Laughing Out Loud In Spanish. Warm-and-fuzzy Hispanic TV ads are giving way to the crude and funny – from BusinessWeek

“Until recently an evening of advertising on Spanish-language television was good for about as many laughs as a trip to the dry cleaner. But as the number of viewers watching Latino networks like Univision tops the likes of CBS (CBS ) some weeks, rates for TV spots are mounting — and so is pressure to prevent the kind of ad-zapping that bedevils English-language channels. That’s helping to spark a creative revolution in Hispanic advertising as clients take more risks to reach a fast-growing market of assimilated consumers with multicultural entertainment tastes. More and more, ads marked by slapstick, frat-house pranks and edgy humor are replacing the relentlessly earnest spots that have run on Spanish-language TV for more than two decades.

Witness the change in ads for that most wholesome of products: milk. The California Milk Processor Board for the past four years has run TV ads featuring heartwarming scenes of an extended Latino family, complete with grandmother baking tres leches cake. The slogan was, predictably, “familia, amor, y leche” (family, love, and milk). That tack was in stark contrast with the long-running “Got Milk?” campaign in English-language media featuring such slapstick scenes as a man in a body and head cast being fed a cookie through the mouth-hole by his hospital roommate and then being left alone to grunt for some milk”

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