Diapers For Fatima

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In addition, P&G has tailored its Gain advertising to Hispanic culture: in an English-language commercial, a Norah Jones song plays while a young man hangs his girlfriend's bright tank top, washed with Gain, on a life-size cutout of Rocky Balboa. P&G drops American icons Norah and Rocky from the Spanish ad; instead, a middle-age man won't get in bed with a woman because he can't stop sniffing his Gain-scrubbed undershirt. The woman is disappointed but not P&G: Gain's Hispanic market share, which is 60% as high as the general market number, has increased 34% over the past four years. Gain is the second-leading brand in the $544 million Hispanic detergent market; it trails only Tide, P&G's higher-priced detergent.

Another innovation of Eleta's group: building a proprietary database of undocumented Hispanic immigrants--the cutting edge of the growing Hispanic population. While the P&G crew is circumspect about the details of that list, they have used it, for instance, to send out thousands of free Pampers diaper samples, in search of prospective customers. Kimberly Clark's Huggies (the dominant brand in Mexico and the Dominican Republic) still leads the $604 million U.S. Hispanic diaper market. But P&G's free-sample effort--along with heavy print and television advertising--seems to be paying off: since 2000, Pampers' Hispanic market share in the U.S. has increased 25%.

P&G's efforts, of course, are hardly the last word in this arena: there are lessons throughout the Hispanic marketplace. According to Nielsen Media Research, for example, 71% of Spanish-language television viewers say they receive information relating to their purchasing decisions from commercials, compared with just 30% for non-Hispanics watching English television. Plus, Hispanic viewers are three times as likely as non-Hispanic viewers to discuss advertisements with others. That's a potent combination. "We're less jaded," says L??pez Negrete, the marketing executive. "We haven't been sold to as aggressively." And once they're sold, they're more likely to stick around: Nielsen says predominantly Spanish-speaking Hispanics are 16% more brand loyal than their non-Hispanic counterparts.

Still, nearly half the top 250 U.S. advertisers are spending less than 1% of their ad budgets in Hispanic media. And some companies just get it wrong. According to a Transperfect Translations Corp. survey, 57% of people who speak Spanish--and English as a second language--say they've seen Spanish advertising that is incorrectly translated from English. In one case, pointwas translated as puta, which means prostitute in Spanish, instead of punta. "Our market is maturing," says L??pez Negrete. "But it's never too late--we're still waiting for an invitation from many brands." Given the sheer potential of this segment, companies will come to the party. The question remains: Who will turn it into a bottom-line fiesta? --With reporting by Anna Macias Aguayo and Cathy Booth Thomas/ Dallas and Sandra Marquez/Norwalk