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Mar 18, 2006 9:28 pm US/Eastern
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Racy Ad Grabs You By The, Um...Check That.
MIAMI (CBS4 News) ―
Companies which market their products in a language other than English need to take special care to send the right message, or they run the risk of saying more than they mean. For example, General Motors tried to sell it's Chevy Nova in Spanish speaking countries without realizing in Spanish, No Va means "doesn't go", not a great name for a car.
Now, another car company is having to re-think a Spanish language ad campaign, after Volkswagen tried to market a new turbocharged GTI 2006 with the phrase, "Turbo-Cojones", plastered up on billboards across Miami, where better than one in two people speak Spanish.
The problem is that while often used by English speakers as acceptable slang for "guts" or "courage", in Spanish, the word 'cojones' describes a part of the male anatomy generally not plastered across billboard, and certainly not as part of polite Spanish speech. Formally translated, 'cojones' describes a man's testicles, something most companies would not put on an English language billboard.
In South Florida, the buzz is about anything but the car.
It was when one of the billboards went up in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood that the complaints began about what Spanish speakers considered vulgar language.
What's even more surprising about the advertising no-no is that the campaign was created right here in South Florida, by the Coral Gables ad agency Creative On Demand. The company says despite the fact that it's virtually impossible not to know someone in Miami who speaks Spanish, and knows the vulgar meaning of the word, it didn't realize the ad would offend anyone.
Now, Volkswagen has decided to yank the turbocharged billboards down in Miami, Los Angeles, and New York, all areas where you have to have a lot of 'cojones' to use a billboard like that.
In its place, Volkswagen will use another phrase in Spanish to market its hot new car. A flash picture of the GTI will be emblazoned on the new billboard along with the suggestion that the car could "Kick a little gracias".
Maybe they should stick to German.
(© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)