Despite America’s growing diversity, multicultural marketing continues to face persistent underinvestment and inconsistency. While Black and Latino consumers make up approximately 30% of the U.S. population, early multicultural campaigns received less than 5% of national advertising budgets, a gap that has improved slightly but remains a major challenge today. Even now, multicultural efforts are often the first budgets cut when financial pressures arise, undermining brand loyalty and growth opportunities.
There has been a shift from language-driven strategies to culture-driven ones. In the past, Spanish-language media buys were often seen as enough. Today, success demands deeper cultural insight, recognizing that diverse consumers live multigenerational, multiracial, and bilingual realities. Authentic connection, not just language, is now the key to meaningful engagement.
Brands like Honda offer a blueprint through initiatives like Honda Stage, which uses music as a universal passion point to unite diverse audiences organically without forcing segmentation. Meanwhile, missteps like Target’s recent DEI pullback show how quickly consumer trust can erode when companies abandon their multicultural commitments.
Another critical takeaway is the growing importance of first-party data and minority-owned media partnerships. As privacy regulations limit traditional targeting methods, collaborating with platforms that genuinely understand their audiences becomes even more valuable.
Ultimately, brands must shift away from chasing fleeting viral moments and instead focus on building real, lasting community relationships.
In this episode of The New Mainstream podcast, Randy Gudiel, SVP, Media Director at Orci, shares valuable insights on why consistency, cultural authenticity, and sustained investment are now essential for brands that want to thrive in an increasingly diverse marketplace.
Meet Our Guest:
Randy Gudiel is a media strategist with over 15 years of experience in media planning, buying, and integrated marketing. He began his career in General Market advertising, supporting automotive and hospitality brands. Early in his career, he transitioned into multicultural marketing—where he led media strategy for clients in financial services, tech, government, CPG, and gaming, helping them better connect with Hispanic, Asian, and African American audiences.
Today, as SVP, Media Director at Orci, Randy leads cross-channel, performance-focused media strategies rooted in cultural relevance, consumer insight, and a Hispanic-first perspective. His work reflects the understanding that effective multicultural marketing starts with intention, not adaptation. His current portfolio spans categories including entertainment, automotive, and grocery, with a focus on building media plans that center Hispanic audiences while thoughtfully engaging the broader multicultural landscape.
Over the course of his career, Randy has also supported clients in healthcare, nonprofit, QSR, and entertainment—bringing a thoughtful, data-informed approach to every challenge.
A first-generation Guatemalan-American, Randy brings a valuable blend of lived experience and strategic expertise to the work, ensuring that every plan is inclusive, intentional, and built for impact.
Influencer marketing has evolved into a powerful strategy for brands looking to engage diverse audiences. Influencers leverage their broad reach to drive awareness and inspire consumer buy-in, while creator marketing enables passionate content creators to engage and connect with niche communities. Brands are increasingly incorporating both approaches into their communication strategies, with social media being a key platform.
However, with both approaches, the goal goes beyond brand visibility. It’s about achieving third-party validation, where trusted voices, such as influencers or creatives, endorse a brand. While these endorsements may be paid, the willingness of these individuals to put their reputations on the line for a brand speaks volumes. This is essential for building consumer trust, as audiences connect more deeply with authentic experiences shared by relatable individuals than with traditional advertising.
A key aspect of this is ensuring that influencers and creators genuinely reflect the audiences brands aim to reach and ensure they are compensated fairly based on engagement and reach. By prioritizing this, brands can cultivate stronger, long-term relationships with influencers and creators. This approach benefits all parties—influencers and creators feel valued, and brands gain more authentic brand advocacy.
One of the biggest mistakes brands make with creator and influencer marketing is dictating content rather than trusting the influencer or creator to do what initially drew the brand to them. While key messaging is necessary, giving them the freedom to be creative ensures the content feels natural and authentic. When they seamlessly integrate brand messages into their content, it enhances both engagement and credibility.
In this episode of The New Mainstream Podcast, Gabe Mederos, Vice President of Creator Marketing with Edelman, discusses the importance of authenticity, diversity, and relationship-building in creator and influencer marketing.
Meet Gabe: Gabe is a creator marketing professional with extensive experience in influencer relations, strategy development, content strategy, analytics, and leadership. A University of Toronto graduate with over 19 years of PR and communications experience in corporate, not-for-profit and government, Gabe has completed his social media and digital marketing certification. Gabe has held senior digital roles at top Canadian brands such as Scotiabank, TELUS, and Nestlé Purina PetCare.
Gabe is currently a Vice President of Creator Marketing at Edelman, where he heads up the creator marketing function for an assortment of clients in Canada, including Samsung, Microsoft, PepsiCo, and eBay. Gabe is also an Instructor at Humber College, where he teaches social media and digital marketing.
U.S. consumer demographics are shifting, with multicultural consumers projected to become the majority by 2050. These audiences drive population growth, influence cultural trends, and wield significant buying power. For programmatic media buyers, it’s clear that effectively engaging multicultural consumers isn’t just an ethical choice—it’s a strategic business imperative.
Yet, despite their importance, the tools we use to connect with these audiences often fall short. While the conversation around diverse media has gained traction, it’s time we give equal weight to an often-overlooked counterpart—diverse data.
From Hispanic-focused streaming services to Black-owned publications, diverse media platforms have emerged as powerful channels to engage multicultural audiences. The industry’s push to invest in diverse media is paying off, with more brands dedicating budgets to platforms that authentically reflect the communities they aim to reach. However, while media outlets are the vehicles, the data fueling these campaigns often lacks the nuance necessary to drive authentic connections.
Let’s address the elephant in the room: Not all data is created equal. Many programmatic campaigns rely on datasets that fail to capture the complexities of multicultural consumers. Generic datasets often rely on outdated assumptions, grouping diverse communities into monolithic categories. For example, “Hispanic consumers” might be treated as a single entity, ignoring the rich diversity of language preferences, generational differences, and cultural nuances within this group.
This lack of specificity leads to missed opportunities. Imagine a campaign targeting bilingual Millennials who seamlessly navigate between English and Spanish. Without granular data that identifies this segment, a brand risks delivering ads that feel irrelevant or, worse, alienating. These blind spots hinder campaign performance and the broader mission of building trust with multicultural audiences.
So, how do we address these blind spots? The answer lies in diverse data, specifically privacy-compliant data rooted in authenticity. Zero-party data—information willingly shared by consumers through surveys, quizzes, or direct interactions—is a game changer. Unlike inferred or third-party data, zero-party data offers insights directly from the source.
For programmatic buyers, this means the ability to create audience segments that go beyond basic demographics, such as identifying African American homeowners interested in sustainability or LGBTQ+ families seeking inclusive financial services. Programmatic campaigns can achieve greater precision and resonance by starting with strong seed data, ensuring that every impression counts.
One of the greatest challenges in programmatic media buying has been bridging the gap between planning and activation. Survey data has traditionally been used for planning purposes, such as shaping strategy and identifying key segments. However, this data often gets lost in translation when it comes time to activate campaigns.
Diverse data addresses this concern by enabling seamless integration with demand-side platforms (DSPs). For instance, a campaign targeting first-time Latino homebuyers can move from a strategic idea to an activated campaign with minimal friction. This end-to-end connection ensures that the data guiding your strategy is the same data driving your execution.
As Connected TV (CTV) expands, so does the need for diverse data. CTV offers unparalleled opportunities to reach audiences in a highly engaging format, but its effectiveness hinges on accurate targeting. By leveraging diverse data, ads are more likely to resonate with multicultural viewers because they align with their values and identities, driving deeper engagement and maximizing ROI.
The same principle applies across all digital channels, from display to social. Programmatic media buyers have the tools to layer diverse data onto existing programmatic pipes, enabling campaigns that are not only scalable but also deeply resonant.
As programmatic media buyers, we have an opportunity—and a responsibility—to push the industry forward. Investing in diverse data is not just a tactical decision, it’s a strategic one. We must ensure that the stories we tell through media reflect the realities of the audiences we serve. By aligning our media strategies with the growing demand for authenticity in advertising, we can drive growth that benefits both brands and consumers.
This blog post was originally published on MediaPost.
Despite recent challenges to DE&I progress, the demand for inclusivity in digital media remains strong. Advertisers are waking up to the growing influence of underrepresented and marginalized groups and are looking to allocate portions of their digital media budgets to diverse-owned media platforms to better engage these groups. This approach has several benefits, like giving minority-owned businesses a seat at the table and ensuring that media dollars contribute to more equitable representation in advertising.
But here’s the challenge. While a growing contingent, the number of diverse-owned media platforms is limited, making it difficult for buyers to fully achieve their diversity spending goals. This is where diverse-owned data can step in to bridge the gap.
The number of diverse-owned media platforms has surged in recent years, driven largely by the momentum of social justice movements like Black Lives Matter in 2020. Yet, despite the industry’s growth and well-earned recognition, demand for programmatic is outstripping available inventory. The shortage has led to bottlenecks, frustrating media buyers eager to invest.
Additionally, some diverse-owned media platforms, while culturally rich and authentic, lack the scale needed to accommodate large programmatic buys. This often forces buyers to look for alternative ways to meet their diversity goals without compromising the reach and impact of their campaigns.
Diverse-owned data, on the other hand, offers a scalable and efficient solution to this supply-demand imbalance. Unlike media platforms, data has no cap on inventory. It can be applied flexibly across multiple campaigns, regardless of the media channel, ensuring that diversity goals are met consistently.
By investing in diverse-owned data – data collected and owned by diverse entities – programmatic buyers can enhance the cultural relevance of their campaigns and precision in targeting specific hard-to-reach demographic groups. More importantly, it ensures that media budgets earmarked for diversity are spent effectively, overcoming the challenges posed by platform scarcity.
Diving deeper, diverse-owned data enables advertisers to incorporate cultural sensitivity into campaigns at scale. Diverse audiences are far from monolithic, possessing unique preferences, behaviors and beliefs that demand a nuanced approach. Diverse-owned data is more likely to reflect these nuances, offering insights that are both deep and actionable.
For instance, using diverse-owned data, a campaign targeting Hispanic Millennials in the U.S. can be tailored to reflect the specific cultural touchpoints that resonate with this audience, such as language preferences, cultural identity and media consumption habits. This level of specificity would be difficult to achieve through platform-based buys alone, especially given the limited number of diverse-owned media options available.
Moreover, diverse owned data facilitates continuous optimization. As more campaigns are run, the data becomes richer and more refined, allowing for even greater accuracy in targeting and messaging. This iterative process helps build stronger connections with diverse audiences over time, leading to more effective campaigns.
While the political appetite for DE&I may be waning, consumers are steadfast in their expectations of brands. In response, the advertising industry remains committed to championing diversity, but doing so will require programmatic buyers to rethink how they allocate their diversity budgets. While the focus on diverse-owned media platforms is commendable, it’s clear that there are challenges in relying solely on these platforms to meet diversity goals.
Diverse-owned data offers a viable and scalable alternative, or a valuable complement, to existing services. It offers the flexibility to reach diverse audiences across any media, with the added benefit of cultural sensitivity and relevance. By integrating diverse-owned data into their strategies, programmatic buyers can ensure that their diversity initiatives are not only fulfilled but also drive meaningful engagement with the audiences they seek to reach.
This blog post was originally published on MediaPost.
Consumers are demanding more from brands when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion. They are tired of the social polarization surrounding DEI and how these concepts are exploited to foster division and isolation. They support brands committed to creating a culture of respect and understanding where everyone feels valued, seen and heard in the workplace and the marketplace.
But too often, DEI initiatives in organizations go no further than high-level training and one-off workshops. DEI is more than bias training, however. It's about embedding DEI into all aspects of the organization, from hiring and promotion to product development and marketing.
Brands demonstrating their commitment to DEI will resonate with consumers, especially multicultural segments and younger generations. These consumers are increasingly looking to support brands that align with their values, and DEI has become one of their core values. Studies show that African American and Hispanic respondents, for example, are the most likely to support a company that makes a public commitment to diversity and inclusion initiatives. They do this by sharing support on social media, spending more money at stores, and going out of their way to shop in specific stores.
Removing limiting factors like bias and stereotype threat from organizational culture liberates employees to perform at their best, resulting in increased productivity, improved work outputs, and higher revenues.
In this episode of The New Mainstream podcast, Maria Morukian, CEO of MSM Global Consulting, discusses how to build high-performing, inclusive workplaces that better serve employees and consumers.
Meet Our Guest: Maria Morukian
For more than 18 years, Maria has devoted herself to consulting, training and coaching leaders and organizations to facilitate culture change, with a specialization in diversity, equity, inclusion, intercultural competence, and innovation.
Maria’s passion lies in building bridges across identity differences, facilitating dialogue and coaching individuals to reflect on their individual cultural lenses that impact their beliefs and behaviors. She is sought after for her ability to connect on an individual level, as well as guide systemic change initiatives with measurable results.
Maria has partnered with a broad range of clients, including American University, the Association for Animal Welfare Advancement, National Institutes of Health, PBS Distribution, U.S. Department of State, and the World Bank. She has worked with leaders around the world, including Colombia, India, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Thailand, and Tunisia.
Impact investing has emerged as a powerful tool for directing private capital toward social and environmental causes while generating financial returns for investors. This approach is particularly relevant for black and brown entrepreneurs who often face systemic barriers that limit their access to capital and resources. Many of these entrepreneurs are creating businesses that address social and environmental challenges faced by their communities, such as access to affordable housing, healthcare, and education. However, they often struggle to secure the funding they need to grow and scale their businesses.
Despite the data documenting the opportunity gap for diverse founders compared to their White counterparts, there is a persistent narrative that suggests no correlation between race and ethnicity and business enablement. Yet, their funding journey varies significantly and getting people to buy into social impact as a business strategy isn't easy.
In this episode of The New Mainstream podcast, Jessica Salinas, Chief Investment Officer at New Media Ventures, discusses how impact investing can empower diverse entrepreneurs and contribute to a more just, equitable, and sustainable society.
The difference between organizations that implement diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives well and those that stumble is intentionality. Two years after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, people of color are still waiting to see systemic change economically, politically and socially.
Companies and brands that employ millions of workers can make a tremendous impact here if that influence is wielded to take a stance on social justice issues, level the playing field for black and brown workers, and increase representation in marketing and advertising.
That work begins with the talent pipeline. Organizations that intentionally fill the pipeline with diverse candidates are more likely to hire employees with diverse backgrounds. That diversity impacts culture, innovation, creativity and, ultimately, business outcomes.
For marketers, when hiring, it’s important to remember that what’s happening inside the organization often shows up on the outside. Without cultural competence and representation, inclusive marketing will be difficult to achieve. Simply put, failing to diversify your talent pipeline is why your marketing is missing the mark.
In this episode of The New Mainstream podcast, Carole Smith, Marketing Director and Executive Sponsor of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council at Aquent, discusses the role of diversity in talent acquisition and how it improves business outcomes.