Julio Iglesias in 1985 Hello! “I had to choose between a psychiatrist and the Bahamas,” he told magazine. Just a few weeks ago, the Spanish artist retired to his Nassau mansion to rest from an intense world tour that had caused him to travel more than 90,000 kilometers to perform 120 concerts. Despite being physically and emotionally tired, Julio was very happy. After years of hard work, she had finally achieved her greatest desire: to become the most popular singer on the planet and conquer the US public.
«In the following years he achieved notable successes, such as the bestselling solo album Un hombre or La Carretera, but after conquering the world show business, his career went downhill. It felt like his time had passed, ”says philosopher, doctor of Sociology and musician Hans Laguna. After three years of work, Laguna said Hey! Julio Iglesias and the conquest of America (Contra, 2022) is an essay of over 400 pages of abundant graphic material that reviews Julio Iglesias’ half-century career and analyzes his strategy for success in the country that invented the entertainment business thanks to him. his wise use of the media, the creation of a strong personal brand, and of course his effort and dedication.
“My first days in North America were very difficult. Sobering, enriching, but very difficult. I came there when I was very old, 35 years old, already strongly in control of the taste, smell and color of my soil. The shock was very strong and I had a very bad time,” she recalled of her landing in Miami. Revered in Europe and Latin America, the singer suffered the contempt of a significant part of society and the media, as well as uprooting the meaning of leaving her country.
“He seems like a nice guy, but why orange?” said; Barbra Streisand asked her manager, “Do you really want me to record with this guy?” he refused to duet with her, saying; Several newspapers mocked his rudimentary English, and his songs were described as “iron music”, referring to the Latin maids playing in the background while doing housework. She began to be described as the “sex symbol of menopause,” responding with humor to one comment: “Whenever it is. [las fans maduras] They ask me for an autograph and say it is for their mother». A few years later, when she was already famous in the US, she even made a cameo appearance on The Golden Girls.
“Part of the rejection had to do with the fact that cultural and musical criticism in the US was done by men whose paradigm was rock music,” Laguna explains. “They viewed him as artificial and belittled him because his audience was predominantly female, which is clearly macho.”
The press also displayed xenophobic and racist attitudes. Inaccessible to Europe and Latin America because of his fame and millions, Julio Iglesias was more like the gardener of Lady Chatterley’s lover, the soap opera chauffeur seducing the groom or mistress in the United States. During his first years in the US, Julio was adorned with a complete package: machismo, racism and classicism.
Despite these disdain, Julio did not lose heart in his quest to win over the American people. To achieve this, she enlisted the services of Rogers & Cowan, a public relations agency that launched a communications campaign to promote herself among opinion leaders with a short but powerful slogan: Who is Julio? [¿Julio quién?].
“The campaign used many of the strategies The Beatles used in 1964 and artists like Rosalia use today. While it was always sold that the Beatles were a thing of their own, in reality there was a big PR mechanism behind it. In that sense, Julio quickly realized that beyond being a singer, there’s always a character or brand that needs to produce content,” says Hey!
Hand in hand with R&C, Julio Iglesias appeared on Johny Carson’s Tonight Show, recorded a duet with Willie Nelson, another with Diana Ross, and soon after Julio signed a million-dollar contract to be the image of Michael Jackson Pepsi. also closed more. A lucrative deal to be the image of Coca-Cola. Pepsi sought to position itself within the African-American community; Coca-Cola thought Julio could be a good prescriber, both among the WASP community and among the millions of Latinos residing in the US.
Among other benefits, this deal made it possible to finance the very expensive world tour of 1984 that would bless Julio Iglesias and that he would eventually have to take refuge in Nassau. It’s what his career downfall would begin as evidenced by the sponsorship deals below. For example, in 1997 a tour of Spain was sponsored by La Casera, a national drink that had nothing to do with the cosmopolitan “spark of life”. Whenever the singer took the stage and saw the logo of the popular soft drink, she angrily commented, “Damn, we’re going to make the next sausage announcement.”
But the complaint was only necessary to add the slogan “again”. Maybe Julio wanted to forget about it, but the 1992 tour of Spain was sponsored by the El Pozo sausage brand.