Nearly half of the undergraduate population at the University of New Mexico is Hispanic. At Fresno State, the Hispanic enrollment represents 46 percent of the total students.
The closer the Mountain West examined its members, like New Mexico and Fresno State, the more the conference office questioned why it wasn’t marketing to the growing Hispanic audience. So the Mountain West launched a Spanish-language brand campaign this season to promote its schools and championships.
 |
The conference worked with agencies Caught Looking and PSP.
|
“Champions of Life,” the MWC’s slogan, became “Campeones De La Vida” on much of the league’s messaging and branding.
“We need to be educating the Hispanic market on who we are as a conference and what we’re trying to do,” said Dan Butterly, the MWC’s senior associate commissioner for marketing and branding.
Butterly has been with the conference since it launched in 1999. He attempted a Hispanic marketing initiative in the mid-2000s called “Tu Conferencia” — “Your Conference” — but the MWC struggled to tell if it worked and it wasn’t renewed.
But when Butterly looked at research from the men’s basketball tournament in Las Vegas last season and saw that 24 percent of the fans in attendance were Hispanic, he decided to put Hispanic marketing on the front burner. Beyond New Mexico and Fresno State, other MWC members — San Diego State, San Jose State and UNLV — also have Hispanic enrollments that account for 26 percent to 33 percent of the total student population.
The idea was reinforced earlier this year when MWC Commissioner Craig Thompson saw how Houston agency PSP created a Hispanic marketing plan for the Final Four.
“The research tells us we have a very strong Hispanic fan base,” Butterly said. “So we crafted brand and promotional spots that work in both English and Spanish. We haven’t seen any other conference doing this.”
The MWC worked with Los Angeles creative agency Caught Looking on its annual brand campaign — they’ve worked together since 2011 — and brought in PSP, one of the nation’s leading agencies on Hispanic marketing, to “trans-create” the spots into Spanish. PSP calls it trans-create because it doesn’t simply translate the words into Spanish. The agency considers the branding and writes a script in Spanish that is intended to capture the full message of the spots. In many cases, the outcome of trans-creation is a Spanish script that’s completely unique to the English version.
“If you look at where Mountain West schools are located and their enrollment, they have a greater diversity than a lot of conferences,” said Tom Davis, president of Caught Looking. “It really does present an opportunity to expand that audience.”
The MWC also hired Sports Desk Media to build its digital Hispanic campaign, which ranges from banner ads to videos on Spanish-language websites, social media and newspaper sites. Sports Desk Media also will supply the MWC with what it calls fan DNA, which is a breakdown of demographic information about the fans who engage with the brand.
The Hispanic aspect of the campaign will cost the MWC in the low five figures, while the total cost of the brand spots will be in the high five figures.
“The early returns show that it’s working to raise awareness for the conference and our championships,” Butterly said. “The next step will be finding out more about who these fans are.”
