Pedro Lerma went from trying to fit in to standing out

Two years after splitting from The Richards Group (now TRG), Lerma/ is on a tear: It has grown from 35 to 135 employees, and combined fees and billings jumped 63% last year to $330 million. Lerma/ is also defying norms with breakthrough if sometimes controversial work, while helping to redefine and broaden the definition of “multicultural” agency for the industry at large. Leading this charge is CEO and founder Pedro Lerma, who is of Mexican descent and grew up in the small town of Wichita Falls, Texas. Lerma was raised by blue-collar parents. His dad worked in construction and his mom worked in a meatpacking plant. See all of Ad Age’s 2024 Agency A-List winners here “I was born at a time when being a Mexican-American kid wasn’t interesting or popular, and in fact, we were encouraged to do everything we could to fit in,” Lerma recalled. But growing up differently meant it wasn’t easy to fit in. Through a family friend, Lerma’s stepmother made a deal with a private grade school to allow Lerma and his brother to attend for a discounted tuition, as long as the brothers vacuumed classrooms on Saturday mornings. “I hated it,” said Lerma. “Once in a while, one of our classmates would come up to the school for something—to pick up a book, or they might have had basketball practice—and they would see us vacuuming, look at us kind of oddly, and ask, ‘What are you doing?’” Lerma said he was embarrassed to explain that his family didn’t have enough money for them to pay the full tuition. But now he looks back on that situation much differently. “It’s something now that I wouldn’t trade for anything. It was a part of shaping me into who I am. And it was a part of making me understand the importance of hard work,” Lerma said. Ad Age A-List and Creativity Gala Buy your ticket to the in-person event Click here Eventually, Lerma got an opportunity to interview for a job at The Richards Group in Dallas. “When I applied there I had a friend of mine take a picture of me in front of the building with my hands held up, and I used that to mock up a cover of Ad Age that said, ‘Lerma Joins The Richards Group, has the competition scrambling.’” Lerma turned that mock-up into the cover of his two-page résumé and cover letter. “When I think back on that, it was kind of cheesy, but it set me apart and it got somebody to make a phone call and invite me in for an interview,” said Lerma. Now job candidates are calling him, looking to be part of an agency that produced three Super Bowl spots last year and picked up the lead agency role on Avocados From Mexico (which accounted for one of the Big Game spots), and won new accounts including Jim Beam, Maker’s Mark, the National Medal of Honor Museum Foundation, the TV series “The Chosen” and Instacart. Lerma has built the agency on the idea of being “cross-cultural,” an evolution from its previous multicultural roots. “‘Multicultural’ has now been primarily drawn along racial or ethnic lines. For us, cross-cultural is a broader term,” Lerma said. “We believe that we can credibly address and lead with underrepresented segments of the market so it’s not just about being inclusive within the agency, but it’s about having a real respect, and being willing to lead with a perspective that is other than your own.” This has led to work beyond its Hispanic AOR relationship with Home Depot, for example. Last year, Lerma started a Hispanic earned-media agency in partnership with Alma’s founder Luis Miguel Messianu and PR agency Edelman and launched an AI model meant to combat bias in the technology. The agency’s most polarizing and notable work has been its ads for “He Gets Us,” the campaign centered around rebranding Jesus for the contemporary world. Lerma/ created two Super Bowl ads for the initiative in 2023 and again in 2024 which garnered millions of reactions. The controversy stems not just from the subject matter, but also from the conservative views of one and possibly other financial backers of the campaign. While Lerma agrees that the ads have stirred controversy, he said the agency took on the account as long as the work can live up to the agency’s inclusive values. Lerma also confirmed that both Christians and people of other faiths work on the account, and said the donors haven’t been involved in the creative approval process. “Our vision as an agency is to channel creativity for good,” Lerma said. “I think ideological purity is the enemy of progress. We see that play out every day in our politics. There is an unwillingness to preach compromise to advance a greater good. So if you asked me, ‘Are you willing to work with someone with whom you have ideological disagreements to advance a greater good?’ My answer would be yes.” See all of Ad Age’s 2024 Agency A-List winners here

Pedro Lerma went from trying to fit in to standing out

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