASA astronaut who will visit select markets and talk about “how early choices, like choosing milk, set the foundation children need to reach for the stars.”
