When the SBA changed its 8(a) program in 2023, many small business owners were caught off guard. For decades, race and gender were presumed indicators of social disadvantage. That changed overnight. Suddenly, every applicant had to write a personal narrative explaining how they experienced disadvantage in education, employment, or business. Back then, I wrote about how the change required applicants to submit a personal narrative to stay in the 8(a) program.

Now the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) has followed the same path. Their new Interim Final Rule removes race and gender as automatic indicators of disadvantage for the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) program. Every firm, new or existing, must now prove individual social and economic disadvantage through a written statement and financial documentation.

This change affects every DBE-certified firm in the country. Agencies like LA Metro have already paused setting DBE contract goals while they reevaluate firms under the new rules. It is the same process SBA went through with 8(a), and the same lessons apply.

What Happened with SBA’s Change

When the SBA rule first came out, it required every 8(a) applicant to write a personal narrative describing specific examples of discrimination that caused professional or financial harm. Most of us had never written anything like that before.

At ThinkNow, a 100% Hispanic-owned firm, we had to describe moments in our lives that shaped how we were treated in education, employment, and business. Writing those examples was not easy, but it was revealing. The process made clear how bias and systemic barriers had influenced our journey as Latino business owners in an industry that is still overwhelmingly non-Hispanic white.

In the end, the SBA was not asking for emotion. They wanted evidence. They wanted a clear cause-and-effect between a moment of discrimination and a tangible setback. That same approach now applies to the DOT’s DBE program.

What DOT’s Change Means for You

The new DOT rule eliminates the presumption that minorities or women are socially and economically disadvantaged. Everyone must now demonstrate their disadvantage through specific, documented examples.

If you are certified as a DBE, you will need to prepare to requalify. If you are applying for the first time, your narrative will determine whether you are approved.

The good news is that you can write a strong narrative by being factual, specific, and clear about how discrimination has affected your career or business.

How to Write a Strong Disadvantaged Narrative

The SBA format used for the 8(a) program is the best starting point for the DOT’s new rules. It requires two detailed examples of discrimination that had a negative effect on your professional life. Each example should include:

1. When it happened
2. Where it happened
3. Who was involved
4. What happened
5. Why it was discriminatory
6. How it caused harm

Here’s how it looks in practice:

“On [date], I applied for a position at [xxxx]. Another applicant, who was not [Hispanic/African American/Female/etc], and I had nearly identical qualifications and prior work experience. After the interviews, he was offered a front-of-store sales associate position with higher pay and commission opportunities, while I was offered a lower-paying stockroom job. When I asked about the difference, I was told that customers “relate better” to certain employees. That decision limited my income and delayed my ability to support myself financially at a critical point in my life.”

That one paragraph includes everything the agencies look for: time, place, cause, and impact.

Write two examples like that, ideally from different areas such as education, employment, or business. Avoid vague statements like “I have always faced discrimination.” Instead, focus on specific events that changed the direction of your life or business.

Connect Each Story to a Measurable Outcome

For each example, explain how the discrimination caused real harm. This could include:

• Lost income or promotions
• Denied contracts or partnerships
• Difficulty obtaining credit
• Delayed business growth

The reviewers are not judging how you felt. They are evaluating whether discrimination had a material effect on your professional advancement.

End on a Forward-Looking Note

Close your narrative by showing perseverance and commitment to growth. The SBA and DOT both value evidence of resilience. Make it clear that, despite barriers, you continue to build your business and contribute to your community.

Through ThinkNow, we built a multicultural insights firm that challenges the very barriers we experienced. Our goal is to ensure that the next generation of diverse entrepreneurs does not face the same obstacles.

Final Thoughts

Both the SBA and, now, the DOT have adopted a race-neutral standard that requires every applicant to tell their own story. This may seem like a burden, but it also gives business owners the power to define their own experience in their own words.

If you are preparing to reapply or renew your certification, take the time to write a clear and honest narrative. Be specific. Be factual. And remember, this is your opportunity to show the path you’ve walked and the strength it took to get here.

You can read more about the SBA’s 2023 change on our blog at ThinkNow.com/blog.

Gen Z, now between the ages of 13 and 28, has had very different life experiences than the Millennials that preceded them. Many of them were children during the financial fallout of the Great Recession and navigated adolescence during the COVID-19 pandemic, all formative experiences that have shaped their values, beliefs around work, and their place in society. Since many of them are still charting their career paths, ThinkNow set out to understand how this generation perceives service in the U.S. armed forces.

Our latest study surveyed a nationally representative sample of 476 Gen Z adults (ages 18–24) to uncover what motivates or discourages them from serving, and to explore how these perspectives differ across cultural backgrounds.

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Familiar and Open-Minded

While most of Gen Z was too young to have served during the U.S. wars in Iraq (2003-2011) and Afghanistan (2001-2021), four out of five Gen Z respondents know someone who has served in the military, whether a family member or friend. This familiarity appears to be creating a foundation of respect and recognition for military service with half of Gen Z holding a favorable view of the U.S. military overall.

Willingness to Join

This familiarity and positive opinion may be responsible for roughly three in ten Gen Z adults saying they would consider joining the military. That is higher than was seen towards the end of the Middle Eastern wars. Ten years ago, Department of Defense tracking polls showed youth interest levels averaging between 13-16%. In comparison, today’s 30% represents a significant increase in openness to service among young Americans.

Career-Minded and Purpose-Driven

For those considering enlistment, the top motivators are career growth, education benefits, and skill development. Gen Z sees military service as both a path to purpose and to opportunity. They value discipline, teamwork, and leadership, but also want clear evidence that their commitment will lead to tangible outcomes in civilian life.

Cultural and Gender Nuances

Interest varies across groups. Men lean toward the Marine Corps, while women favor the Air Force. Non-Hispanic Whites express the strongest overall favorability, while Hispanic and African American respondents are somewhat less likely to have close family ties to service. Recognizing these nuances allows for more authentic, culturally relevant communication.

The Role of Incentives

Among those uncertain about joining, higher pay, stronger benefits, and guaranteed post-service employment stand out as the top motivators. These are practical, achievable levers that can further expand the pool of interested young adults.

The Takeaway

Gen Z’s willingness to consider military service is a bright spot in a decade-long trend of declining youth engagement. Their 30% interest rate signals renewed openness and suggests that the right combination of purpose, opportunity, and security can attract a new generation of service-minded Americans. Understanding what drives Gen Z’s choices helps not only the military but any institution seeking to connect with a generation that values authenticity, balance, and progress.

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Walk through any major city in the U.S. and you’ll see it. Consumer demographics are shifting. From local shops to national brands, multicultural communities are driving commerce and key economic trends. Yet, while consumers are evolving, many marketing strategies are not. Too often, multicultural audiences remain an afterthought rather than the center of business growth.

Brands that succeed in multicultural marketing start by recognizing that inclusion is a business imperative, not optional. Data shows that in many regions, net population growth and the dollars that come with it are driven by Hispanic, Black, and Asian consumers. Failing to engage these audiences is a missed opportunity, putting brands at a competitive disadvantage.

For brands that are investing in multicultural marketing, authenticity is foundational. Campaigns that perform best are rooted in local insight and cultural nuance, often brought to life through relatable storytelling and community-driven engagement. For example, influencer partnerships that reflect real family dynamics, humor, and everyday experiences resonate far more deeply than ads simply translated from English. When creative control is shared with culturally fluent voices, brands earn credibility and build relationships.

Technology powers these relationships, offering new ways to reach, engage, and measure audiences. Artificial intelligence, for instance, can help brands understand consumers, but without culturally diverse data, it misses the nuances that define communities. Human insight is critical to ensuring inclusion and minimizing bias.

On this episode of The New Mainstream podcast, Liz Pedraza, Director of Hispanic Marketing at Pinnacle Advertising and President of CIMA Advertising, explores how multicultural insight, data, and authentic storytelling create measurable business impact for brands.

Meet Our Guest:

As a 300%er, Liz’s Mexican, Puerto Rican, and American roots run deep. Growing up proud of her vibrant heritage gave Liz the courage to dream big and find new ways to reach and speak to the Latino consumer. A career spanning over 20+ years of media and strategy experience, including Univision Communications, Telemundo, NBC Universal, iHeart Media and NPR. Liz infuses boldness, drive, and a love for her culture into her work, inspiring others to embrace the beauty, relevance, and opportunity of these key audiences. A thought leader in the industry, Liz continues to weave tales of tradition and forward-thinking into the ever-changing tapestry of Multicultural marketing in the U.S.

At ThinkNow, we believe that understanding people starts with listening and getting beyond data points. By integrating artificial Intelligence (AI) into our online panels, we’re transforming how we capture and analyze open-ended responses in market research.

For years, open-text analysis was a manual, costly, and limited process. Today, AI enables us to process qualitative insights with unprecedented speed and precision, optimizing every stage of the research cycle. With these technologies, we don’t just analyze words; we interpret emotions, tone, and context, uncovering the authentic voice of the consumer that traditional methods often miss.

One of the most significant innovations is the ability to collect responses in audio or video format within the panel. This approach allows participants to express themselves more naturally, adding nuances that written text cannot capture. AI transforms these recordings into structured, automatically coded information, available in real time to analysis teams.

Moreover, machine-learning algorithms can assess the coherence and authenticity of responses, enhancing panel quality and reducing human bias. This results in more reliable, representative insights, especially in multicultural studies where expression and context are key to accurate interpretation.

This convergence of AI and online panels ushers in a new era in research, one where the boundaries between quantitative and qualitative blur, giving way to a faster, smarter, and more human ecosystem of insights.

ThinkNow is also expanding these innovations through synthetic sample, an advanced approach that broadens the reach and representativeness of studies without compromising methodological integrity.

If you’d like to learn more about how AI, online panels, and synthetic sampling are revolutionizing research, click here.

When we launched ThinkNow Audiences, our goal was simple: put multicultural data where media gets bought. We saw a gap between multicultural insights and how those insights were being activated in media buys, so we built a bridge.

Now, that bridge is getting wider, smarter, and faster.

ThinkNow Audiences 2.0 isn’t just a refresh. It’s a strategic evolution in multicultural research and programmatic media buying. We’ve doubled down on contextual relevance, expanded private marketplace (PMP) partnerships, and focused on what matters most to buyers – culturally relevant campaigns that drive top-line results.

From Demographics to Cultural Context

Traditional multicultural targeting has often been limited to high-level demographics, like age, ethnicity, and language. While still useful, those markers alone do not fully reflect how people engage with media or express their identities in 2025.

Today’s audiences are fluid. They move between languages, cultures, and platforms depending on their mood, the moment, and the medium. So, our audience strategy needed to evolve to capture the nuances of today’s consumers.

ThinkNow Audiences 2.0 introduces a new layer of cultural context built around behaviors, affinities, and signals that reflect this complexity, including:

• Spanglish fluency segments
• Cultural content affinity, such as regional music fans, Latin American sports loyalists, or bilingual comedy watchers
• Crossover consumers who blend multicultural identity with general market tastes in streaming, shopping, and social media

By mapping these signals, we’re creating segments that reach not only Latino, Black, and Asian consumers, but also those from other diverse backgrounds. They speak to who they are and what they care about in the moment they’re engaging.

Why Contextual Targeting Matters Now

The loss of cookies has made contextual data more valuable than ever. While much of the industry is still catching up, multicultural audiences have always been more effectively engaged through context, not just identity signals.

We’ve leaned into the shift to contextual by:

• Partnering with publishers that offer culturally-aligned content environments
• Layering survey-based insights into PMP strategies so inventory reflects not just who the user is, but how and where they consume content
• Building cultural contextual bundles around moments like Hispanic Heritage Month, Día de los Muertos, or Black Music Month

In short, we’re shifting from basic audience targeting to authentic audience connection.

PMP: The Quiet Power Play

A big part of our 2.0 rollout has been focused on private marketplace deals, where we’re seeing serious traction. The agencies and brands we work with are looking for:

• Efficiency with better performance per dollar spent
• Trust through inventory with verified cultural alignment
• Customization through the ability to match creative with context

PMPs allow us to deliver all three. They provide our partners with an easy entry point into multicultural activation, eliminating the need to overhaul their entire media strategy.

We’ve seen success working with Hispanic-focused agencies, Black-owned publishers, and general market programmatic buyers who want to reach growth audiences with more intention.

Built with Cultural Integrity

What makes ThinkNow Audiences different isn’t just the multicultural data. It’s how the data is created. Our segments are built on:

• Zero-party data from ThinkNow’s proprietary research panels, real people voluntarily sharing their perspectives
• Cultural nuance layered in by humans, not just algorithms that assign generic labels
• Validated behavioral signals that reflect lived experiences rather than broad modeled assumptions

ThinkNow Audiences is not repackaged, generic data with a multicultural label on it. It’s original and culturally grounded, the result of over a decade of working at the intersection of culture, data, and media.

Looking Ahead

As we move into 2026, we are committed to making it easier for brands to meet multicultural audiences where they are in ways that are important to them.

ThinkNow Audiences 2.0 is a step forward, but it’s also an invitation to the industry to make multicultural marketing, central, not secondary, to data strategy to drive relevance in marketing and media. The future of audience targeting is not just more diverse, it’s more human, and that’s what we’re building for.

In today’s global marketplace, data has become the single most valuable asset for businesses. Every strategic decision, whether it’s a new product launch, entering a new market, or refining customer experience, is anchored in insights drawn from quantitative research. But here’s a reality check. The accuracy of research is only as strong as the panel it draws from.

That’s where proprietary panels enter the conversation.

Many organizations rely on third-party sample providers, but an increasing number are realizing that owning a proprietary panel can serve as a strategic driver of competitive advantage. Here’s why.

1. Data Integrity

Third-party panels are convenient, but they come with risks, including duplicate respondents, fraudulent behavior, and a lack of transparency in recruitment. In a world where online fraud has become increasingly sophisticated, depending solely on external sources can expose your research to inaccuracies that undermine decision-making.

A proprietary panel, however, gives you control over respondent recruitment, profiling, and validation. You know exactly who is in your panel, where they come from, and how they’ve been verified. This control significantly reduces noise in the data and ensures the insights you’re analyzing are authentic.

2. Consistency Across Studies

When organizations conduct research over time to track brand health, consumer sentiment, or product adoption, consistency is critical. If the respondent pool changes dramatically between waves of a study, the insights can become blurred or misleading.

Proprietary panels allow businesses to maintain a consistent respondent base. This makes longitudinal studies more reliable and will enable you to compare data points over time with confidence. For a multinational organization, that consistency can be the difference between identifying a true trend and chasing a data anomaly.

3. Enhanced Quality Through Profiling

A proprietary panel isn’t just a list of random respondents. It’s a dynamic database of deeply profiled individuals. You can segment by demographics, purchase behavior, attitudes, or any niche criteria that matter to your research.

This level of profiling enables businesses to conduct highly targeted studies, ensuring that respondents are genuinely relevant to the research question. For example, suppose you’re testing messaging for an electric vehicle campaign in Latin America. Your proprietary panel can instantly identify urban professionals considering EVs in Mexico City or São Paulo rather than relying on the broader, less-specific pools of third-party providers.

4. Global Representation and Cultural Nuance

In cross-border research, one of the biggest challenges is capturing cultural nuance. Localized behavior, language, and attitudes can shift how respondents interpret survey questions. Proprietary panels built with a global footprint solve this by ensuring representation across diverse regions and markets.

By owning the panel, you’re not just sampling “a group of consumers,” you’re cultivating communities in specific regions. This enables stronger localization of surveys, leading to greater cultural accuracy and deeper insights into how consumer behavior varies between regions, such as Southeast Asia and Western Europe.

5. Trust and Engagement Over Time

Respondents who join proprietary panels often build a relationship with the brand or research firm. With regular communication, fair incentives, and transparent practices, you cultivate trust.

This trust translates into higher engagement and reduced dropout rates during surveys. Respondents are more likely to provide thoughtful, accurate responses because they feel part of something consistent rather than a one-off transaction.

In contrast, third-party respondents often treat surveys as “quick clicks for cash,” leading to rushed or careless responses that weaken the data.

6. Cost Efficiency in the Long Run

Given the specificity, building a proprietary panel might seem expensive. Recruitment campaigns, incentive management, and panel technology platforms all add up. But over time, however, the economics become clear:

• Lower dependency on external vendors
• Higher recontact rates (reducing cost per complete)
• Improved quality of responses (reducing wasted spend on cleaning poor data)

Ultimately, proprietary panels don’t just protect data quality, they also protect budgets. For companies conducting frequent research, the ROI compounds quickly.

7. A Competitive Edge in the Global Market

Every business is looking for an edge. Owning a proprietary panel sends a clear message to clients, investors, and stakeholders that you’re serious about data integrity.

It positions your organization as a leader that doesn’t just “buy insights” but invests in building a robust and trustworthy ecosystem to generate them. Industries such as consumer insights, healthcare, and financial services find this invaluable.

Moreover, in the era of AI-driven analytics, having clean, high-quality proprietary panel data also future-proofs your business. AI is only as smart as the data it’s trained on. Proprietary panels ensure that the data feeding your models is trustworthy.

Final Thoughts

In the rush to gather insights quickly, many organizations fall into the trap of over-relying on third-party panels. While they have their place, the risks of fraud, inconsistency, and lack of transparency can erode the foundation of decision-making.

Investing in a proprietary panel is a strategic move that builds an organization’s credibility by avoiding these pitfalls and providing accurate insights that reflect the voice of the consumer. If accurate quantitative research data fuels growth, proprietary panels are the engines that ensure the journey is reliable.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping society, but with its transformative power comes pressing ethical, cultural, and social questions. The conversation around AI often centers on new capabilities, but equally important are the implications for equity, transparency, and human values.

A key concern is the concentration of AI development in a handful of industries, particularly technology and finance, which risks creating tools that benefit only a narrow segment of society. When innovation prioritizes speed and competition, the so-called “AI race” can result in systems being released prematurely, riddled with bias, or inaccessible to much of the global population.

Language representation in AI models is another critical issue. Many large language models are predominantly trained in English, resulting in the underrepresentation of other languages and cultural perspectives. This imbalance not only limits accessibility but also reduces the quality of AI outputs. Advocates stress that LLMs trained on multicultural data lead to better, more representative systems, ones capable of reflecting the world’s diversity rather than reinforcing existing biases and stereotypes.

Still, the potential for AI to drive positive impact is significant. From creating accessible tools for immigrants navigating new systems to providing voice-based digital companions for older adults, socially conscious applications of AI can foster inclusion and improve quality of life.

On this episode of The New Mainstream podcast, Norman Valdez, CEO of BrainTrainr, discusses the urgency of developing responsible AI and highlights both the dangers of exclusion and the opportunities for technology to serve as a force for good.