Hispanic-owned holding company aims to attract minority-owned agencies

Two longtime ad executives are launching a Hispanic-owned holding company composed of minority-operated agencies. The new entity, called Culture+ Group, was founded by Lili Gil Valletta and Enrique Arbelaez, who opened their inclusive marketing agency, Cien+, in 2010 after they both spent time as executives at Johnson & Johnson. Ad Age A-List & Creativity Awards Final deadline approaching for annual program Enter here Culture+ Group currently consists of Cien+; its healthcare division Cien+ Health; shopper and experiential marketing agency The Choice+; and market research and analytics company Human Dot Plus. Valletta said the partners were looking to borrow from the holding company model but remain independent of giants like WPP, Publicis Groupe, Interpublic Group of Cos. or Omnicom Group. Culture+ will focus on offering full-service capabilities through an inclusive marketing lens. “Typically smaller companies are the ones that are perfect acquisition targets,” Valletta said. “We’re flipping the script and saying ‘Why don’t we put ourselves at the tip of the spear and acquire others?’ So we’re making the tent bigger and continue to be culture-first and minority-owned.” Currently, the company is having conversations with potential capital providers and strategic partners to expand its network. Culture+ is looking to acquire or partner with companies in the research, data analytics, AI, and media space and is currently in negotiations to purchase a digital media company. Each company within Culture+ will have its own P&L. “The challenge in this space is that there is a lot of fragmentation with a lot of mom-and-pop and small agencies, and if you’re trying to service a Fortune 500 company, there is, of course, concern over the ability to execute with scale,” Arbelaez said. “So the infrastructure of the ecosystem is intended to bring the best-in-class partners and solutions, but give [clients] the comfort that it is an ecosystem that has the scalability due to the network.” While 60% of its clients are in the healthcare space, Culture+ also works with clients such as Diageo, PepsiCo, Google, Kellanova and WK Kellogg. Currently, Culture+ has around 100 employees and is about 90% diverse. The holding company will look to add only agencies that are minority-owned. Valletta and Arbelaez, who are Colombian, said they define inclusive marketing as going beyond a traditional multicultural marketing scope and targeting segments of populations—whether by race or other identifiers such as age or interests—to maximize growth for clients. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs “It’s [going] from doing multicultural marketing to marketing to a multicultural America,” Arbelaez said, “where insights, briefs and priorities follow the evidence of numbers of where growth is.” A recent report from the Latino Donor Collaborative and Wells Fargo found that the U.S. Latino economy had grown to $3.2 trillion in 2021, up from $2.8 trillion the year prior.

New Hispanic-owned holding company aims to attract minority-owned agencies

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