In Pimpeando, a new show about cars, the talk is of lowriders and paint jobs with images of Aztecs and the Virgin of Guadalupe.
The target audience may also watch Pimp My Ride, the MTV car customizing series on which Pimpeando is based. But the sought-after viewers for this show are primarily young Latinos, a fast-growing demographic whose taste in entertainment runs from English to Spanish, from American to Latin, and back. And MTV is giving chase.
On Monday it started MTV Tr3s as a replacement for the all-Spanish language MTV en Espanol, a 15-year-old video jukebox that MTV executives now say was a placeholder while they tried to figure out more fitting programming for the Latino youth audience.
The new MTV Tr3s, or MTV Three, doesn’t shun Spanish — it will broadcast, for example, Quiero Mis Quinces, a Latin American show about the coming-of-age parties for 15-year-old girls, with English subtitles — but it will mostly reflect the fusion of American and Latin music, cultures and languages, MTV executives said.
That means VJs who speckle their English with Spanish words, a playlist that puts Daddy Yankee next to Justin Timberlake, and original programming like Pimpeando. The latter pairs the popular host-customizer Michael Martin, or “Mad Mike,” star of Pimp My Ride, with Luis Lopez, a custom painter from the San Fernando Valley.
MTV Tr3s, pronounced “MTV tres,” is concentrating on Latinos between the ages of 12 and 34. It expects to reach at least 15 million households through cable, satellite and broadcast channels, said Lucia Ballas-Traynor, general manager of the network’s new channel.
Market research has consistently shown that while the U.S.-born generations increasingly speak only English, they preserve a pride and sense of uniqueness based on their Hispanic heritage. Christina Norman, the president of MTV, declined to estimate the dollar investment the network made in Tr3s, but she said that from its name — “Three,” following MTV and MTV2, MTV’s video-intensive offshoot — to its sharing of MTV’s marketing, research and even personnel, the new network is beaming a message in and outside the company that “it’s not that Latin channel over there.”
The potential audience is huge. About 1 in 5 Americans aged 34 and younger is of Hispanic descent, and MTV executives cite Census Bureau estimates that say by 2020 the Latino teenage population is expected to have grown 62 percent, compared to 10 percent for teenagers overall.
Cable channels like SiTV and Mun2, a Telemundo channel that underwent a makeover last year, already offer Latin-theme hybrid programming. Robert Rose, chief executive of the AIM Tell-A-Vision Group, which produces two syndicated shows for American-born Latinos, said that the advent of MTV Tr3s is significant because it should help get the attention of advertisers, which, he noted, still try to reach Latinos through Spanish-language media only.
“I view them as an ally because they’re further validating the market that we’re all targeting,” Rose said of MTV.
