San Diego’s 1st Spanish-Language Radio Station Faces Hurdle

Thanks to a federal bureaucrat with a sense of humor, San Diego’s first Spanish-speaking radio station could bear the unlikely call letters of KIRS--and its home would be at 1040 on the AM dial.

The Internal Revenue Service allusions are appropriate because getting the county’s first Spanish-language station on the air is proving to be a taxing matter for Quetzal Bilingual Communications.

First proposed seven years ago, Quetzal has received its Federal Communications Commission license. However, it has struggled to find an environmentally acceptable location for its station, transmitter and tower. The company hopes to have KIRS on the air by late 1988, if the county approves an environmental impact statement for the company’s proposed building site in Lakeside.

But that won’t be the end of Quetzel’s struggle. The fledgling station must then pry listeners away from an established cadre of 17 Spanish-speaking stations that already broadcast from Baja California, most of which maintain studios in Tijuana.

Big Selling Job Ahead

Quetzal’s major shareholders--David Martinez, a retired businessman, Mateo Camarillo, a local businessman, and Jose Mireles, director of Hispanic programming for KPBS radio--remain optimistic that the station will succeed.

“It’s going to take a big selling job” to convince advertisers that KIRS is a viable medium,” acknowledged Mireles. “It’s not going to happen right away, but we’ll find our niche and survive.”

That niche will be built upon the listening habits of Spanish-speaking listeners in San Diego and Tijuana who aren’t satisfied with existing Spanish-speaking radio stations that concentrate almost totally on music.

“We’ll focus on issues and concerns affecting the Spanish community in San Diego; we’ll try to educate the community,” Mireles said. “Most of the information that’s on (Spanish-speaking radio) today is from Tijuana and Mexico, and it has little or no relevance for people in San Diego.”

Getting KIRS on the air also will “mean a lot for the market in general, even if it is potentially a competitor,” according to Robert France, vice president of sales for Tijuana-based XEMO-AM, which broadcasts to a blue-collar audience in San Diego and Tijuana.

“I think advertisers would like to spend their money in San Diego with a U.S.-based station,” suggested one media buyer in Orange County. “We get requests all the time, but there aren’t any ‘K’ stations (U.S.-licensed stations) in San Diego.”

The county’s airwaves are filled with Spanish-language programming but with the exception of KPBS radio’s weeknight “Contacto 89” program, virtually all Spanish-language programming is broadcast by the 17 “X” stations--Mexican-licensed stations. (Some of the Mexican stations are heard only in Baja California; the signals of other stations “jump” over San Diego and are heard in Los Angeles or Orange County.)

Quetzel’s struggle to arrange financing, build a station and get on the air is in keeping with what often has been a slow road for Spanish-language stations that can be heard in San Diego, according to observers.

During the past three years, national advertising accounts, including beer and soft drink companies, department store chains and fast-food restaurants, have begun to spread their Spanish-language advertising budget beyond the most important markets in New York, Los Angeles and Miami, according to France.

Some of that advertising money is being spent in San Diego.

However, advertisers typically buy time on stations that serve San Diego County’s estimated 50,000 Spanish-language listeners and generally ignore Tijuana, treating that city’s more than 1 million inhabitants as a separate and less-understood radio market.

Don’t ‘Believe in Potential’

“Most of the agencies in the states do not really believe in the potential of the south side of the border,” according to Alberto Estrada, a spokesman for XEXX-AM, which broadcasts Spanish-language sports broadcasts for the Padres and Sockers. “They don’t want to understand that 40,000 cars a day come across, so they don’t give the south side of the border as much importance as they should.”

Most advertisers hold that view “even though it’s a man-made border running between the middle (of the San Diego-Tijuana region), which has nothing to do with (where people shop) or what they listen to,” said Arline M. Lowenthal, an analyst with Analysis/Research Ltd. who has tracked Spanish-language radio audiences for 13 years.

In audience size, “San Diego alone is about the 13th largest market, but (combined) with Tijuana, it’s third behind Los Angeles and New York,” according to Glenn Higgins, vice president and director of Hispanic research with San Diego-based California Research Consultants.

“Talk to the (Immigration & Naturalization Service) and they’ll tell you that 65,000 (Mexicans) cross the border legally every day,” France said. “These people spend money on fast food, auto parts and at the department stores.”

However, “the very, very large percentage of America’s major consumer goods manufacturers don’t do Spanish advertising or do very little,” France said. “They’re still not giving adequate weight to this audience.”

Radio industry number crunchers suggest that advertisers often overlook the fact that San Diego’s Hispanic radio audience is more settled, better educated and has more money to spend than audiences in Los Angeles or New York.

Despite gains made by Spanish-speaking radio stations in other large cities, San Diego’s Hispanic radio market remains “a very young market in terms of overall awareness in the advertising and marketing community,” according to France, who said national advertisers seem more attuned than local advertisers to the growing importance of the San Diego/Tijuana market.

Part of the problem in San Diego is “cultural,” according to Lowenthal, who believes that “local and national people don’t want to address the market because they just don’t know how to address it.”

‘Missing the Boat’

Lowenthal said advertisers’ ignorance of the combined San Diego/Tijuana market “can be very frustrating because the clients are often missing the boat.” Recently, for the first time in 13 years, Lowenthal convinced a major client to research the differences among listeners in San Diego and Tijuana.

Part of San Diego/Tijuana’s problem is that national research organizations, including Arbitron, have not included San Diego’s Hispanic population in its audience surveys. Arbitron conducted its first survey in San Diego just this past spring, according to radio executives.

To fill in that numbers void, a handful of San Diego-based market research companies have begun compiling numbers.

“The sky is the limit here,” according to Armando Montaldo, director of Hispanic research for San Diego Surveys, which conducts market research. “The Spanish-speaking stations are finally beginning to capture some of the advertising dollars that before they were not getting.”

That increased ad revenue is seen--and heard--at the stations and in their broadcasts, according to Higgins. “Many of the Mexican stations are more modern, more up-to-date, and have better sales forces than their English-speaking counterparts,” Higgins said.

However, one radio station executive complained that “local advertising agencies (which guide advertisers in their advertising buys) don’t know anything about local Spanish-speaking radio. They’re ignorant when it comes to the Spanish-speaking market.”

Nationally, advertisers generally deal with a handful of agencies, including Mendoza, Dillon & Associates in Newport Beach, which specialize in Hispanic-language stations.