P&G and the Hispanic Marketing Council (HMC) convened industry leaders for the session: “The Only Purpose is Growth,” during the second annual Latino US Day at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. This exclusive event, hosted by Advertising Week LATAM and powered by PRODU, celebrated the profound influence of the Hispanic advertising community. The discussion highlighted the critical role of elevated creativity, the strategic integration of AI, and the undeniable economic power of multicultural consumers in driving business growth.

Lela Coffey, Sindy Chapa, Carla Dodds and Luis Miguel Messianu

The panel was moderated by Luis Miguel Messianu, Founder, President, Chief Creative Director of MEL. Panelists underlined the urgent need for a higher standard of creativity to capture consumer attention in today’s fragmented media landscape. Lela Coffey, VP of Multicultural Business Acceleration of P&G North America, shared her key takeaway: “We need to be setting our creative bar higher, much higher than we are. There’s such an attention deficit these days, and we have to make sure, if creativity is our currency, that we’re upping the game in every way we can.” She stressed a return to the fundamentals of “amazing, great creative,” beyond the buzz of new technologies.

Carla Dodds, CMO of The Aaron´s Company, echoed this sentiment, highlighting “the disruptiveness of creative and how you’re using content to really break through the clutter.” Dodds also acknowledged AI’s growing importance, noting its potential to provide “the right tools that I need to give our team in order to reach that level of creative,” while maintaining a crucial “HI (Human Intelligence) balance.”

Sindy Chapa, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication, School of Communication, Florida State University, addressed the need for academic institutions to evolve their approach. She highlighted the growth of Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), with over 600 already established where more than 25% of the student body is Hispanic. Chapa mentioned that framing multicultural marketing solely through a DEI lens in business education is “wrong” and limits its true potential as a growth strategy.

Lela Coffey of P&G affirmed that “multicultural consumers are the growth.” P&G’s strategy focuses on “growing the market” by serving all consumers, emphasizing that true inclusivity requires the “precision of winning with each” distinct group.