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Why Marketers Cannot Afford to Ignore 'El Chavo'
November 01, 2005
By Luis Clemens
Episodes of a 35-year-old show featuring a 42-year-old man portraying an 8-year-old boy routinely dominate Nielsen Media's weekly list of the most-watched programs on Spanish-language cable television. El Chavo del 8, starring Mexican actor and writer Roberto Gómez Bolaños as the title character, was produced by Grupo Televisa and now airs on Galavisión, the Univision-owned cable network. (A Galavisión executive was not available to comment.)
El Chavo typically occupies eight, nine and sometimes all of the slots on Nielsen's top 10 telecasts on Spanish-language cable. In addition, the show's characters continue to drive retail promotions, sales of books and DVDs.
"Pretty amazing, isn't it," says David Flynn Huerta, managing director of Amistad Media, an Austin, Texas-based media buying shop. Flynn, who grew up in Guatemala watching El Chavo, now buys time on the show for Jarritos, a Mexican soft drink brand, "because of its definite tie-in to Mexico and its skew toward a Mexican audience," he says. No surprise there. Less expected, though, is the fact that he also buys time on El Chavo for a U.S. Army recruitment campaign aimed at older relatives who can influence young men between the ages of 16 and 26 to consider enlisting as soldiers.
"[It is] humor for adults that appeals to kids because of its silliness," says Flynn and cites Nielsen data to bolster his argument. "El Chavo has a 16 percent [audience] share up against [network] news on Univision and Telemundo among adults 18 to 24." The show also has a sizable contingent of viewers over 50. "Grandmother, mom and dad and the kids watch together," says Rosa Serrano, senior vice president, group account director, multicultural, for New York-based Initiative Media. "The show is a classic. [It is] a show where families gather together to watch."
El Chavo's title character is an orphan who sleeps in a barrel in a down-and-out neighborhood populated by adults who are always ready to give him a whack on the head. It was shot on all of two sets under the watchful eye of a censor employed by Mexico's Interior Ministry. Its idiomatic expressions are decidedly Mexican. The show's humor is often slapstick and always goofy. Serrano, an unabashed fan and former elementary school teacher, says, "It is magical."
Marinela, a brand of Mexican baked goods giant Grupo Bimbo, tried to translate that magic into increased sales by running a back-to-school campaign in August and September. The company purchased a license from Televisa and ran the promotion in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Phoenix with a primary target of Spanish-speaking children ages 6 to 14, along with a secondary focus on their mothers. (Televisa executives did not respond to interview requests.)
Some 20 different stickers from the TV show were inserted into two of its product lines. The stickers featured cartoon versions of the various characters, which, if you think about it, says a lot considering many cast members are now in their 60s and 70s. Marinela brand manager Juan Miguel Esaa insists, without providing specifics, that the promotion was successful because "it is just a good-hearted program with a good sense of humor that brings back fond memories for adults."
Nostalgia is clearly boosting sales of El Diario de El Chavo del 8, a reprint of a book written by Gómez Bolaños and originally published in 1995. Laura Lara is the head of the Mexico City-based imprint Punto de Lectura, which released the paperback in July. Lara has hosted events for literary giants such as Carlos Fuentes and José Saramago, but her voice quakes with emotion as she describes a book signing this summer by Gómez Bolaños.
"People hugged him, some cried remembering the happiness the show brought them as children," she recalls. "Others who could not afford to buy the [$5] book approached him for an autograph on [scraps of paper]."
The 19,000 books sold in Mexico pales in comparison to the 600,000 copies of El Chavo DVDs sold in the U.S. Surprisingly, one of the buyers is the library at Stanford University where Gómez Bolaños spoke in mid-October to a mix of several hundred students, professors and workers who brought along their children. According to Andreas Ehrensberger, a doctoral student in biophysics who helped organize the event, Gómez Bolaños gave a lecture stressing the importance and richness of the Spanish language.
That may seem an odd topic for someone whose most famous character had a gift for grammatical gaffes a la Yogi Berra. Yet Gómez Bolaños insisted to the audience he always took great care with the words spoken by El Chavo. Perhaps El Chavo's malapropisms and ingenious wordplay explains the show's lasting appeal.
That the program is still popular with fans and media buyers is deliberately unintentional, which might be how Gómez Bolaños would translate El Chavo's wry "sin querer queriendo."
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