We Keep Laughing at the Same Marketing Mistakes. Here's Why They Keep Happening.

Every year around this time, I brace myself.

Hispanic Heritage Month is here, and with it, the parody videos will start circulating: the ones mocking companies that roll out a marketing campaign built entirely out of an abuela, some Spanglish, and someone dancing salsa. I laugh every time, because they're accurate. But underneath the laugh, I feel something closer to worry. Because I know what usually happens next. The campaign flops, the company calls it a failed experiment, and instead of asking why it didn't land, they quietly decide Latino marketing "doesn't work" and move on. One bad attempt, and an entire market gets written off.

That's the part nobody's laughing about. And it's the same mistake I watched play out for fifteen years in a very different room.

I spent those years in national newsrooms covering elections, and I watched news executives and political pundits make the identical error, just with higher stakes. When leadership wanted "the Latino perspective," they'd send one team to one highly populated Latino city or state and call it coverage, as if a Cuban American in Miami, a fourth-generation Mexican American in San Antonio, and a Salvadoran American in Los Angeles shared a migration history, a class background, an immigration status, or a set of political values. They don't. And every few years, that flattening catches up with everyone at once: a presidential election ends, the polling doesn't match the results, and the same executives who'd been confident about "the Latino vote" a week earlier are suddenly scrambling to explain what they missed.

I saw the cost of that flattening firsthand, and not just in election years. I once pitched a story about Selena's family releasing new music decades after her death, a story I knew mattered deeply within Latino culture. My bosses didn't have the cultural context to see its value, and they passed. A competing network ran with it instead, and it performed exactly as I'd predicted. When my bosses noticed, something shifted. Not everything — I didn't suddenly get a green light on every pitch — but I started getting more yeses, and more room to flag coverage that felt stereotypical or thin. Progress, but slow, and only because I'd had the chance to prove it once.

I later ran into the producer who'd landed that Selena story, at a Hispanic journalism conference. She gloated a little about beating me to it. I told her the truth: her story helped me too. It proved to my bosses that I understood what counted as a Latino-interest story, and it made them more receptive the next time I brought one. Then I told her something I actually believe. She and I weren't in competition. Our networks were. My goal was accurate Latino representation across legacy media, and if her success meant her network took Latino stories more seriously, that was a win for all of us, not a loss for me.

That's the mindset I bring to my work with Latinx MBA now, and it's the mindset I want every member to carry into their own careers.

Here's the case I make, backed by data every time. According to the Latino Donor Collaborative, U.S. Latino GDP has reached $4.4 trillion, making it the fourth-largest economy in the world if measured as its own country. That number is only going to grow, as Latinos remain the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. workforce. But even well-intentioned companies get this wrong. They see the size of the market and assume Latino consumers will respond to any effort. They won't. Authenticity is what wins loyalty, and you cannot be authentic to a customer you've reduced to a stereotype. Latino consumers can tell the difference between a company that understands them and one that's performing understanding, which is exactly why those parody videos exist in the first place.

That's why I do the work I do with Latinx MBA. I can't rely on there being a Latino journalist in every newsroom, or a Latino executive in every boardroom, to advocate for our community from the inside. What I can do is help our members stop waiting for that advocate to show up and become the subject matter experts themselves, on panels, in interviews, in thought leadership, and in the executive meetings where these decisions actually get made. I've sat in those meetings and spent half my time explaining cultural basics before I could even get to the strategic opportunity I was actually there to present. That's time I shouldn't have had to spend, and it's exactly the gap our members are positioned to close, because Latino employees are often the only authentic access companies have to the full range of Latino consumers they're trying to reach.

So when I talk to our members about this, I tell them two things. First, you are not responsible for representing every Latino. You represent your own expertise, and that is enough. Second, come prepared like it's any other business recommendation, with data, with forecasting, with proof. We're not asking companies to consider Latino consumers out of fairness. We're telling them which Latino consumer they're actually trying to reach, and handing them the roadmap to reach them well.

That's the shift I want to see. Not more companies scrambling to explain a Latino story after it's already gone wrong. More Latino professionals in the room early enough to make sure it doesn't.