Border radio: Tijuana's Uniradio wants the best of both worlds--hometown fans plus San Diego's Hispanics. (Currents: Latin America).

Radio signals need no passport to cross borders. In San Diego, Mexico's proximity is obvious with a turn of the dial. Domestic stations blare hip-hop while, across the border, stations pump out brass-heavy Mariachi tunes or slick, sentimental Mexican pop ballads. With the number of Hispanic listeners growing in San Diego, Tijuana's Uniradio decided it was time to snare advertising dollars to the north.

In mid 2001, family-owned Uniradio dispatched Ricardo Astiazaran, 33, to head a San Diego sales office for its five Tijuana stations. In a life story typical of the U.S.--Mexican border, Astiazaran was born in a U.S. hospital but grew up in Mexico and studied finance in Monterrey.

Before moving to San Diego, he headed Uniradio's four stations in Hermosillo, a dusty state capital in the Sonoran Desert of northern Mexico.

"The business culture in the United States has been a challenge and a constant learning process," says Astiazaran, now Uniradio's chief financial officer. "At first, the whole American approach to business seemed excessively cold, if efficient. It was always, 'Let's get to the point,' or 'Where are you going with that?' Where I came from in Hermosillo, everything was different."

James B. Gross, Uniradio's national sales manager, says Astiazaran realized changes were needed to transform Uniradio. "You've got to Americanize," Gross says. "If you want those U.S. ad dollars, you have to run this like a U.S. operation." In Mexico, for example, ratings agencies are ineffective and ads are often purchased based on relationships and a good sales pitch; in the United States, ad agencies wanted detailed ratings, audience profiles, market research--hard data.

For Astiazaran, the first step meant getting help in assembling a marketing infrastructure. With more than 3 million Spanish-speakers between them, Tijuana and San Diego combined to create California's largest Hispanic audience outside of Los Angeles. All of the Latin-oriented media groups are here. "It's a challenge, competing against the best of the best," he says.

One competitor, the independently owned Radio Latina, established itself as an aggressive grassroots marketer in the 1980s, with a fleet of double-decker buses that tour malls and events. Hispanic Broadcasting Corporation, the largest owner of Spanish-language radio in the United States, bought two stations here for $65 million in the mid-1990s.

Thomas J. McSweeney, general sales manager for Hispanic Broadcasting, says a key edge he has over Uniradio is local feel. "They reacted positively to having their own station, when we open the morning show saying 'Good morning, San Diego,'" McSweeney says. Uniradio's Astiazaran is betting on a different approach. "We try to see it as if our station were right on the border and we were transmitting to both sides," he says.

Power play. Looking to polish his product, Astiazaran recruited consultants from Los Angeles to help him adjust music formats to bi-national tastes. To appeal to demanding U.S. consumers, Uniradio cut time slated for ads, tweaked outdated play lists and added a San Diego news and traffic report. Miami's Radio Unica, a Spanish-language talk radio network, was enlisted to take over the AM signal, linking Uniradio to a well-known name in U.S. broadcasting. Uniradio also invested heavily in stronger antennae so that its signals would not be outgunned.

Uniradio's leading station, XHTY FM, appropriately named "La Invasora," has climbed steadily to fourth place among San Diego Hispanics. Astiazaran, however, sees ratings as half the battle. He also wants to work against what he considers a knee-jerk resistance major U.S. corporations have to spending ad money on Hispanic radio. More than 800,000 Hispanic-origin people live in and around San Diego, with spending power of $9 billion and a mean household income of better than $45,000.

"Some still have the misconception that the Hispanic consumer is synonymous with limited spending power," Astiazaran says. "A personal goal of mine is to convert those companies who only focus on the general market, so that Hispanic media can gain a bigger piece of the pie."