DirecTV Más took the opportunity of last week’s gathering of media buyers and planners in New York to officially unveil its new advertising campaign targeting U.S. Hispanics.
The television campaign, which mostly takes aim at cable providers with taglines such as “Libérate del cable” (Free Yourself of Cable) features Mexican actor Andrés García, and Ana María Polo, the host of Telemundo’s courtroom show Caso Cerrado, in separate spots urging viewers to dump cable in favor of the digital, weatherproof signal of DirecTV.
The new campaign was developed by Miami-based DMG Solutions, which took over the DirecTV Más account in July, after several years of award-winning creative work by The Vidal Partnership. The new effort has a strong focus on direct response and, according to both DirecTV Más and DMG Solutions, it has sold more subscriptions among Hispanics than ever before.
“We are here to sell a service, not to win [awards] at Cannes,” DMG Solutions’ José del Cueto told Hispanic TV Update. “When we took over the account, the first thing we saw was that the [advertising] budget wasn’t been matched by the number of phone calls requesting the services.” Del Cueto declines to give out specifics, but claims the most recent campaign has a response rate of over 20%, versus the previous “single-digits” seeing in the past.
The current campaign’s success is due mainly to the development of a proprietary software called Track’em, said Del Cueto, a former Univision and Telemundo executive. DirecTV uses Track’em to zero in on specific areas and consumers to make the best targeted pitch possible.
“I’ve always said that the Hispanic market shouldn’t be carpet-bombed,” he said.
Track’em uses a series of variables that go beyond the obvious, including factors such as the weather and the incidence of cable versus satellite to pitch DirecTV.
Speaking to an audience of “upfront survivors,” John De Armas, VP of DirecTV’s WorldDirect service, took the stage to tout the most recent additions to the Más platform: ESPN Deportes, Discovery Familia, Televisión Dominicana, V-Me, Mega TV and the national feed of Azteca América.
As of today, the Más platform has 45 channels in Spanish.
