Ad Age is marking Hispanic Heritage Month 2024 with our Honoring Creative Excellence package, in which members of the Hispanic community revisit pivotal projects or turning points in their careers. (Read the introduction and all the essays here.) Today, guest editor Will Esparza, founder and CEO of Hyphenated, writes about why brands need to include the Latiné consumer in their marketing approach if they want to stay relevant and resilient.

Angelica-Apolonio-Oaxaca-Durango-East-L.A.-Chicanx-Español-English-Zapoteco-middle-child-Pico-Union-OG-graffiti-BFA-husband-father-mixed-fam-two-boys-advertising-Apple-Ray-Ban-Nike-Pepsi-Beats led to this: Hyphenated. My most significant and most challenging project yet.

As a returning guest editor for Ad Age’s Hispanic Heritage Month creative excellence series, I’ll focus on how brands can gain market strength with the new cultural brokers representing a resilient future.

Hyphenated started with a fundamental belief: People are greater than the boxes they’re placed in. Today, it manifests as a problem: People are hyphenated, but brands are not. We dimensionalize brands by bridging them to their next best consumer with authentic, unrelenting creativity.

It’s become more apparent that the future consumers are the multifarious, multicultured, multilanguaged, multigenerational, multitalented drivers of our economy: the Latiné community, the once invisible but now inevitable contributor to culture, brand value and business success.

Brands are realizing the chasm is not with Gen Z or pop culture at large but with the connectors of those cultures through attitudes, artifacts, aesthetics and attention. They are the proud, resilient Latiné cohort. This group is proven to have the highest propensity to connect with other ethnicities; it is a natural state of their being.

Let’s lay out the facts.
 
Approximately 500 million people worldwide speak Spanish, the second most spoken language behind Mandarin Chinese. More than 63 million influential and affluent Latiné people live in the U.S., of which 50 million ages 5 and up can confidently communicate in Spanish. These figures make the language’s variations more critical than ever, not just delivering and adapting creative in Castellano or Mexican-ish Spanish.

Let’s look at the size of the dollar. With $3.2 trillion GDP, the U.S. Latiné population is the fifth largest economy in the world, with a 14% year-on-year increase, 2.5 times faster growth than any other group, and a higher percentage of young consumers, with 20 million under 25. Their cultural capital drives growth across food, beverages, media, sports, entertainment, retail, beauty, insurance and telecommunications. Ask the NFL, Rare Beauty or the entertainment industry. The é in Latiné is for entrepreneurs generating over $800 billion in revenue annually.

The largest community in the U.S. are people who share a language but don’t always share a culture. People representing 33 Latino countries live in the U.S., 6 million of whom are Afro-Latiné and 3.5 million Native Americans. A portion of the community is white. Latiné is expected to reach 106 million people by 2050, which is less time than a mortgage term.

Now consider the following trends and behaviors: With 15% year-on-year growth in Latiné streams, Latin music and its rich diaspora (think Cumbia, Reggaeton, Ranchera and the No. 1 Latin subgenre, Regional Mexican) is the fifth most-streamed genre in the U.S. Latiné listens to 43 more minutes of audio daily and has the highest movie attendance in the country. Latiné accounts for 42% of the country’s most-watched content on the streamers and has increasing influence in fashion, with explosive growth in Latiné designers at Fashion Week. Just see what Willy Chavarria has been up to, or check what the most influential rapper of his time is wearing.

To be Latiné is to live as identities with intentional intersections of influence. 

Move on from comfortable tropes that were once convenient truths like La Familia, abuelita or art that is mural only. Move on from L.A. Mex or Boricuas in the Bronx as a proxy for all things Latiné. Instead, embrace Afro-Latiné cultures, Indigenous roots and truths untold. 

Some 45% of CEOs don’t believe their business will survive the next 10 years if they stay the course. These businesses and their brands can survive, even thrive, with the direct, intentional involvement of the undeniable power of the Latiné Identity. Moving from the front lines to the front office to board rooms, tapping the empathetic creative power of the culture to drive valuable outcomes. The future is clear and inevitable. But I ask brands, is your future viable?

It’s time to start zeroing in on the bull’s-eye and, more specifically, include the Latiné consumer in your marketing approach if you want a chance at relevance and long-term resilience. Get comfortable with Latiné not as a multicultural ask but as a general market requirement. Challenge your partners to reflect the most complex cohort in our nation authentically and to go a step forward to let their people lead the effort beyond being on Zooms to satisfy the ask.

I offer some principles: Insights from the Latiné community require deep connections to member communities at a neighborhood level. Complexity is the new simplicity, which means accepting the edge effects from the collisions and contradictions within the cohort. Embrace culture from the source as the story; Latiné cultural influence is bottom-up, not top-down.

And if you are looking for connectors and cultural leaders in the space, it’s a pleasure to meet you.