The Hispanic television upfronts are always great for networking. For several days, you get to share food and drinks (sometimes too many) with some of the main players in Hispanic media and advertising. But besides the fun, there’s never really much in the area of news or ideas to come out of these events.

Until today.

This morning, right before Fox Sports en Español’s upfront presentation at Cipriani, an advertising exec I like and admire suggested I become something like “El Gordo y la Flaca” of Hispanic media and advertising. If you know El Gordo y la Flaca, you know that nothing escapes them when it comes to Latino celebrities. So, this exec told me, I should try to do the same with the chismes surrounding Hispanic media.

I guess that was sort of what I attempted when I started this blog, but I couldn’t have put it better. That might be my true calling and perhaps my new title: Latino Media & Advertising Gossiper. After all, serious journalism seems so pasee these days.

Of course I will need your input -and chismes- to make it happen. Write to me, even if you wish to remain anonymous. Who knows? this “business” might prosper someday to hire my very own team of paparazzi.

Stay tuned for highlights on Azteca America, Telemundo and Univision upfront presentations in New York City. 

Hispanic leaders in Ohio can now be happy. The local radio station WLW has agreed to bring down a billboard considered by many as offensive.

The culprit is a huge billboard showing a donkey and a man wearing a Mexican sombrero and dark moustache under a sign that reads “The Big Juan.” See? the radio station’s slogan is actually “The Big One,” thus the play on words.

As usual, the main complain had to do with the use of stereotypes and what the gringos at the station thought was the way Mexicans look. Now, if you ask me I think “The Big Juan” thing is actually quite funny, but if WLW wanted to be accurate, instead of bringing down the billboard it could have just replaced the donkey with an SUV or, even better, a Hummer. That would make Juan your “typical” Mexican in the U.S.

As far as the flag is concerned, it could very well become the bumper sticker. Ajúa!!!

In its latest marketing effort, Lexicon’s Inglés sin Barrreras has a new ad out pitching its costly English-language course to Latinos. A 60-second spot currently running on Univision features a couple of presumably recent immigrants talking -in Spanish- about how learning English has changed their lives in America. At some point, the man switches to a perfect English while subtitles in Spanish show up on screen. But then the woman intervenes to make a final, perfect pitch in Spanish. “I think [Inglés sin Barreras] is a medium sent to us by God himself to make it to this country.” (Yo creo que es un medio que Dios nos ha proveido [sic] para progresar.)

Wow! I wonder how many politically-correct gringo companies can ever get away with that one. But hey, in the increasingly competitive business of selling English-language courses to Hispanics, God must be an infallible tool. Who can beat that?

What is it with grown-ups and dolls?

It turns out now that the “teenagers” featured in Rebelde and RBD, the telenovela and music ensamble brought to you by Televisa, will now be immortalized by Mattel in the form of three new Barbie dolls: Mia, Roberta and Lupita, each dressed in their signature school uniform consisting of a blazer, a tie and a not-very-long denim skirt. Read the story, in Spanish, here.

Not that I care too much for dolls, but the news of Barbie going Rebelde came almost at the same time as a retired U.S. Force Hispanic woman announced the creation of Gabriella, an 18-inch “truly Hispanic” doll, who wears nothing fancy (jeans, a turtleneck sweater) and has long, straight black hair and, of course, big brown eyes.

In an interview with a local newspaper in Belleville, Illinois, Mary Alvarez-Pearson says she came up with the idea of Gabriella because she wanted to make sure that when a Hispanic girl looked at her, she could see herself. Well, while that’s a very noble thought, I am sorry to inform her that thanks to television and advertising, Hispanic girls don’t want to look anything remotely like them (or their mothers, grandmothers, etc.) In fact, they’d rather look like Barbie, regardless of its encarnation.

And that is why most likely sales of Barbie Rebelde will go to the roof (just like anything else associated with that uninteresting telenovela) and Gabriella might just as well become a nice, collectible item for the nostalgic type.