Page 10 - HISPANIC MARKET OVERVIEW - 2018-complete

2018 HISPANIC MARKET OVERVIEW, presented by López Negrete Communications
Even such a diverse assortment of accounts, the efforts being done in the Middle East for RAM stand out. This poses
the following question: Is
the multicultural agency
now a multinational agency, if you will, given the RAM work?
Alex opens up about how reluctant he was to go after the RAM business.
IF YOU GO BACK TO THE BIRTH OF THE INDUSTRY, WHAT DID WE PROFESS THAT WE DID BETTER THAN ANYBODY? WE PROFESSED TO BE REALLY GOOD AT TWO THINGS – KNOWING OUR CONSUMER AND CONNECTING HUMAN BEINGS THROUGH CULTURE. WE ARE REALLY GOOD AT CI – CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE.
— Alex López Negrete
He says, “We really
struggled with whether we
would pitch this product or
not. My partner, [CFO]
Cathy López Negrete, is one gutsy, powerful woman. She came to me as I was contemplating this and said, ‘You have been saying for years that you’ve wanted to be part of the Why Not Club rather than the No, Because Club and you’re thinking of not doing it because you think it doesn’t fit in your box?’ She had a really good point.
“If you go back to the birth of the industry, what did we profess that we did better than anybody? We professed to be really good at two things – knowing our consumer and connecting human beings through culture. We are really good at CI – cultural intelligence. If you know how to dig for insights and know how to manage that and you’re good at culture then we have a much bigger sandbox that what we thought we had.”
So, how does Alex define what LNC is in mid-2018?
“We are a Latino-owned agency that also knows culture – and we know how to master culture,” he says. “If you give yourself permission to say culture is the precious resource we know how to manage better than anyone else, we end up with a much bigger sandbox.”
SANDBOX EXPANSION AMID SHIFTING SANDS
While LNC is certainly plenty busy working with its clients, is the market ripe for client growth— not just for Lopez Negrete but for all Hispanic specialty shops and multicultural expert agencies?
Speaking of his own agency, Alex says, “We still have a lot of headroom and there are still a lot of categories and advertisers that have not thrown themselves into multicultural or Hispanic. But, it is a complicated industry. The days where I think you could be the agency and manage everything – those are hard to find. Compensation models are very complicated now, sharing the pie with other agencies. We have to rethink the kinds of accounts we go after, and there are less of those huge accounts. The smaller accounts,