Well, the top one is a tiny bit ambiguous since it doesn't actually say how important money is. But I think most people would read it as saying that money is important -- at least most people in the sign's target demographic. And that to me is pretty interesting.

Either way, I don't feel like they make for compelling marketing.

They've identified two demographics that are underrepresented in their customer base: youth and Latinos. They have decided that the reason they are underrepresented is that they are poor and therefore don't use banking services.

The youth-targeted English ad seems obvious - you don't care about that boring money stuff, but hey, it's important and we can help. I'm not sure about the Latino ad, but it seems to be saying, hey, we can take care of some of your money problems so that you can focus on more important things. Definitely a different message.

I suspect that they weren't meant to be displayed next to each other.

It's bad marketing, but interesting art.

I don't think they are necessarily trying to target Latinos here- if they were, they'd make it much less obvious. If it's true that 75% of the population in this area doesn't speak Spanish, they could be trying to tell people "Look how diverse we are that we go out of our way to make minorities feel welcome!" or "Look how exotic we are that we use a foreign language!" The actual words themselves don't matter because they are targeting non-Spanish speaking people.

The Citi “Live Richly” campaign was an old campaign that was launched in 2001 and featured a variety of phrases that emphasized the "importance of living life" while also targeting a younger and more diverse audience.

In doing a little research, I came upon other phrases such as:
“Holding shares shouldn’t be your only form of affection”
"Open a cravings account"
"40 may be the new 30. Just remember, you're still 40"
"Turn your living dollars into living quarters"
"Nobody comes running down the stairs to hug you when you get to work"

So despite the proximity, I don’t think there’s necessarily meant to be any specific connection between these two signs other than they are part of the same campaign.

Also, I believe the campaign ended a few years ago but perhaps some of the billboards remain.

This might be ridiculous...but maybe it's meant to be sort of an in-joke for the people who can speak Spanish? Like, 'Haha, they're being made to think money is what's important, but we know it isn't'.

I wonder if the person reviewing the Spanish-language sign was looking for grammatical errors, rather than messaging errors. Changing the discordant "no" to "nada" changes the entire meaning of the message to be more in line with the English:

Don’t wait until you have a lot of money before you realize that nothing is is more important.

Changing the "no" to "nunca" would also change the final meaning to "...before you realize that it is never more important."

Although I'm not a fluent Spanish speaker, I am pretty sure that the substitution of "nada" is grammatically correct. (I'm not so sure about the substitution for "nunca".)

Side note: The Spanish verb "esperar" (from which the second-person imperative "esperes" is derived) can mean "hope" and "expect" as well as "wait." Therefore, the opening words could be read as an admonition of "Don't hope to have..." or "Don't expect to have..."

The ways in which words relate with each other in different languages has an impact on how people will be likely to receive the message. In English, "wait," "hope," and "expect" don't necessarily overlap, but (at least to my understanding) they do so much more in Spanish. Just adding this to say that there could be other ways of interpreting the opening command. (And we know that it's a command, because of the conjugation of "Esperar".)

@ mercurianferret I agreee that "No esperes" is best translated, in this particular case, as "Dont expect" or "Dont hope" It makes more sense, esp. in reference to the bilboard above.

I don't know where this billboard is located, but a potentially racist message is playing out here too.

Could the assumption be that Spanish-speaking people won't be as likely to make a lot of money, so they're targeting different demographics different ways? It almost seems like they're offering a crutch to the Spanish-speaking people; like "don't worry, sure money's important, but don't feel bad that you don't have a lot of it."

No comment on this pair of billboards, but CitiBank has a history of adapting to whatever message is expedient. In the '90s, it was all "Spend spend spend!" Come the recession and it was "act responsibly."

I have no respect for this company.

I do dislike it, however, when anyone in the U.S. touts the importance of money and power but changes the message for financially challenged minorities. The sad thing is, some poor people buy into this crap. You would not believe the naive discussions I've had with some other mature, African Americans. They think the movies are real.

Intentional contradiction so that it will be photographed and talked about online, thus successful marketing?

Frankly, I'm not sure I agree with Sara's translation. I think it easily reads as, "Don't wait to have a lot of money before realizing it's the most important [thing]."

I grew up speaking English and Spanish and have gone to school in both languages. I would translate the ad as :
Do not wait to have lots of money to realize that it is not what is important.

I think that a very smart latino/a made the wrong translation on purpose. We, latinos know that money is not as important :). (and Melissa, the translation to English means what Sara says: "Don't wait to have a lot of money to realize it isn't the most important thing"

Easy. The first one is for the clients: money is important.
The second one is for their bilingual employees: on a second thought, money is not THAT important (don't request a higher salary).
I am joking, I hope.

My first guess was mischief.

As slick marketing tool to get people talking, it bombs a bit, not totally, but a bit. As a bright spark idea of the someone actually pasting the poster up there, more likely.

Though I am European and maybe I am crediting a bit of spunk where there was none.

On consideration, someone was given a pile of adverts and told to paste them to bill boards and this is the completely random result.

This makes me sad, please someone research and tell me it was really mischief.

The shift in demographics in the upcoming future might have something to do with it-like they are getting people used to seeing both ahead of time. Or maybe the children of immigrants who grew up here with both languages are seen as an audience. They probably feel catered to, and usually aren't. Maybe it makes them look inclusive or like they value diversity.

Maybe it's aimed at families? Perhaps the older Latino/a people are being urged to spend time with family while the younger (Americanised, hence the English?) people are being told to start saving now, so that when they're older, they don't have to worry about money.

Please bear in mind, I am not American, and thus know very little about the cultures/subcultures.

Is it that they think that English speakers will already have money - they need to learn how important it is, how to manage it etc...

And that Spanish speakers won't have money, because they are talking about a wait until a point in the future when they do have money?

Im sure they did a lot of market research and the Spanish line resonated more with the latinos.

Marketers have been talking for years about the 'explosion' of the untapped bilingual market. There are a ton of trend pieces on the new American consumer, with the potential to make billions. They're the Americanized children of Latin American immigrants who tend to be young, educated and have disposable income.

The other thing that makes that market attractive to advertisers is that no one is talking to them. They're not getting as much market saturation as their white counterparts, so if companies could find the right way to market to this growing, dynamic group of consumers, they'll have them for life and hopefully for generations.

It's been touched on, but I think this may be a simple mistranslation. (Either on our part, or on Citi's.) I don't speak enough Spanish to say for sure. The wording of the two phrases just seems too similar.

I think it is targeting two different demographics. The first one is obviously for anyone who considers themselves young, or has kids and may want to set them up with CITI. But the motto, live richly will surely appeal as if it has moral value by saying, rich doesnt mean just money it means family. Academics have argued before that Latino immigrants may not be interested in assimilating by voting or learning english, but they are also retaining roots of family value and religious beliefs...

I think the pairing is purposeful and has a quiet positive feedback loop effect. Reading the one you rather immediately intuit that the other says the same thing. this suggests to the beholder that there's a sort of universality (or at least cross-cultural truth) to the claim of the one you can read. It provides the illusion that the one you just read bears repeating in another language too. I think this is very slick.

I worked at a bilingual ad agency, I know from experience they usually transliterate headlines, trying to keep the same meaning but change it to make more sense colloquially instead of literally. I would even go so far as to guess that these weren't meant to be paired together. It was probably a mistake.

I saw an example of this shortly after reading this post. And I immediately thought of the idea of some languages being more specific than others.

I was visiting a Mexican bakery in my neighborhood. The sign in English said "Please use tongs or napkins." The sign in Spanish (as best as I could translate) said "Do not use your hands to pick up pastries, please use the tongs or napkins."

I thought it was interesting that the Spanish sign added the "do not use your hands" while the English sign left it out.

Very well done indeed, targeting the Spanish speaking population, addressing them as the ones with an edge over the English speaking one: their knowledge of Spanish allows them to re-contextualise the English message as important for everyday life, but ethically and socially silly. Spanish speakers are thus addressed as the ones with true access to self-reflection over issues concerning money.

I work in marketing. Let me illuminate.

The billboard placement or "buy" was likely done by someone white who works in the ad world and does not speak Spanish. Advertising is a very white world. Betting they didn't know what message they were pairing with which.

As for the two statements that seemingly contradict-- they are aimed at different markets, youth and Hispanics. Another poster caught this and it's true, Citibank definitely is changing their message for different markets. But why these messages?

It's because marketers have a program they access to pull general information and statistics about types of people. I can tell you that generally, Hispanics care more about family-related activities, read more newspapers, and put more emphasis on living well than living for status than whites do. Statistically. In general, young people today love their families and lean on them for support more than previous generations. The English-speaking youth of San Francisco likely have affluent parents and a reduced motivation to be financially independent.

The musings of other commenters regarding this issue are very clever! But usually people guess marketers are being a *little* cleverer than they really are!

Still thinking about this one. It's very odd.
It's not just the juxtaposition of the two ads... what I'm stuck on is, I'm a native English speaker, and it's the billboard in English that I'm having trouble understanding.

Allow me to run on for a sec.
Is it me, or is there something oddly... I don't know, vague about it? (That alone is weird, as this is an advertisement. They don't usually want for clarity.) Money=important is framed as a given, but it's not specified how it's "important." You can fill it in— surely they mean money management is important?— but it's strange that it's not made obvious, since as-is, unless you pause to think about it, "[having] money is super important, period" is the obvious reading. And that's jarring, because it's so contrary to the way we [in the US] are generally taught to think about money— it's not usually said outright, but there's a cultural notion is that it's gauche (and maybe even slightly immoral?) to be too focused on money/wealth* (which is how we get things like: it's rude to talk about/ask about money). [Of course, we are completely obsessed with money, but that's another story!]

It's also weird in the context of Citibank's advertising for the last few years. The billboard in Spanish fits perfectly with the "live richly" campaign (which I'm pretty sure is still actively running in print form), but the one in English just... doesn't. After all this time, I'm so familiar with the nature of the campaign that the English billboard would have struck me as odd even if I'd seen it by itself.

. . . . .
Oh, and just for fun, another theory:
Mentioned this post to my guy and he immediately wondered if the second billboard's message, delivered exclusively in Spanish, was somehow connected to the (correct? erroneous?) image of recent Latino immigrants in particular as "super-savers." That is, the idea that they're more likely to strictly save their money (or "send it back home") than, y'know, spend it profligately on Xboxes and whatnot like longtime USians do. He wondered if the idea was to undermine that cultural tendency: "don't be such a miser!"*
::shrug::
It's a thought.

[*The cultural confusion on this is pretty funny/sad. Save too strictly, and you're a penny-pinching miser who's unhealthily/immorally obsessed with wealth. So you should spend freely and easily, not focusing "too" much on saving a nickel here or there. But not too freely, because overly-conspicuous consumption is also frowned upon as vaguely immoral and offensive. Everybody is supposed to be, or at least act, "middle class"— not "rich," but ever able to afford luxuries. That may not even be considered luxuries.]

this is so foolish hahaha