Best Agencies 2023: Dieste

Dieste was founded to reach Latino audiences but is now successfully widening its focus to reach Black consumers and broader audiences. See all of Ad Age's 2023 Agency A-List winners here The Omnicom-owned agency, created in 1995 and based in Dallas, uses the holding company’s Omni data platform–which processes client and secondary data to “create bespoke audiences rather than rely on broad demographic audiences,” said Dieste CEO Greg Knipp. “Some of these audiences are race- or ethnicity-based, but more and more these are simply behaviorally and attitudinally defined.” The use of data allows the agency to identify “birds of a feather,” meaning consumers who have shared behavior and attitudes towards a product, said Tony Dieste, the agency’s founder and chairman. The shop began creating infrastructure to reach wider audiences after it started to add pharmaceutical clients last year, said Knipp, a category that during COVID put a priority on reaching specific minority communities, including Black and Latino populations, in order to address health information inequity. The agency declined to identify its pharma clients. Dieste's success in reaching Black consumers in the health care space soon spread to its work with prepaid wireless service provider Cricket, which has employed Dieste as its multicultural AOR for five years. Buy your ticket for the Ad Age A-List & Creativity Awards Gala here. After working on a Latino-focused campaign for Cricket, Dieste was asked by the brand to work on a campaign reaching African American consumers, said Knipp. “They’d been working with another agency and they were happy with how we approached multicultural marketing from a Hispanic perspective,” said Knipp. Dieste had already hired and formed a team of Black creatives for its new pharmaceutical clients, and put the team to work creating a campaign showing the value and unique nature of historically Black colleges and universities. The resulting HBCU Cricket campaign was also diverse in its production, said Knipp, created by Black director Ewurakua Dawson-Amoah and a majority-Black production crew. An example of a Dieste campaign that was attitudinally defined is its Latino-focused Cheetos campaign, launched in 2020, which ended up having “a much broader appeal” than the Latino community, said Knipp. The snack maker tapped Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny to create its “Deja Tu Huella” (Leave Your Mark) campaign, which was created after data revealed that Latino consumers “aspire to impact U.S. culture creating something new and different, richer than what existed before,” he said. But the agency found the idea of leaving one’s mark (with Cheeto dust) also resonated with wider audiences, said Knipp. When it comes to internal diversity, the agency consists of 79% employees of color and 54% female employees. Of its leadership, 72% are people of color, according to internal figures. Dieste grew revenue 40% last year. See all the winners of Ad Age's 2023 A-List Awards here.

Dieste leaves its mark on audiences beyond Latinos

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