Lionel Messi closed the book on his Argentina career. I’ve started this sentence five different ways, and none of them felt big enough for what he actually gave us.

On August 31, 2026, Lionel Messi picked up a pen and told the world, in his own handwriting, that he is retiring from the Argentina national team. “It was a decision that hurt and hurts my soul, but I understand that this is the moment,” he wrote - and that ache landed in my chest too, a lifetime away, as if he were writing directly to every one of us who ever stopped breathing when he touched the ball. He thanked the shirt, the coaches, the teammates, and the fans he now joins on the outside, vowing to cheer forever more. He closed it the only way he could: “Thank you God for making me Argentine. Let’s go Argentina!” I read it once, and it generated something open in me - grief, gratitude, and fierce pride, all at once, all irreversible.

A name I didn’t choose, but was built for this

I never picked my name. But I’ve come to believe it picked me for exactly this moment. “Messianu” carries an old root - “anointed one” - the same root behind the word “Messianic.” I don’t need more proof than that. Call it coincidence. I call it destiny with a sense of humor. From one Messi(anu) to another, Leo - I was always going to spend my life anointing you as the greatest who ever lived.

I stood where Maradona made the ground shake. You still went further.

I was a young man, standing in a stadium in Mexico in the World Cup of 1986, and I felt Diego Maradona through the soles of my own feet. Every roar of that crowd hit me in the chest before it hit the air. He played every minute of every match that tournament, scored five goals, delivered five assists, and was directly involved in 71% of Argentina’s goals on his way to lifting that trophy - still called, to this day, the single greatest individual World Cup performance in the history of the sport . Diego was a lightning bolt with a jersey on - violent, brilliant, uncontainable, a street prophet who dragged a wounded nation to glory by sheer force of will. I was there. I felt it live, unfiltered, full passion.

And still - forgive me, Diego, wherever you are - Leo went further. Not because he wanted it more. Because he built something no lightning bolt ever could: two decades of relentless, uninterrupted excellence, without a single wasted scandal, without ever needing chaos to be sublime. Nineteen seasons in that shirt. Argentina’s all-time leading scorer. The highest-scoring man in the history of South American football (ABC News). A World Cup. Two Copa Américas. A body of work so complete it borders on unfair to everyone else who ever picked up a ball. Diego was a comet - blinding, unforgettable, gone too soon. Messi is the North Star. Fixed. Eternal. Guiding an entire generation on what greatness looks like when talent bows to discipline and ego bows to love of the game. I witnessed both eras with my own eyes. That is not luck. That is a gift I will never stop being grateful for.

To Argentina: hold your head up

I won’t soften the ending, because softening it would insult everyone who bled for it. On July 19, 2026, at MetLife Stadium, Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in extra time - Ferran Torres burying a Nico Williams assist deep in the second additional period, after Enzo Fernández’s red card left the Albiceleste fighting the world with ten men. I wanted the impossible ending. I wanted Leo lifting one more star into that New Jersey sky before he closed this chapter forever. It didn’t happen, and it still burns. But Spain earned that trophy - the best team on the planet that summer, relentless and precise - and a true champion never needs an asterisk hanging over its crown.

To every Argentine reading this: carry the pride, not the wound. You already had your miracle in 2022, and no single night in extra time erases what Messi built for your colors over nineteen years. Vamos, Argentina. Siempre. Corazón roto, cabeza en alto.

One more gift — right here, in my own backyard

And here is the part I refuse to grieve, because I don’t have to. The national jersey may rest, but Messi keeps lacing up for Inter Miami CF, the club he’s called home since 2023 - my local team, in my city. This is not a farewell. It’s a turning page, not the last one. I still get to drive to our own stadium on a warm South Florida night and watch history breathe a few hundred feet from where I’m sitting. Thirty-nine years old and still bending the game to his will, still doing things that make grown men gasp - and I get more of it, live, on a Miami night, whenever I want it. What an outrageous, undeserved privilege that is.

Gracias, Leo

So here is my tribute, stripped of restraint: thank you for the gift of watching you play. Thank you for redefining what devotion to a craft looks like - not just the trophies stacked to the ceiling, but the assists nobody else even sees coming, the free kicks that bend the laws of physics out of respect for you, the low center of gravity that turned entire back lines into a minor inconvenience, the tears of a captain who felt every single loss in his bones because he actually, truly cared. Thank you for Lusail in 2022 - the night that finally, mercifully, settled every unfair debate the world ever had about you. Thank you for every match you turned into something closer to poetry than sport. And thank you for giving that jersey everything you had left, right up to the final whistle of your final dance, win or lose.

You leave as the greatest player this game has ever produced. Not “one of.” Not “arguably.” The greatest - full stop, forever, no debate left worth having. You are one of the deepest reasons I love football with a passion I can barely put into words to anyone who didn’t grow up watching you rewrite what was possible. And the best part? You’re not even gone. Not from here. Not yet.

Gracias por todo, Leo. From one Messi(anu) to another - it has been, and still is, the honor of a lifetime watching you play.

There’s a story, sixty seconds long, hand-drawn at the very start of The Last Viking, and it never really lets go of you after that. A prince loses an arm in battle. His father, a king, can’t bear that his son is now different from everyone else, so he orders the whole kingdom to lose an arm too. Not to heal the boy. To make sure no one is more whole than he is.

It’s absurd. It’s brutal. It’s also, if you think about it for more than five seconds, the single worst HR policy in human history. And, it is a type of prologue for the whole movie in miniature.

The Metaphor That Sticks

Everything the film does for the next two hours is an argument with that opening image. It would be easy to read the king’s decree as a joke about extremism, and it is that - Anders Thomas Jensen pushes it to a bloody, absurd extreme on purpose, because subtlety, in this movie, died along with everyone’s spare arm. But underneath the joke is something quieter and sadder: the idea that equality, misunderstood, becomes a leveling-down. That the easiest way to live alongside someone’s difference is not to make room for it, but to manufacture a matching wound of your own. Sameness, not acceptance, as the cure - which is a very Viking way of saying “misery loves company, and if it doesn’t, we’ll amputate until it does.”

That’s not really a story about Vikings. It’s a story about every family, every friendship, every group chat that has ever quietly asked one person to shrink until they fit the rest.

Manfred, John, and the Rest of Us

By the time Anker gets out of prison, his brother Manfred no longer answers to his own name. He believes he is John Lennon - round glasses, leather jacket, and a complete refusal to remember where fifteen years’ worth of buried cash went, which is either the most inconvenient side effect of a delusion or the most convenient excuse for never having to dig it up yourself. The film treats this less like a diagnosis and more like a costume that finally fits: Manfred isn’t the odd one out here. He’s simply the one whose fracture happens to be visible. Everyone around him is carrying some version of the same thing, just better disguised - a sister managing her own quiet unraveling, a psychiatrist who needs to be needed as much as anyone needs curing, a brother who can’t set down his own violence even once the plot stops asking for it and just wants him to, please, put the shovel away.

Two broken men, built to fit each other’s breaks the way siblings so often do. That’s the real brotherly love in this story, if it has a name. Not two whole people propping each other up, but two incomplete people who never once asked the other to prove himself whole first - mostly because neither of them could pass that test anyway.

Why the Dark Humor Works

I don’t think this story survives being told straight. Play the one-armed kingdom completely earnest and it becomes a lecture, and nobody has ever been moved by a lecture, especially not one delivered by a man who insists he wrote “Hey Jude.” So Jensen hands the material to a Beatles tribute band assembled entirely from recently discharged psychiatric patients, to a man who hurls himself out of moving cars whenever his fantasy gets threatened - and gets up again, because apparently even his skeleton didn’t get the memo that he’s supposed to be fragile - and to slapstick sitting shoulder to shoulder with real cruelty. Somehow the tenderness survives the noise instead of drowning in it.

That’s the trick of the whole film: it makes you laugh first, so you’re not braced for what’s underneath. A man getting thrown through a window is funny right up until it isn’t, and then it’s funny again three scenes later, and the film never once apologizes for that whiplash. It just keeps insisting that broken, non-uniform lives are still worth finding funny - worth finding human - rather than worth “fixing.” Grief with a laugh track attached is still grief. It’s just grief that lets you breathe.

The Brothers at the Center

Strip away the heist and the fake Beatles band and what’s left is simple: two brothers, a childhood wound, and a refusal to abandon each other - even when abandoning each other would frankly be the more sensible option. The flashbacks to that childhood carry some of the darkest material in the film, and by the end nearly everyone is left bruised, bandaged, or missing a small piece of themselves in some way, and yet somehow content. Much like the Vikings in the opening storybook, minus the actual severed limbs.

That closing image is the whole point, circled back on itself. The film doesn’t end with anyone “whole” in the king’s sense. It ends with people bruised, asymmetrical, and still standing next to each other anyway, which is a far better outcome than anyone in this movie has statistically earned. That’s the real rebuttal to the opening fable - not a fixed wound, but a chosen loyalty despite it. Not perfection. Presence, and possibly a concussion.

My Take

The Last Viking isn’t really about Vikings, or heists, or even mental illness in any clinical sense. It’s about the violence we do to each other - and to ourselves - in the name of making everyone match, and about how much easier that violence goes down when it’s dressed up as a joke. Manfred’s delusion isn’t a costume the film asks us to see past - it’s the shape his loyalty happens to take. He is devoted, rigid, moving in his own broken logic, and none of that softens once you understand where it came from. If anything, it sharpens. The buried money was never really the treasure. The treasure was watching two men who have every reason to give up on each other simply refuse to.

Days later, the plot has mostly faded, but the fable hasn’t. The one-armed king is still rattling around in my head, mostly because I keep meeting his subjects everywhere I look - at dinner tables, in offices, in myself on a bad day. This film wraps a genuinely hopeful idea in ABBA covers, stolen cash, and a man who thinks he’s John Lennon, and somehow it lands harder for the disguise. I walked away thinking less about the plot and more about how much of ordinary life is just people quietly asking each other to cut off the same arm - and how rare, and how funny, it is to find someone who’d rather keep both arms and just love you crooked instead.

Have you seen The Last Viking? I’d love to hear what the fable meant to you.

There is a particular kind of pride that has nothing to do with campaigns, awards, or accounts won. It’s the pride of watching your own child walk away from the world you built your life in, and build something entirely his own instead.

That’s the story I want to tell today - not as a creative director, not as an agency guy, but as a proud father.

The News

Bodegas Alebrije, the young winery my son Alex and his wife Cristina have poured their hearts into, has just been featured by Vinos OFF The Record ahead of the publication’s 14th edition, taking place in Madrid on November 9, 2026. It’s the kind of recognition that doesn’t come from a marketing budget or a clever pitch deck - it comes from putting in the work, vintage after vintage, until people start paying attention on their own.

Bodegas Alebrije was born with the 2023 harvest, in the Galician province of Ourense, out of what the winery itself describes simply as “a great passion for wine and an absolute respect for the land.” The philosophy is minimal intervention: let the vineyard set the pace, let the soil, climate, and parcel speak for themselves, and let the wine carry something of the tension between origin, harvest, and human decision, rather than smoothing it all away in the cellar. As the project puts it, “the wine is made in the vineyard” - the cellar’s job is to accompany that process, not to mask it with a technique or a signature style.

The debut collection - Tinto, Blanco, Rosé, Quetzal, and Coot, all 2023 - is described not as a finished catalog, but as a first letter of introduction. A first sentence in a much longer story. The wines lean on native, autochthonous varieties from the region, treated not as a nostalgic gesture but as a way of building identity from the ground up (Vinos OFF The Record).

The Pivot

What the article can’t tell you - because it isn’t its story to tell - is everything that came before those five bottles.

Alex grew up inside my world. He watched me build campaigns, chase deadlines, sit in edit bays until 3 a.m., and live for the next big idea. For a while, that world was his too - not just adjacent to it, but at the center of it. He became an emerging creator and film director in his own right, building sets, directing crews, chasing the same obsession with story and image that has driven my entire career. It was on one of those shoots that he met Cristina, who was working as a wardrobe designer and stylist - the person who understood, better than anyone on set, that the smallest detail can carry the whole story. Two people obsessed with craft, meeting in the middle of someone else’s production.

And then, at a certain point, they both did something that takes far more courage than staying: they left. Not one of them - both of them, together.

Leaving the industry your father built his identity in is not a small decision. It means stepping out from under a shadow, resisting the comfort of an open door, and betting on something unproven instead. Alex and Cristina did that, in tandem. They chose to build a life rooted in land instead of storyboards, in patience instead of deadlines, in a harvest cycle instead of a shooting schedule. And they didn’t stop at one pivot. Alex went on to become a top-level sommelier, translating his director’s eye for detail and narrative into reading a glass, a vintage, a vineyard. Cristina went from dressing at a set to running one of her own - she has cooked as a chef in a Michelin-rated kitchen, bringing the same precision and instinct for composition she once brought to costume racks to a plate instead. That is not an easy trade, let alone two of them. It requires a different kind of resilience - the quiet, unglamorous kind that shows up every single day in a vineyard and a kitchen, regardless of whether anyone is watching or writing about you yet.

There is something fitting in the name they chose. An alebrije, in Mexican folk art, is a fantastical creature - a hybrid, dreamed into being by artist Pedro Linares during a fevered vision, combining wings, scales, horns, and fur into something that had never existed before, yet felt entirely whole. Alebrijes are, at their core, a symbol of unlimited creativity and transformation: taking pieces of different worlds and fusing them into something singular and new. I don’t know if that’s exactly what Alex and Cristina had in mind when they named their winery, but as a father - and as someone who has spent a career thinking about what a name should carry - I can’t help but see it. A project born from combining his creative instincts with her partnership and a shared devotion to the land, into something that is entirely, unmistakably theirs.

The Real Story

I’ve spent my career helping brands find their voice. Watching my son find his - on his own terms, away from mine - is the proudest campaign I never got to work on.

What strikes me most is that Alex and Cristina didn’t just change careers once. They changed them twice, and every time, they did it together. From a film set to a vineyard. From directing and styling to pouring and plating. They moved from Miami to Los Angeles, from Los Angeles to Barcelona, and they settled in Ourense, one of the jewels of the Galicia region. Today, Alex is a top-level sommelier and Cristina cooks in a top-rated kitchen, and on top of both of those demanding pursuits, they still found the time, the will, and the partnership to build a winery from scratch. That’s not luck. That’s a genuine power couple - two people who keep choosing craft, choosing each other, and choosing to bet on themselves, over and over again.

Bodegas Alebrije is still writing its first chapters. But every harvest, every bottle, and now this recognition from Vinos OFF The Record, is proof of something I’ve always believed: happiness isn’t inherited, and it isn’t handed down through a family trade. It’s pursued, stubbornly, one decision at a time. Alex and Cristina pursued theirs into a vineyard in Ourense, and they’re just getting started.

If you’re in Madrid on November 9th for the 14th edition of Vinos OFF The Record, look for Bodegas Alebrije. Taste the Tinto, the Blanco, the Rosé, the Quetzal, the Coot. And know that behind every one of those labels is a story about leaving one path to build another - with resilience, with persistence, and with someone by your side who believed in it just as much as you did.

Sources: Vinos OFF The Record — Bodegas Alebrije; https://www.vinosofftherecord.com/bodegas-alebrije/

Bodegas Alebrije; Bodegas Alebrije on Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/bodegasalebrije/

https://www.bodegasalebrije.es/

Time has a strange way of measuring loss. A year can feel like nothing and everything at once-long enough for the world to keep turning, short enough that a few memories still feel unfinished.

We weren’t old friends. Just a handful of dinners, really. But some people don’t need much time to make themselves unforgettable.

Gene Gordon was like that. He walked into a room like sunrise walks into a window - you didn’t have to look for it, it just arrived, and everything got warmer. That was his gift. Married to the luminous Ileana Bravo, the two of them together were not just a couple, they were a current. You felt it before you understood it.

We found them through Danny and Priscilla Marrero, our dear friends, and I’ve come to believe that the best people in your life often arrive as a gift wrapped inside another friendship. Life hands you these small miracles disguised as dinner invitations.

Gene built empires the way some men build sandcastles - with joy, with instinct, with hands that weren’t afraid to get dirty. But it was never really about what he built. It was about what he knew. He carried the kind of wisdom that only comes from having lived fully, loved fiercely, and lost nothing of his charm along the way.

One of our last dinners, we were doing what creative minds do best - turning the future over and over like a stone, looking for the version of it that felt safest. Life. Work. What comes after the climb. We were thinking too much, the way we always do.

And Gene just looked at us. Eyes bright, that smile doing its usual damage, and he said it - loud, unfiltered, punctuated like thunder:

“What are you thinking??? You’ve got to do what you got to do!!!”

No hedge. No footnote. Just truth, delivered like a gift you didn’t know you needed.

A year later, that sentence still lives in our house like a second heartbeat. My wife Liz and I whisper it to each other when the fear gets loud and the doubt gets comfortable. When the smart choice and the true choice start arguing. We hear Gene, and somehow the noise quiets.

That’s the strange mathematics of love - the people who mark us the deepest don’t leave when they leave. They just change shape. They become a voice in the hallway. A phrase in your pocket. A compass you didn’t ask for but can’t put down.

So Gene - wherever the light is brightest, wherever the room is loudest with laughter - gracias. For the friendship. For the dinners that ran too long because the conversation was too good to end. For a phrase that became a lantern, still burning, one year later and every year after.

To Ileana, to Danny and Priscilla, to everyone who ever stood in the warmth of that smile - I think we’re all still saying it, quietly, to ourselves.

What are we thinking.

We’ve got to do what we got to do.

Con cariño, siempre,

Luis Miguel

I’m done asking permission to say this: the American growth story has a new author, and most of the industry hasn’t bothered to read the byline.

Here’s the number. In 2025, the United States added a net 316,000 new homeowner households. Hispanic households added 441,000 new owners - the largest single-year gain for any demographic group since the Census Bureau started keeping score in 1975. Non-Hispanic white households declined by 441,000. Black households declined by 103,000. Do the arithmetic and something strange happens: the “national number” doesn’t exist without one group. Hispanic homeownership growth wasn’t a contribution to the total. It was the total, at 139.6% - enough to cover every other group’s losses and still have room left over.

Read that again. One community didn’t just outperform. It carried the country. Quietly, without a press release, while plenty of people who should have been paying attention were still debating whether it mattered.

Stop Calling It a Niche

Zoom out and the pattern doesn’t soften, it hardens. Between 2020 and 2023, the country’s white population declined by 2.1 million people. The only reason the United States grew at all during that stretch is that Hispanic and other communities of color didn’t just fill the gap - they overran it, with Hispanics alone accounting for 3.2 million of the total gain, 91% of it. In 2025, Hispanic households formed 92.6% of every new household in the country, the largest annual gain since 2012.

Income is the variable everyone assumes is boring, immovable, safe. It isn’t. The Census Bureau’s own comparison of 2024 incomes against pre-pandemic 2019 levels found that of every race and ethnicity group measured, exactly one saw a statistically significant real increase: Hispanic households. Not the fastest. Not the biggest. The only one. Latino median household income hit $70,950 in 2024, up nearly 30% over the decade, running eight points ahead of the national average, with Latino household wealth compounding at twice the rate of non-Hispanic white household wealth.

Even the grocery cart tells on the industry’s blind spot. Hispanic households are 14.7% of U.S. households and 23% of the country’s total retail dollar growth - an index of 157 against the overall market - outpacing everyone else in categories nobody would call glamorous: bottled water, laundry detergent, baby care. Egg purchases grew 51.5% year-over-year in this segment alone. Call this a niche market one more time. I dare you to say it to the spreadsheet.

The Uncomfortable Part

Here’s where most people writing this argument go soft, so I won’t. This growth is happening under fire, not in spite of some minor inconvenience.

Molson Coors and Constellation Brands have told investors that macroeconomic pressure has hit lower-income and Hispanic consumers hardest, dragging down beer sales in markets with large Hispanic populations - a downturn analysts have tied directly to the timing of intensified immigration enforcement and deportations. Jack in the Box posted a 7.1% same-store sales decline it attributed partly to pullback from lower-income and Hispanic guests; Wingstop and Popeyes saw smaller versions of the same hit. This is happening while the broader U.S. economy loses its own footing - GDP growth fell to an annualized 0.5%–1.4% in late 2025, real disposable income has been shrinking, and consumer spending overall is cooling into 2026.

So no, this isn’t an immune population riding out easy tailwinds. This is a population absorbing real, disproportionate damage and still, somehow, remaining the only line on every chart pointed up. Think about what that actually means: the true size of this opportunity is bigger than the numbers we’re citing, because fear is actively suppressing demand that would otherwise be even larger. Some of the growth this country needs is sitting on the sidelines, waiting to see who shows up first with something real instead of something safe.

Loyalty Isn’t Bought. It’s Inherited.

Modelo Especial didn’t take the top spot in American beer by accident, and it didn’t take it in a single quarter. It overtook Bud Light in 2023 and has kept the title since, built on decades of unglamorous, uninterrupted investment in Hispanic consumers - made before it was trendy, and continued after it got complicated. Brands that reduced cultural investment saw significant erosion. Bud Light’s cultural inconsistency gave Modelo room to reach the top spot of its category.

Here’s the part that should terrify every CMO reading this: Bud Light didn’t lose the title over one bad decision. It lost it because trust, once withdrawn, doesn’t come back on the brand’s timeline. It comes back on the audience’s. Nobody is obligated to forgive a brand just because the brand is ready to be forgiven. That’s not how loyalty works, and it’s definitely not how this loyalty works.

The Next Chart Nobody’s Drawn Yet

If housing, income, and everyday spending are proof already sitting in the data, gaming is proof that hasn’t been written yet, and almost nobody is even holding the pen. Seventy-two percent of U.S. Hispanics aged 13 and older already identify as gamers, a third more likely than the general population to call gaming their primary source of entertainment. In-game ads reaching Hispanic mobile gamers generate 30% higher engagement and 60% stronger brand recall than the same ad on social media, and those players are 20% more likely to actually buy what they see advertised inside a game. That gap between attention and investment is exactly where the next Modelo is hiding. Somebody will find it. The only question is whether it’s a brand with the imagination to look now, or one that waits until the opportunity is already gone.

Building Anyway

I don’t think brands need another moral argument. I think they need to look at their own category’s growth chart, subtract Hispanic performance, and stare at what’s left. In housing, it’s a decline. In population, it’s a loss. In income, for the first time on record, it’s flat for nearly everyone else. That’s not a call to conscience. That’s a math problem with only one right answer.

But arithmetic was never going to be enough to move anyone who wasn’t already paying attention, so here’s the part that should. This community is building anyway - buying homes, forming households, compounding wealth - in the middle of real fear, real hardship, and an economy that’s giving almost everyone else less. That’s not a demographic trend. That’s an act of defiance dressed up as a spreadsheet. And defiance like that doesn’t ask to be marketed to. It demands to be matched.

So match it. Stop treating cultural investment as the first line cut when a boardroom gets nervous, and start treating it as the line that’s currently holding up everything else you’ve built. Put someone in that room with the authority to defend the budget when the room panics, not just present it when things are calm. Build the creative from real cultural fluency, not a general-market idea wearing a translated headline. Show up before the numbers force your hand, not after your competitor already has. And judge yourselves by the only metric that will still matter in ten years: whether the people you’re asking to trust you would say, without hesitation, that you’ve earned it.

They’re building anyway, with or without you. The only real question left is whether you have the nerve to build alongside them, or the excuse ready for why you didn’t.

Luis Miguel Messianu is the founder and chief creative officer of MEL.

Somewhere around 6pm last night, the stadium lights at MetLife dimmed like a held breath finally released. It took 106 minutes and a substitute’s boot - Ferran Torres, alone with the moment, burying the only goal of the night in extra time - to finally break a final that refused to break for anyone else. Spain lifted the trophy for the second time in their history, denying Lionel Messi the storybook ending the whole world half-expected him to write. Confetti fell and settled into the turf like ash after a bonfire, and the whole planet exhaled at once, together, for maybe the last time in a long while.

And then, this morning, something quieter than losing crept in. Something with no name in English, though I suspect Spanish has one hiding somewhere, the way Spanish always does.

Withdrawal. Duelo, almost. A small grief for something that was never really ours to keep.

Five weeks. Forty-eight teams. A hundred and four matches across three countries, from the Azteca to MetLife, from Mexico City to Miami. Five weeks of alarms at hours that made no sense, group chats lighting up like flares at dawn, grown adults - CEOs, abuelas, six-year-olds, your most cynical friend from college - weeping and praying over a ball crossing a line.

And now it’s Monday. The sun still rose. Nothing has actually changed. And yet everything feels hushed, dimmer, the way a house feels the morning after it was full of family and now isn’t.

I know this ache. I’ve carried it four times before - 1970 in Mexico, my hand small in my father’s. 1986, cutting my teeth as a young Creative Director. 1994 in Los Angeles, the same electric week we won the McDonald’s U.S. Hispanic account, as if the universe wanted those joys to arrive holding hands. 1998, my son Alex beside me, falling in love with something I’d loved since before he existed. And this year - number five - my wife Liz beside me in Mexico City for the opening match. The withdrawal never gets easier. It gets more tender, because by now you know exactly what you’re going to miss.

This one carried extra weight. On June 11th, the same week the world descended on Mexico City, we launched Always al Cien for Centenario Tequila - a platform distilled into three words: Todo o Nada. All or nothing. This is a campaign I took really personal, because it celebrates Mexican Greatness. What a great opportunity!

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about the World Cup

It isn’t really about the football. Not entirely.

It’s about the fact that for five weeks, the world agreed - without a vote, without a treaty - to care about the same thing at the same moment. Name me another event that pulls that off. Not an election, those cut us into pieces. Not an awards show, that’s for insiders admiring themselves. The World Cup is the last true campfire humanity gathers around: a bus driver in Lagos, a grandmother in Oslo, a teenager in Bangkok, and an ad exec in Miami, all losing their minds over the same free kick, in the same second, for a hundred different reasons that somehow become one.

For five weeks, borders grew thin as paper. Strangers became temporary family, bound by a jersey color, a chant, a shared held breath. I watched Merlin the duck become more beloved than half the players on the pitch - a two-year-old bird in a tiny green jersey, waddling through Mexico City like he understood something the rest of us had forgotten how to feel out loud. That’s the ingredient no recap ever measures: joy, unguarded and undignified.

Here’s my favorite proof of all: millions of English speakers who don’t understand a word of Spanish watched this World Cup on Telemundo and Peacock anyway, not despite the language but because of it. They couldn’t tell you what the announcers said. They could tell you exactly how it felt. Andrés Cantor’s gooooool never needed translating. Emotion travels faster than language, and it always lands.

Mexico didn’t just show up to this World Cup as a host - we showed up as a heart. El Tri broke a curse forty years old and went further than anyone predicted, while an entire nation opened its doors with a generosity you can’t manufacture, only inherit. Mexico won something harder than a trophy: the affection of the planet.

We didn’t just watch a sport. We watched humankind remember, for five fleeting weeks, how to be one thing again.

Even the game that meant nothing turned out to mean everything. Saturday’s third-place match between France and England had no trophy on the line - and it delivered the wildest ninety minutes of the tournament. England raced to a 4-0 half-time lead, Kylian Mbappé became the all-time leading scorer in World Cup history mid-comeback, Bukayo Saka answered with a hat-trick, and Jude Bellingham sealed it with a stoppage-time solo goal to make it 6-4. England’s best finish since 1966. Nobody wanted to play that match. Everybody was glad they did.

The world is a better place during the World Cup. I’ll die on this hill.

I’ve spent over thirty-five years building brands, sitting in rooms where grown professionals debate a logo for six hours. Nothing unifies a room, a city, a planet the way this tournament does. It’s the single greatest piece of creative work humanity has ever produced without a brand behind it. Well, several brands behind it, but you understand what I mean.

It gives us permission to feel something enormous about something that, on paper, “doesn’t matter.” A ball. A net. Twenty-two people and a referee, and somewhere in the stands, a child memorizing a moment she’ll carry for life. It moves markets, mends old family fights, makes a grown man cry into a jersey he’s owned since he was twelve.

For five weeks we were allowed to be tribal in the most beautiful way there is - loud, painted, weeping, dancing in the street at 2 am with strangers, without anyone getting hurt over it. Tell me honestly: when was the last time you felt anything strongly enough to risk everything for it?

And here’s something this World Cup proved: the big screen never left. Plenty of people caught a half on their phone at a desk. But when it mattered - a Round of 16, that final on Sunday - people found a big screen and got around it. Bars overflowing onto sidewalks. Living rooms rearranged so the couch faced the TV like a congregation faces an altar. Plazas in Mexico City projecting matches onto buildings for thousands who came just to stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers. No phone replicates the electricity of a shared gasp in a packed room. The original screen - communal, built for gathering instead of scrolling - is still as essential as it was when I watched 1970 on a television the whole block crowded around. Technology changed how we watch. It changed nothing about why.

Now comes the hard part: four years

Here is where I’m supposed to tell you it’s a long wait. Everyone says that. “Four years is forever.” I used to believe it too, back when I thought time moved in straight lines.

But a lifetime of loving this sport has taught me something gentler: fútbol plays tricks with time. It folds decades into single moments and stretches ninety minutes into lifetimes. Ask me about 1970, and I will close my eyes and still feel my father’s hand on my shoulder, all these years gone and somehow still happening right now, as I write this.

That is the ilusión of time in the universe of fútbol — not illusion as in falsehood, but ilusión as we mean it in Spanish: hope wearing the costume of anticipation, wonder that hasn’t happened yet but already feels true. Four years sounds endless when you say it out loud in the dark, missing something. But it will pass quietly, in a blur of unremarkable Tuesdays, and then one June morning a whistle will blow somewhere and it will feel as though no time passed at all. The children watching for the first time will be grown by the next one. That’s not a tragedy. That’s the whole point of loving anything that returns.

So here’s my toast to the withdrawal

Feel it. Don’t fight it. The ache you have this morning is proof of how much you let yourself feel over these five weeks. Optimism isn’t the absence of sadness when something good ends. Optimism is choosing to be grateful it happened at all.

We got a global injection of joy and unity when we needed it most. We got to be, briefly, one species instead of two hundred competing nations. We got Merlin the duck, comebacks that shouldn’t have been possible, and a kid somewhere who just fell in love with this game the way I did in 1970, and will spend his life chasing that feeling.

Creativity is optimism in action. So is fandom. So is standing in a stadium, or a living room, or a bar at 6am, believing - against every rational instinct - that this is our year, our team, our moment.

The World Cup ended last night. Everyone will tell you it’s over.

They’re wrong. It just went quiet for four years - and quiet is not the same thing as gone.

— Luis Miguel Messianu

La herida y la reflexión

Es una pena que tengamos que esperar a que gente como Ramiro se vaya para decir en voz alta lo mucho que nos inspiró. En vida, lo aplaudimos en festivales, lo citamos en pasillos, repetimos sus chistes y sus ideas; pero solo cuando la noticia de su partida nos sacude, encontramos las palabras para agradecerle de verdad.

Yo no soy la excepción. También me tardé.

Lo que Ramiro hizo por todos nosotros

Ramiro fue mucho más que una sucesión de campañas brillantes. Con Carlitos Baccetti al lado, se animó a “refundar” la publicidad argentina en los 90, y lo increíble es que lo lograron: cambiaron el tono, el lenguaje y la ambición de toda una generación.

“La llama que llama” dejó de ser una campaña para Telecom y se convirtió en patrimonio emocional de un país; la gente pagaba por tener los comerciales, repetía sus frases, las compartía con sus hijos. “Gueropa” para Renault, “En tu cabeza hay un gol” para Quilmes, tantas piezas más… eran avisos, sí, pero sobre todo eran cultura popular en tiempo real.

Mi Ramiro personal

Yo lo admiré primero desde lejos, como muchos. Después tuve la suerte de conocerlo mejor cuando Eduardo Casarín impulsó aquella potencial alianza entre Agulla Baccetti y del Rivero Messianu, en los años previos a lo que después sería alma. Ahí descubrí de cerca algo que siempre se intuía en sus campañas: una inteligencia filosa combinada con un “street smart” muy latino, una lectura casi instintiva del pulso cultural.

Ramiro hablaba de campañas, pero en realidad hablaba de personas. De cómo piensan, cómo se ríen, cómo sufren, cómo celebran. Tenía esa alegría de vivir que se contagiaba en la sala; esa energía que te hacía creer que, con la idea correcta, podías mover algo más grande que una aguja de awareness.

La autocrítica: por qué llegamos tarde

Su partida me deja una gratitud profunda, pero también una incomodidad. ¿Por qué nos cuesta tanto homenajear a nuestros referentes en presente y no en pasado? ¿Por qué esperamos al obituario para escribir lo que podríamos haber dicho en un simple mensaje, en un almuerzo, en un abrazo?

En la publicidad somos expertos en lanzar tributos a marcas, causas, aniversarios y efemérides, pero a veces somos torpes para celebrar a las personas que nos cambiaron la vida profesional. Normalizamos el talento extraordinario, lo damos por sentado, lo usamos como referencia… y solo cuando se apaga, nos animamos a ponerle palabras a la admiración.

De homenaje tardío a propósito a futuro

Tal vez el mejor homenaje que podemos hacerle a Ramiro —además de seguir estudiando y disfrutando su trabajo— es cambiar esa costumbre. Empezar a decir “gracias” ahora, no después; celebrar a nuestros maestros, nuestros pares y hasta nuestros alumnos mientras están en la cancha, no cuando ya dejaron de jugar.

Si su generación fue “la dorada” que puso a la creatividad argentina y latinoamericana en el mapa, la nuestra tiene la responsabilidad de construir una generación agradecida. Que no solo se inspire en sus campañas, sino también en su valentía para hablarle directo a la gente y no solo a los accionistas.^[

Yo, por lo pronto, hoy escribo esto tarde, pero no tanto como para no decirlo:

Gracias, Ramiro.
Por recordarnos que la publicidad puede ser cultura, que la risa también es una forma de verdad, y que ninguna idea es realmente grande si no se siente en la calle.

Y ojalá que, a partir de hoy, no tengamos que esperar otra pérdida para animarnos a decirle a nuestros héroes creativos lo que de verdad significan para nosotros.

“En tu cabeza hay un Ramiro”. GRACIAS de corazón a “un prócer de la publicidad” que precisamente partió en un día tan especial para su natal Argentina. Mis condolencias para su gran partner Carlos Baccetti, y para toda su familia. Su legado lo mantendrá siempre vivo en nuestras mentes y nuestros corazones.

“La Llama’ siempre se mantendrá encendida!

There’s a moment at Cannes every June when the noise actually stops. The rosé stops pouring. The badges stop swinging. A room full of people who’ve spent their entire careers convincing strangers to buy things goes dead silent to listen to one of their own tell the truth.

This year, that moment belonged to Susan Fowler Credle. And it wrecked me a little, in the best way.

She walked up to accept the Lion of St. Mark - the highest honor our industry hands out, reserved not for a campaign but for a life’s work - and she earned every inch of it. Forty years. M&M’s, pulled back from irrelevance and turned into a cultural force. Allstate’s Mayhem, a decade deep and still swinging. A McDonald’s Happy Meal quietly rebuilt to put a book in a kid’s hand before a toy. Not stunts. Not “content.” Work that outlived the meeting it was born in and became part of people’s actual lives.

She used that stage - the biggest one we have - to say the thing nobody with less to lose would dare say. Standing in front of a business that’s spent the last few years chasing “fast and cheap,” outsourcing its soul to an algorithm and calling it strategy, she looked it dead in the eye and called it what it actually is: advertising pollution. She reminded a room of people who build brands for a living that a brand - like a person - has to know why it exists beyond the transaction, or it isn’t a brand. It’s just noise with a logo on it.

But that’s not the line that stopped the room cold. That’s not the line still ricocheting across LinkedIn days later, carried by people who worked beside her decades ago and never forgot how she made them feel. This is:

“At the end of your career, what did you make besides money? That answer may just determine your happiness.”

I read that sentence and had to put my phone down.

One of the tributes that followed her off that stage said it better than any trade headline ever could. A creative leader who came up alongside her - BBDO, Chicago, the Croisette - wrote that Susan taught her, and a whole generation of women behind her, that if we could see it, we could be it. Mentor. Sponsor. A permanent seat on somebody’s personal board of directors. Decades of quiet generosity, off camera, while she was busy building M&M’s into a cultural institution in full view. That’s the other half of her own answer, and it’s the part that actually made me emotional. What you make besides money isn’t only the platform with your name on the case study. It’s every person who now believes a seat like yours was always meant for them too.

The Question I Can’t Put Down

I’ve spent well over 40 years in this business, and I need to be honest with you: that question terrifies me a little, because it demands an answer with no room to hide behind a good quarter.

I’ve built agencies. I’ve sold agencies. I’ve rebuilt from nothing more than once, and I’ve sat in enough new business pitches to know the exact second a room decides whether it believes you. I’ve helped create campaigns for McDonald’s, for State Farm, Pepsi, MolsonCoors and as of late, for a great tequila brand that hopefully will become part of people’s Friday nights. I’ve built platforms that outlived the executives who signed off on them. I’ve spent a huge chunk of my career trying to force an entire industry to see the U.S. Hispanic market not as a “segment” tucked in the appendix of a media plan, but as the main story it always was.

None of it - not one bit of it - happened because I was chasing a check. Money is what happens after you make something true, often enough, for long enough, that it can’t be ignored anymore. It was never the point. It was the exhaust, not the engine.

Susan’s question lands like a gut punch because it’s the exact question our industry has quietly stopped asking itself. Somewhere between the quarterly deck and the AI pitch, “why does this deserve to exist” got replaced by “how fast can we ship it.” She said the unsayable part out loud, in front of the people most responsible for it, at the one moment in her career when she had absolutely nothing left to lose and nothing left to prove. That’s not a lifetime achievement speech. That’s a reckoning, delivered with grace. And she went further than almost anyone dares to at a moment like that - she tied the answer directly to happiness. Not legacy as a nice word for an obituary. Legacy as the honest, unavoidable determinant of whether you’ll be able to look back at your one life and actually feel good about it.

What I’ve Made, So Far

So I forced myself to answer her question honestly, the way she meant it - not “what will I make,” but what have I made, so far, besides money. And I’m not going to pretend that was a comfortable exercise.

I didn’t help build Círculo Creativo USA because there was a business case for it in 1998. There wasn’t one. A small group of us built it because there was an entire generation of Latino creatives with more talent than the industry knew what to do with, and nobody had built them a room to be seen in. We put them on the map precisely as an additional team of Young Creatives at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity! Twenty five plus years later, that organization isn’t a bullet point on a résumé - it’s a professional home that outlasted the reason we first walked through the door. That’s not a campaign. That’s a legacy with a pulse, still beating, still mentoring the next generation the way somebody should have mentored me sooner.

I didn’t fight for Hispanic and Mexican-American stories to be told with dignity, humor, and cultural truth instead of caricature because a client asked nicely. Most of the time I had to fight the client to get there. I did it because representation done right doesn’t just move product - it tells an entire community, out loud, that it was finally seen correctly, maybe for the first time in a boardroom that never had a single person in it who looked like them. If I’m honest, that’s the mission underneath every mission I’ve ever had: to elevate and dignify the image and presence of Latinos in this country, one campaign, one client conversation, one hire at a time, until nobody has to ask permission to see themselves as the main character of the American story.

And I didn’t spend 30 years on faculty and on the board of Miami Ad School because it looked good on a bio. I stayed because I believed in what that school was building - a pipeline for the next generation of creatives, Latino and otherwise, who deserved a real shot at this industry. I was there from the very beginning, and by the time I stepped back, I was the only board member who could say I’d been there since inception. Three decades of showing up in a classroom or a boardroom, not because anyone was watching, but because somebody has to be the person who keeps a door open long after it stops being convenient.

I didn’t choose optimism because it tested well. I’ve come to believe optimism is a discipline, not a mood - the thing you fight to protect on your worst day, precisely because the world hands you a hundred reasons to give it up. That’s not naivety. That’s resistance, and it’s a form of courage nobody puts on an awards stage. It’s the same instinct that let me stand at a World Cup opener in Mexico as a grown man and feel, for one unguarded second, like the kid who watched the 1970 tournament next to his father - proof that some things you build are strong enough to outlive the moment they were born in.

None of that shows up on a balance sheet. All of it is the real, unvarnished answer to Susan’s question. And saying it out loud, plainly, without hiding behind humility, is the least I owe the people who made it possible.

The Lion of St. Mark Isn’t Really About Advertising

Here’s what I believe she was actually telling that room, underneath all the applause. The Lion of St. Mark isn’t given for the campaign that hit its numbers. It’s given for a body of work that changed how an entire industry thinks - the kind of legacy that keeps teaching long after you’ve left the stage. NVRFNSHD, as she once described the ideas that shaped her - the best ideas, and I’d bet everything I have that the best lives too, never actually finish. They just keep handing themselves forward to whoever’s brave enough to pick them up next. #SeeItBeIt isn’t a hashtag. It’s the entire mechanism of how legacy actually works.

That’s the real, unflinching question underneath hers. Not “what did you make money from,” but “what did you make that someone else gets to inherit - and did it make you happy while you were building it?” A platform. A community. A door held open with your own hands. A young woman who now believes the room she’s standing in was built for her too. A kid in Miami or Guadalajara who sees a career path that simply did not exist when I was starting out.

Money buys you runway. It has never once bought anyone the reason they took off in the first place, and it will never buy the happiness Susan pointed straight at, without blinking, at the very end.

Your Turn

So I’ll leave you with her question, because it deserves to travel a lot further than one stage in Cannes, or one LinkedIn post written through tears of gratitude for a mentor.

Not “what will you sell.” Not “what will you scale.” What did you make - the kind of thing that still matters after the invoice clears, after the campaign wraps, after the applause for your career fades and it’s just you, alone with the truth of what you actually spent your life building. The kind of thing that answers, honestly, whether you were happy while you built it.

I know part of my answer, and I’m still writing the rest of it, right now, in real time - every mentee I pull aside at a conference and refuse to let leave without a plan, every young Latino creative I tell “your story is the main story, not the footnote,” every piece like this one that I write trying, always trying, to leave behind more than I ever took.

At the end of your career, what will you have made, besides money? Susan Fowler Credle just stood in front of the entire advertising industry and told us, without apology, that the answer might be the only one that ever really mattered. I believe her completely. Now I dare you to answer it as honestly as she did.

NVRFNSHD

Susan built her whole career on that one strange, unpronounceable word, and I think it’s the real key to her question, not just a clever coda to a speech. The best ideas never finish. Neither does the work of becoming who you’re supposed to be. A mission like mine doesn’t have a finish line, no matter how many rooms I’ve changed or doors I’ve held open. There will always be another Latino creative who needs someone in his corner, another boardroom that still doesn’t look like the country it claims to sell to, another kid who needs to see it to believe he can be it. That’s not a burden. That’s the whole point. NVRFNSHD isn’t a warning that the job is never done. It’s a promise that it doesn’t have to be, as long as you’re still showing up.

So here’s my answer, distilled all the way down, the order I’ve tried to live by every single day since I understood what actually mattered: Pride first. Fun second. Money third. In that order, always, no exceptions, no matter how good the number on the contract looks. Pride, because if I’m not proud of what I’m building or who I’m building it for, no amount of money will make me feel like less of a fraud. Fun, because life is too short and this industry is too hard to spend it miserable chasing something you don’t even enjoy. And money, last, on purpose, every time - because it was always going to show up anyway, the moment the first two were true.

That’s not a hierarchy I arrived at by accident. It’s the one thing about my own legacy I know for certain, and the one thing I hope outlives me longer than any campaign ever will.

Heartfelt thanks dear and admired Susan!

Inspired by Susan Fowler Credle’s acceptance of the Lion of St. Mark at Cannes Lions 2026, and by the tributes that followed her off that stage - a career spent believing the best campaigns, and the best lives, are NVRFNSHD.

#Cannes #Creativity #Leadership #SeeItBeIt

We used to ask machines for strength.
Then we asked them for memory.
Now we ask them for judgment.

Soon, we may not have to ask at all.

That realization has stayed with me this last week as the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity comes to an end. As our feeds and sessions get filled with talk of prompts, copilots, and automation. The conversation rarely pauses to ask a more unsettling question:

If AI does the work, chooses the options, and even anticipates our desires, what exactly remains for us?

I don’t see AI as a single “revolution” or a villain in a black hoodie. I see it as a staircase. It’s already built. We’re standing at the bottom, looking up, deciding whether to climb.

Delegating our way upward

The first steps of this staircase are already behind us.

We delegated muscle to machines and watched cranes and engines raise structures no human body could have lifted. We didn’t get weaker; we built higher.
We delegated memory to search engines and external drives, and our minds stopped hoarding facts and phone numbers. We didn’t get dumber; we opened bandwidth to imagine new things.
We delegated navigation to GPS, and entire generations stopped memorizing routes. Our phones became our compass.

Each delegation felt like losing something - skill, discipline, self‑reliance. Yet each opened a new floor of possibility.

Now the staircase turns again. AI is the next delegation. But this time, it is not our muscles or our memory at stake. It is our way of thinking, our way of asking, and eventually, our way of choosing.

The era of asking

For the moment, we still live in the era of asking.

We type: “Build me a page.”
“Draft this contract.”
“Analyze these numbers.”

We issue the commands. The system executes. We retain the comfort of telling ourselves: the idea was mine, the machine only carried it out.

That narrative is soothing. It lets us feel like pilots in a cockpit of tools. It flatters our sense of agency.

But it is a temporary story. The staircase doesn’t end at prompts.

The next step is not better phrasing. The next step is no phrasing at all.

When the staircase moves on its own

Very soon, our agents will know us well enough to act without waiting for explicit instructions.

You won’t have to say, “Book me a flight.”
Your calendar, your past choices, your loyalty programs, your behaviors will quietly inform an autonomous decision. The system will compare options, hold a seat, and present you with the itinerary that “makes sense” for your life.

Your role becomes lighter: you no longer do, you no longer ask, you simply approve.
Yes. No. This one. Not that one.

At first, that feels like liberation. Less friction. Fewer clicks. More time to “focus on what matters.”

But notice the shift. You are stepping away from execution, then from intention. You are becoming an editor of outcomes pre‑curated on your behalf.

In theory, your taste remains the last line of defense. You are the one who says, “I like this, not that.”

Until taste quietly steps onto the staircase too.

Taste on the next floor

We like to act as if taste is inviolable.

We tell ourselves that our preferences are an expression of something irreducible and human - that the song we love, the design we favor, the story that moves us reveal a unique interior landscape.

But even here, the delegation has begun.

Spotify doesn’t just offer songs; it predicts the ones that will feel right before we hear them. Netflix doesn’t just list films; it anticipates what we’ll watch tonight. Recommendation engines study our micro‑choices and slowly learn to play us like instruments.

If machines can already solve problems that stumped our best mathematicians and scientists for decades, it is naive to think they will stop at utility. The border between “hard problems” and “taste problems” is thinner than we pretend.

There will be AI systems with a better statistical sense of what works—what design leads to engagement, what melody pulls people back, what narrative structure keeps attention - than most humans. They will not have “soul,” but they will have a frighteningly good feel for patterns.

And when those systems become cheap and ubiquitous, many people will delegate taste as readily as they delegated memory.

First we delegated doing.
Then we began delegating deciding.
Soon, we will start delegating choosing.

The staircase keeps rising. What is waiting at the top?

Are we walking toward irrelevance?

It’s easy to look up and imagine an endpoint where humans simply…don’t matter.

If machines execute with more precision, optimize with more speed, and choose with more accuracy, what role is left that isn’t just nostalgia?

History suggests another reading.

Every time we surrender a function, we don’t only lose something. We gain altitude.

When we let go of pure muscle, we moved our focus to designing structures instead of lifting them.
When we let go of storing every fact ourselves, we moved our focus to connecting those facts, interpreting them, weaving them into meaning.

Delegation can feel like a fall if you look down at what you no longer do. It looks like an ascent if you look up at what you are newly free to become.

We are not walking off the staircase; we are moving from one landing to another. From operator, to director. From director, to author.

The true question is no longer “What will AI do?” It is “What will humans author?”

Beyond work and choice

If AI can handle execution, optimization, and even anticipation, our job cannot be to compete at those levels forever.

Our job migrates.

It becomes the act of imagining worlds that do not yet exist - worlds no dataset can infer.
It becomes the act of asking questions that have no training data.
It becomes the act of holding contradiction, ethics, humor, pain, aspiration, and cultural meaning in ways that no algorithm can fully resolve without guidance.

AI can maximize engagement, but it cannot decide what kind of community or society that engagement should serve.
AI can detect patterns, but it cannot determine which patterns are dignifying and which are degrading.
AI can remix reality, but it cannot tell us what reality is worth pursuing.

Meaning is still a human responsibility.

So AI, in this light, is not our successor. It is our amplifier. It supplies more strength, more speed, more synthetic “intuition.” But the direction of travel - the reason we climb at all - remains ours to choose.

Culture is not a dataset

Nowhere is this clearer than in multicultural and Latino contexts.

If we let AI learn blindly from the past, it will inherit the past’s omissions and prejudices. It will absorb who was seen and who was invisible, whose stories were recorded and whose stories never reached the archive.

The staircase will rise, but only for familiar voices.

So the core questions of AI and taste have to be cultural questions:

Whose taste is being treated as default?
Whose reality counts as “normal”?
Whose language, humor, and pain are recognized as meaningful, and whose are treated as noise?

For diverse communities, AI can either flatten differences into stereotypes or reveal new layers of nuance - depending on who stands at the higher floor, guiding the climb.

Culture is not just content. It is a living context: memory, contradiction, code‑switching, inside jokes, rituals, silences, songs, scars. Data can describe its surface. It takes humans to honor its depth.

If we do not intervene, machines will simplify culture into pattern.
If we do intervene, machines can help us trace patterns without erasing the people inside them.

The invitation

So yes, the staircase is real.

We can stand at the bottom, mourning every step as a loss - the loss of craft, the loss of control, the loss of exclusivity. Or we can recognize every step as both a cost and an invitation.

We have already started climbing. Muscle is behind us. Memory is behind us. Parts of navigation, calculation, even taste are behind us.

Ahead lies something harder to name but easier to feel: the responsibility to decide why we climb at all.

From making, to shaping.
From executing, to envisioning.
From choosing, to dreaming.

AI may bring the force, the intelligence, and even a growing simulation of taste.
We still have to bring the dream.

And that, perhaps, is the highest floor: not the level where machines do everything for us, but the level where we finally accept that our irreplaceable work has never been about tasks. It has always been about meaning.

The staircase will not disappear.
The question is whether we treat it as a threat, or as an invitation to become more fully human and even more creative on a higher floor.

Take the first step!

SAMA MEMBER FORUM · HIALEAH, FL · JUNE 2026

There are moments in our industry that deserve to be marked, not just because of what was discussed, but because of who made them possible. Yesterday’s panel at the SAMA Member Forum in Hialeah was one of those moments for me.

A THANK YOU

Thank You, Gilbert and Lisette

To Gilbert Dávila and Lisette Arsuaga: thank you. Not just for the invitation to participate in this year’s SAMA Member Forum, but for everything you’ve built, championed, and sacrificed over decades so that conversations like the one we had yesterday could even exist.

This was their last SAMA Member Forum as part of AIMM - a milestone worth pausing on. Gilbert and Lisette co-founded AIMM with a simple but radical premise: that multicultural and inclusive marketing wasn’t a niche, it was the future of the entire industry. They were right. And they didn’t just say it - they built the institutional infrastructure, the research, the coalitions, and the community that proved it.

Gilbert spent 25+ years leading multicultural marketing at some of America’s most storied brands - Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Sears, and The Walt Disney Company - before dedicating himself to building AIMM, DMI Consulting, and now SeeALL Marketing Alliance. Lisette, his partner in this mission, has guided iconic brands including Kimberly-Clark, Kellogg, Marriott, and Gatorade while co-architecting the Cultural Inclusion Accelerator and CIIM.

Together, they have been among the most tenacious, data-driven advocates for cultural relevance this industry has ever seen. When it was unpopular. When budgets dried up. When the political winds shifted. They stayed.

And it was especially meaningful that Gilbert himself took the moderator’s chair for our panel - not as a ceremonial gesture, but as a signal of what this conversation still means to him. Even at the close of one chapter, he was still at the center of the work.

Gilbert, Lisette - this industry owes you more than a thank you. But it’s a start. Gracias, de corazón.

THE PANEL

Tête-à-Tête: Evolving the Agency Playbook

The session brought together heads of agencies to examine how the agency model is changing - from shifting client expectations and the growing role of AI, to brand safety and culturally intelligent strategy. I was honored to share the stage with three leaders who each bring a distinct vantage point to these questions.

MODERATOR

Gilbert Dávila

Co-Founder, SeeALL Marketing Alliance & Co-CEO, DMI Consulting

Co-founder of AIMM and one of the most consequential architects of multicultural marketing in America. He moderated with the wisdom of someone who’s spent 30+ years building the table we were all sitting at.

Jorge Plasencia

Global Chief Client Officer, Havas Creative Network & Co-Founder/Chairman/CEO, Republica Havas

A pioneer in cross-cultural marketing who scaled a Miami-born agency into a global force - while never losing its cultural soul.

Giancarlo Pacheco

Founder & CEO, Plan C Agency

A champion of Asian American representation in advertising for 20+ years, proving that deep community knowledge - not surface-level targeting — is what drives real brand performance.

Kristian May Stewart, Ph.D.

Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder, Contender Labs

A sociologist-turned-strategist with 20+ years translating data into culturally resonant insights for brands reaching Millennials, Gen Z, LGBTQ+, and multicultural audiences.

Four agencies. Four different communities at the center of our work. One shared conviction: cultural intelligence is not optional — it’s the strategy.

WHAT WE DISCUSSED

01

The Agency Model Isn’t Dying. It’s Being Sorted

Let’s be direct: the middle is getting squeezed out. Generalist agencies that do a little of everything are facing pressure from both directions - clients bringing execution in-house, and specialists delivering higher-value, more culturally attuned work.

Forrester predicted that 85% of U.S. B2C marketing executives would review their media agencies in 2026 - driven largely by holding company consolidation. That’s not disruption for its own sake. That’s clients asking, honestly: “Are we actually getting what we need?”

For multicultural specialists, this moment is an opening. What we offer: cultural fluency, community credibility, decades of lived experience - is exactly what can’t be replicated by a holding company playbook or an AI workflow. The barbell wins. Depth over breadth.

02

AI Is Already Assumed. Governance Is the Differentiator.

Every agency on that stage uses AI. Every client assumes we do. What they’re interrogating now is how it’s governed - and whether the humans making the creative and strategic calls actually know what they’re doing.

For multicultural agencies, this matters even more acutely. AI trained on general population data lacks the nuanced cultural intelligence to replace human creative judgment for communities like U.S. Hispanics, Asian Americans, or Black Americans. AI can scale speed. Cultural intelligence is what makes that speed meaningful.

“AI will make everyone in this industry faster. Cultural intelligence is what will make us better. Speed without cultural truth just makes bad work at scale.”

— FROM THE PANEL

03

Brand Safety Is Being Rewritten — and We Need to Be in the Room

Brand safety hit a genuine inflection point in 2025. The conversation is shifting from “brand safety” to “brand suitability.” And here’s what our panel raised: multicultural agencies have a stake in making sure that rewrite doesn’t replicate past mistakes under a new name.

For years, brand safety blocklists disproportionately excluded content related to communities of color and cultural conversations. As the playbook gets redrafted, we have to be in the room. We understand what “suitable” means - for the brand and for the community. That’s not a soft credential. It’s an irreplaceable one.

04

Cultural Intelligence Is Not a Specialty. It’s the Strategy.

The U.S. Hispanic population represents 65 million people and $3.4 trillion in purchasing power. Gen Z - the most diverse generation in American history - will hold $12 trillion in spending power by 2030. The U.S. is heading toward a majority-multicultural population within our professional lifetimes.

This is not a niche audience strategy. This is the market.

Brands still treating multicultural strategy as a separate line item - a translation pass, a campaign add-on - are making a long-term strategic error. Real cultural intelligence means building with culture, not targeting at it. The best work any of us do isn’t culturally relevant because we translated it well. It’s culturally relevant because it was born from cultural insight.

“The question is no longer whether to invest in cultural intelligence - it’s how deeply that investment is embedded in strategy from the very start.”

05

The Client Relationship Must Be a Belief Relationship

The panel also went somewhere honest and personal. Clients want outcomes, not output. They want agencies that can explain their value in business terms, that bring transparency to their AI use, pricing, and performance - and that show up with accountability, not just creativity.

But the best agency-client relationships I’ve experienced aren’t just transactional. They’re built on shared conviction: the client believes that cultural relevance drives business growth, and the agency believes it deeply enough to fight for it in the room, quarter after quarter.

When that belief is shared, you’re not defending your budget at every review. You’re co-authoring the brand’s growth strategy. That’s a different relationship - and a far more durable one.

Yesterday was a celebration - of a community that has fought, often against the current, to make this industry more accurate, more honest, and more powerful. Gilbert and Lisette built the infrastructure for that fight. Jorge, Giancarlo, and Kristian have each extended it in their own communities and disciplines - proving that deep cultural intelligence and strong business performance are not in tension. They are the same thing.

The model is evolving. The work continues. And the agencies that will lead the next chapter are the ones that understand culture not as a variable in a media plan, but as the organizing principle of everything we do.

Thank you, SAMA. Thank you, Gilbert and Lisette.

Nos vemos en el camino. 🌟

As Mexico prepares to open the 2026 World Cup at the Azteca, Memo Ochoa stands on the verge of a sixth World Cup and a farewell that captures something much larger than fútbol: the resilience, humility, joy, and orgullo of Mexican Greatness.

On June 11, 2026, Mexico will open the FIFA World Cup at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, in the first match of the largest World Cup ever staged. FIFA has confirmed that Mexico will begin the tournament that day in its capital, in a stadium that will become the first in history to host three World Cup opening matches, after 1970 and 1986.

That fact alone is enough to give any Mexican goosebumps.

The World Cup returning to Mexico is not simply a sporting event. It is a cultural homecoming. It is memory, mythology, and destiny walking back into the same cathedral where Pelé once danced, where Maradona became eternal, and where generations of Mexicans learned that fútbol can be much more than a game.

It can be a mirror.

It can be a language.

It can be a way of saying, aquí estamos.

For me, this is not an abstract emotion.

I was a young kid in 1970 when I witnessed the first World Cup in Mexico, and with it, the grandiosity of Pelé. Not just the player, but the presence. The elegance. The sense that greatness could move through a stadium and make everyone feel they were watching history being written in real time.

In 1986, I did not just watch the World Cup. I practically lived it.

I was working at McCann Erickson as Creative Director on three sponsoring brands: McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Camel. Those weeks were a blur of fútbol, clients, colleagues, deadlines, campaigns, late nights, and national obsession. Mexico was once again the center of the world, and the World Cup was not something happening around us. It was happening through us.

Then came 1994 in Los Angeles, where I witnessed the final and received the kind of news that changes the trajectory of a professional life: we had won the McDonald’s U.S. Hispanic account. Four years later, in 1998, I attended the two semifinals and the final with my son Alex, adding another layer to this lifelong relationship with the game. From my father to my clients and colleagues, from my son to now my wife, Liz, the World Cup has become one of the ways my life marks time.

So when I attend the opening match on June 11, it will not be just another game. It will be my fifth World Cup. It will be Mexico again. It will be the Azteca again. And it will be a bucket list milestone fulfilled with Liz by my side.

And in the middle of that opening moment, there is another story waiting to be told. A story with curls, gloves, impossible reflexes, and 23 years of discipline, sacrifice, scrutiny, and pride.

The story of Memo Ochoa.

As part of the Mexico’s final squad, Memo will stand on the verge of something unprecedented: participation in a sixth World Cup. Because Mexico opens the tournament in Mexico City, he may reach that milestone days before Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi have the opportunity to do the same. In a world that so often measures greatness through the most obvious global icons, how extraordinary would it be for the first image of six World Cups to belong to a Mexican goalkeeper?

Not a striker.

Not a billionaire brand.

Not the player the world expected.

But Memo.

Nuestro Memo.

For many, Memo Ochoa is a collection of unforgettable World Cup moments. Brazil 2014. Germany 2018. Those saves that seem less like athletic reactions and more like acts of faith. That rare ability to grow larger when the stage grows bigger. That strange, beautiful Mexican habit of turning pressure into poetry.

But recently, I had the privilege of meeting Memo during the filming of the new Centenario Tequila campaign. And what stayed with me was not the celebrity. It was not the résumé. It was not even the aura that inevitably surrounds someone who has represented Mexico before the entire world.

What stayed with me was his humanity.

For someone so accomplished, so famous, so instantly recognizable, Memo was authentic. Grounded. Even humble. There was an ease about him that could not be manufactured, a warmth that did not need to be performed, a magnetism that came not from fame but from presence.

You could feel it in every scene.

He did not enter the room like someone asking to be admired. He entered like someone who understood why he was there. Not to play a role, but to carry an emotion. Not to act Mexican pride, but to embody it.

That is what makes Memo such a powerful symbol. He does not simply represent athletic excellence. He represents a very Mexican form of excellence: resilient, resourceful, emotional, disciplined, improvisational, generous, and deeply connected to something bigger than the self.

That, to me, is Mexican Greatness.

Not perfection.

Not arrogance.

Not the need to explain ourselves to the world.

Mexican Greatness is the dignity to keep going when the odds are not designed for you. It is grace under pressure. It is joy in adversity. It is the ability to transform struggle into beauty, criticism into fuel, and expectation into purpose.

Memo has lived inside that tension for more than two decades.

Goalkeepers know a particular kind of loneliness. Their mistakes are public, permanent, and replayed. Their triumphs are often measured in what did not happen. A striker is remembered for the goal everyone sees. A goalkeeper is remembered for the disaster he prevented.

Memo built a career in that invisible space.

For 23 years, he has stood between possibility and heartbreak. He has moved across countries, clubs, 7vleagues, languages, and cultures, adapting again and again without losing the essence of who he is.

There is something profoundly moving about that.

Because this may not only the final chapter of a career. It is the closing chapter of a relationship between a player and a people. Memo has been there for a generation of Mexicans who watched him grow from prodigy to veteran, from promise to institution, from goalkeeper to national mirror.

In his face, we have seen tension.

In his saves, release.

In his leadership, continuity.

In his resilience, something familiar.

Nuestra cultura knows endurance. We know what it means to carry history and still find room for celebration. We know what it means to be underestimated and still show up con todo. We know what it means to sing when our hearts are full, when our nerves are frayed, and when we need to remind ourselves who we are.

That is why Memo’s connection with Centenario Tequila feels so natural.

Centenario’s “Memos for Mexico” campaign invites fans to contribute voice and video recordings of “Cielito Lindo,” framing the song as a collective expression of Mexican identity and pride.

That is not just marketing.

At its best, it is cultural memory in motion.

Because “Cielito Lindo” is not just a song. It is a password. A prayer. A collective heartbeat. It is what happens when millions of people, across borders and generations, remember that pride is not an abstract idea. It has a sound. It has a rhythm. It has a voice.

Ay, ay, ay, ay.

You do not translate that.

You feel it.

And when Memo speaks to that feeling, it lands because he has earned the right to do so. Not by being perfect. By enduring. By coming back. By showing up. By accepting the burden of expectation and still finding a way to remain human.

In a world obsessed with personal brands, Memo Ochoa reminds us that legacy is not built by performance alone. It is built by consistency. By character. By what people feel in your presence when the cameras are not yet rolling.

That is what I saw.

A man who has done extraordinary things, but does not seem consumed by his own extraordinariness. A champion who understands that pride does not have to be loud to be powerful. A Mexican icon whose greatness feels more profound because it is anchored in humility.

If 2026 is indeed his farewell, it will be a farewell worthy of poetry.

The World Cup returns to Mexico.

The opening match returns to the Azteca.

A nation returns to the center of the fútbol universe.

And Memo Ochoa, after 23 years of flying, falling, rising, resisting, believing, and protecting, stands at the threshold of a sixth World Cup.

Before Messi.

Before Cristiano.

Before the world catches up to the headline, Mexico may get to say: we were there first.

But perhaps the deeper truth is this:

Memo Ochoa has never only been first in a record book. He has been first in courage. First in resilience. First in reminding us that Mexican Greatness is not a slogan. It is a way of being.

It is the humility to stay grounded.

The resourcefulness to adapt anywhere.

The discipline to keep preparing when no one is watching.

The heart to carry millions without losing yourself.

That is Memo’s legacy.

And that is why, when he walks onto the world stage one last time, he will not be walking alone.

He will be carrying the pride of nuestra cultura.

He will be carrying the sound of every “Cielito Lindo” sung from the chest.

He will be carrying the memory of every kid (including me) who put on gloves and dreamed of flying.

He will be carrying Mexico.

And Mexico, as always, will be carrying him.

There are coincidences… and then there are quiet pieces of destiny that reveal themselves slowly, over time.

In Mexico, Mother’s Day does not move. It does not adjust itself to convenience. It is not negotiated by calendars or long weekends. It is fixed—May 10th—like something sacred should be.

You grow up with it. You feel it coming. You hear it in the music, in the calls, in the ritual of showing up.

And in my life, May 10th chose to mean even more.

It is my mother Frida’s birthday.
It is my wife Liz’s birthday.

The same day.

For years, I called it a coincidence. A charming anomaly. Something improbable enough to make people smile when I mentioned it.

But life has a way of turning coincidences into meaning—if you pay attention long enough.

Because in our culture, motherhood is not just a role. It is a presence. A force that shapes everything around it, often without asking for recognition.

We come from societies that are often described, sometimes simplistically, as “machista.” But that label misses the deeper truth.

Ours is a culture built, sustained, and emotionally governed by women.

By mothers.

They are the center of gravity. The quiet authority. The ones who hold the emotional blueprint of the family.

They are memory. They are discipline. They are tenderness and strength in the same breath.

My mother, Frida, was all of that.
Not loudly. Not performatively. But unmistakably.

She taught me that values are not declared—they are lived. That love is unwavering, but never passive. That character is built in the everyday, in the small decisions no one applauds.

Long before I understood brands, I understood her.

And then, life—almost poetically—placed Liz in my path.

Born on the same day. Carrying, in her own way, that same depth of presence.

But Liz is not just part of that symmetry. She expands it.

Because to watch her as a mother is to witness something extraordinary in motion.

She leads with love, but never loses clarity.
She nurtures, but also challenges.
She protects, but also prepares.

She is not only raising our daughter—she is shaping a human being with values, confidence, and a sense of identity that will travel far beyond our home.

Our daughter, Carolina Frida, carries her own story in her name.

Carolina—for my grandmother.
Frida—for my mother.

Three generations, living in one name.

And every day, through Liz, those names are not just remembered—they are honored.

Because Liz doesn’t just tell Carolina who she comes from. She shows her what it means to carry that legacy forward.

In the way she speaks.
In the way she stands.
In the way she loves without conditions but parents with intention.

That is not easy. And it is not accidental.

It is the work of a mother who understands that raising a daughter is not about protection alone—it is about preparation. About giving her roots, yes, but also wings strong enough to carry history with pride, not weight.

So when May 10th arrives, it is no longer just a date on the calendar for me.

It is a convergence of women who define my life in different, but deeply connected ways.

The woman who raised me.
The woman who walks beside me.
And the young woman who carries both of them within her.

All tied, beautifully and improbably, to the same day.

In Mexico, we don’t let Mother’s Day pass quietly. We show up. We celebrate. We make it visible.

And maybe that’s because, deep down, we understand something essential:

That mothers are not just part of the story.

They are the story.

They are the reason we know who we are.
And, if we’re lucky, the reason we know who we can become.

So this May 10th, I don’t just celebrate a tradition.

I celebrate a lineage.

Of strength.
Of love.
Of women who lead not by demanding attention, but by earning devotion.

And in that lineage, I find not coincidence—but meaning.

If you think Cinco de Mayo is about Mexico, you’re already missing the point.

Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day.
It’s not even a major holiday in Mexico.
And yet, in the United States, it has become a cultural and commercial juggernaut.

That contradiction isn’t confusion.

It’s revelation.

Because Cinco de Mayo doesn’t show us how Mexico celebrates itself.
It shows us how America consumes Mexico.

Yes, the origin matters. In 1862, in Puebla, a smaller Mexican army defeated the French. A symbolic victory—courage over power, resilience over empire.

But history alone doesn’t create a nationwide ritual.

Culture does. And scale does.

And Mexican culture, whether fully acknowledged or not, is one of the most powerful forces shaping modern America.

Beyond influencing it. Defining it.

From what America eats to how it speaks, from street corners to Super Bowl ads, Mexican culture is not a “segment.” It’s embedded in the system. It’s part of the operating code.

Cinco de Mayo is what happens when that cultural force gets picked up, packaged, and amplified by American marketing.

And marketing—at its best—doesn’t just sell products.

It engineers behavior.

Corona (a great analogy for the 5 de Mayo phenomenon itself) understood that early.

It didn’t need to own history. It just needed to own the ritual.

Beer. Lime. Sun. Together.

Repeat.

Modelo is now taking it to another level.

And just like that, a relatively obscure historical moment became one of the most predictable consumption patterns in the country.

Not because people understood it.

Because people could participate in it.

That’s the real power of Cinco de Mayo. Not education—access.

But that access comes at a cost.

Because when a culture as deep and complex as Mexico’s gets translated into mass behavior, it inevitably gets simplified.

Expanded… and flattened.

Cinco de Mayo becomes both a celebration and a caricature.
A tribute and a shortcut.
Visibility… at the expense of depth.

Tacos. Margaritas. Sombreros. Beer.

Recognizable? Instantly.
Accurate? Not even close.

And yet, dismissing it entirely would miss the bigger truth.

You don’t get a holiday like Cinco de Mayo—this big, this pervasive, this economically powerful—without real cultural gravity behind it.

Mexico doesn’t show up in America once a year. Or only during Hispanic Heritage Month.

It’s here every day.

In kitchens. In language. In music. In humor. In family. In rhythm. In flavor. In feeling.

Cinco de Mayo is just the most visible spike in a constant presence.

So yes, question the commercialization.
Call out the reduction.
Challenge the clichés.

But also recognize what’s underneath it all:

A culture so strong, so magnetic, that even when it’s misunderstood, it still shapes the mainstream.

That’s not marginal influence.

That’s dominance.

So go ahead—celebrate Cinco de Mayo.

But understand what you’re really participating in.

Not a Mexican holiday.

An American interpretation of Mexican power and influence.

There is a song that every Mexican knows by heart. Not because anyone taught it to us in school. Not because it plays on the radio every morning. We know it because it lives in us—passed down not through lessons, but through living.

“Cielito Lindo.”

Four words. One melody. And a chorus that might be the most honest piece of philosophy Mexico has ever produced:

Ay, ay, ay, ay, canta y no llores. Porque cantando se alegran, cielito lindo, los corazones.

Sing. Don’t cry. Because singing is what makes our hearts glad.

Think about that for a moment. In a world that tells you to grind harder, hustle more, optimize everything—this song, written in 1882 by a man named Quirino Mendoza y Cortés who was simply in love, offers a radical counter-proposal: When life gets heavy, don’t shut down. Sing. Don’t retreat into sorrow. Sing louder. Because joy is not the absence of pain—it’s the defiance of it.

That, right there, is the Mexican superpower.

From a Love Song to a Battle Cry

Quirino Mendoza wrote “Cielito Lindo” as a love letter. The lyrics speak of dark eyes descending from the sierra, of a beauty mark near a lover’s mouth, of the ache and wonder of falling for someone completely. It is tender and intimate—a man pouring his heart out to his “lovely little sky.”

But great songs have a way of outgrowing their origins. And over 140 years, “Cielito Lindo” has grown into something far larger than a serenade. It has become the unofficial anthem of Mexico itself.

If you have ever been in a fútbol stadium when El Tri takes the field, you know exactly what I mean. Before the first whistle, before the lineup is announced, you will hear it rise—first from one section, then another, until 80,000 voices become one:

Ay, ay, ay, ay...

It is not a chant. It is a declaration. We are here. We are together. And no matter what happens on that pitch, we will not stop singing.

Moscow, 2018

On June 17, 2018. Mexico vs. Germany. The World Cup. The defending champions against a team most had written off. When Hirving “Chucky” Lozano’s shot hit the back of the net, the celebration was so massive that seismic sensors in Mexico City—half a world away—registered the tremor.

But what Stans out is what happened after the match. Deep in the Moscow metro, far from the cameras, groups of Mexican fans filled the tunnels and subway cars with “Cielito Lindo.” Russian commuters, who are famously not in the business of spontaneous joy, stood frozen as a wave of green jerseys sang through the underground. Canta y no llores.

That moment was not about soccer. It was about identity. It was the sound of a people who have been told, over and over, that they are less—less important, less capable, less worthy—refusing to believe it. Singing instead.

When the Earth Shook

And here is where the song reveals its deepest truth. “Cielito Lindo” is not just the soundtrack of victory. It is the soundtrack of survival.

September 19, 2017. A 7.1-magnitude earthquake devastated Mexico City. Buildings collapsed. Lives were lost. And in the dust and chaos, something extraordinary happened: volunteers—ordinary citizens digging through rubble with their bare hands, hauling food and medical supplies through darkened streets—began to sing.

Canta y no llores.

Not because there was nothing to cry about. But because singing was the only way to keep going. Because in that moment, the song was not entertainment. It was oxygen. It was the collective voice of a people saying: we will not be broken. We will lift each other. We will sing through this darkness until morning comes.

When South Korean rescue teams, who had worked alongside Mexican volunteers for over ten days, finally departed, the neighborhood gathered to see them off. They did not wave flags or give speeches. They sang “Cielito Lindo.” It was the highest honor Mexico knows how to give—wrapping someone in the song that holds us all together.

An Anthem of Optimism

I have spent my career trying to understand and celebrate what makes Mexican culture extraordinary. And I keep coming back to this: we are a people wired for optimism. Not the naive kind. Not the kind that pretends everything is fine. The kind that stares directly at difficulty and chooses joy anyway. The kind that says, the world may be falling apart, but I will sing—and in singing, I will remind you that your heart still has a reason to be glad.

“Cielito Lindo” is the purest expression of that spirit. It does not promise that life will be easy. It does not say the pain will disappear. It says something far more powerful: Cantando se alegran los corazones. Singing makes hearts glad. The act itself is the cure. The togetherness is the medicine.

That is why you hear it in stadiums and in rubble. At quinceañeras and at funerals. At protests and at fiestas. On streets in Los Angeles and in subway tunnels in Moscow. Wherever Mexicans gather—especially when the odds are against us—the song appears. Because it is not really a song. It is a philosophy. A way of moving through the world. A refusal to let sorrow have the last word.

Sing and Don’t Cry

Today, as headlines reduce Mexico to a single, dark narrative, I think about Quirino Mendoza sitting down in 1882, composing a simple love song with no idea that it would one day be sung by millions in stadiums, in disaster zones, in foreign cities, in moments of triumph and heartbreak alike.

He gave us more than a melody. He gave us a manual for living.

Canta y no llores. Sing and don’t cry. Not because crying is weakness—but because singing is strength. Because when we sing together, we remember who we are. And who we are is extraordinary.

That is Mexican Greatness. And it has a soundtrack.

Ay, ay, ay, ay.

When my good friend David Chitel asked me during a recent “Dave of the Dead” podcast what single song I’d want played at my funeral, I didn’t hesitate. Without a beat of doubt, I said: “Imagine.”

It wasn’t a calculated answer — it was instinctive, sincere, almost spiritual. It rose straight from the heart, because Imagine has always been the soundtrack to the world I dream of… and, in many ways, the world I’ve spent my life trying to help create.

The Dream That Defines Humanity

When John Lennon wrote Imagine in 1971, the world was heavy with war, protest, and division. Yet, in the middle of all that noise, he chose to whisper hope. His vision wasn’t grandiose or complicated — it was radically simple: What if we could see beyond borders, religions, and possessions, and instead choose peace?

More than a song, Imagine became an act of imagination itself — a quiet revolution of empathy. Lennon knew that to change reality, we first need to picture a better one.

The Personal Connection

As a proud Mexican American who has lived between languages, cultures, and continents, I’ve always felt deeply connected to that message. My story — like so many immigrant stories — is one of blending worlds, finding meaning in difference, and turning duality into strength.

Through creativity, I’ve tried to build bridges: between brands and communities, between cultures and understanding. That’s what multicultural storytelling is ultimately about — daring to imagine together. Because when we do, we create more than campaigns. We create belonging.

Imagine reminds me that empathy is not weakness — it’s wisdom. It’s the fuel that drives creativity and the foundation that makes unity possible.

Why Imagine Still Matters

More than five decades later, Lennon’s call feels more urgent than ever. We live in a world that seems increasingly divided — politically, culturally, spiritually. Yet the song asks us to remember something simple, even sacred: that peace begins not in governments or movements, but in our own imagination.

Every line of Imagine dares us to believe that coexistence is not utopia but choice — a series of daily acts rooted in compassion. And in a way, that mirrors what creativity is all about: envisioning what doesn’t exist, and then courageously bringing it to life.

My Final Song

So yes, when the time comes, I’d want Imagine playing as people gather to celebrate my life. Not as a goodbye, but as a continuation. Because its message — that we can dream the world into something kinder, fairer, and more human — is the message I’d like to leave behind.

Imagine is not about perfection; it’s about possibility. It’s not nostalgia; it’s a challenge. It asks all of us to close our eyes, open our hearts, and picture the world not as it is, but as it could be. If we could all take a moment to truly imagine — to see beyond the boundaries of nation, race, or creed — perhaps we’d find ourselves, as Lennon suggested, living life in peace.

And maybe, just maybe, we’d realize that the dreamers weren’t naïve after all. They were simply the ones who kept believing that imagining a better world was the first step toward creating it.

Uncertainty no longer knocks—it lives with us. It sits in our newsfeeds, our plans, our silences. The world feels like it’s constantly shifting under our feet, and some days it’s hard to tell what will change next, or how. Yet, somewhere in all this noise, there is still a whisper worth listening to: we remain in charge of how we see the world.

That’s where the quiet power of a positive outlook begins. It does not deny the turbulence. It doesn’t pretend everything is fine. Instead, it asks a different question: Given all this, who do I choose to be?

A positive outlook is not naïveté; it’s rebellion. It’s the refusal to let fear edit our story. It’s the decision to look forward when everything around us insists on looking down. Realists describe the world as it is; those with a positive outlook help build the world as it could be.

In my world—the world of creativity, ideas, and brands—this outlook is not a nice-to-have, it’s fuel. It’s what turns impossible briefs into surprising solutions. It’s what helps us see potential in places others overlook: in new voices, in underrepresented communities, in markets that don’t yet have a name. A positive outlook doesn’t ignore risk; it just refuses to let risk be the only lens.

I’ve seen it time and again. Two teams, facing the same challenge: shrinking budgets, high expectations, and a brutal timeline. One team spirals into cynicism—every obstacle becomes proof that “this will never work.” The other acknowledges the constraints, then asks, “What can we still make happen?” Same reality, radically different results. The difference wasn’t talent. It was outlook.

Those of us who grew up between cultures understand this at a deeper level. We learned early on that change is not an exception—it’s the norm. New language, new rules, new codes to decode. Out of that instability, many of us developed something like a quiet superpower: the ability to find a center within ourselves, even when the outside world felt unstable.

In our communities, a positive outlook is often embedded in everyday gestures. The way a family hosts a gathering even in tight times. The way humor surfaces in the middle of hardship. The way we talk about “salir adelante”—moving forward—not as a fantasy, but as a stubborn, almost sacred obligation. That cultural instinct to believe in tomorrow, even when today is difficult, is a form of wisdom we sometimes underestimate.

This doesn’t mean closing our eyes to injustice, inequality, or pain. On the contrary, a genuine positive outlook requires that we see reality clearly. It asks us to stand in front of the full picture—the beauty and the brokenness—and still choose to engage, to contribute, to care. It’s not “toxic positivity.” It’s not pretending everything is okay. It’s saying: even if everything is not okay, I will not let that cancel my capacity to act with hope.

There is also something profoundly practical about guarding our outlook. When we let negativity run the show, our world shrinks. We see fewer options, fewer allies, fewer exits. Our thinking narrows. When we cultivate a more open, hopeful perspective, we see more paths, more partners, more possibilities. A positive outlook won’t fix everything. But it will make us more capable of navigating anything.

So yes—be aware, be vigilant. Read the signs, understand the risks, protect what needs protecting. But don’t surrender your faith in what can be. A positive outlook is not the absence of struggle; it’s the poetry of survival. It’s the choice to remain human in systems that often push us toward numbness or despair.

Maybe that’s what this moment is really asking of us:
to dream louder than doubt,
to light a candle when others predict darkness,
to lead not from fear, but from vision.

In our roles—as leaders, as creators, as citizens, as simply human beings—we have more influence than we think. Every time we choose our outlook, we’re quietly shaping the atmosphere around us. We’re deciding whether people leave our presence a little heavier, or a little lighter.

Let’s keep rebelling, softly but firmly—with ideas, with hope, with love. Let’s dare to design conversations, teams, and communities where the default is not cynicism, but curiosity; not resignation, but resolve.

Because a positive outlook is the most creative act of all.
It is how we invent tomorrow—starting from the only place we ever truly control: the way we choose to see today.

What I discovered, page after page, is that memory does not ask for permission. It arrives unannounced, rearranging the furniture of our inner life, reminding us that what we’ve lived never really leaves—it only changes shape. In Elena Ehrenwald’s photographs and in the words they drew out of me, I found myself walking that fragile line between nostalgia and truth, between the comfort of forgetting and the courage it takes to remember.

Elena’s sepia imagery has always carried the weight of stillness. In her photographs, time seems suspended, as if the world itself were holding its breath. Those moments, frozen yet alive, stirred something in me—a need to translate the unspoken language of memory into poetry. Out of that dialogue emerged lines that became the heartbeat of the book:

Es el ayer, el hoy y es mañana.
Es un algo y es un todo que se acomoda y se desordena sin voluntad.
Es un pozo profundo, obscuro y luminoso.
Es un elixir que envejece y rejuvenece.
Se desenvuelve… se abre y se cierra… se voltea y nos para de cabeza…
Es juicio y es prejuicio… es ilusión y realidad…
Es frustración y aliento que se entremezclan… que nos confunden…

Those words reminded me that memory is never static. It breathes, transforms, hides and resurfaces. It can be both our most loyal companion and our most capricious one.

When the late Carlos Alberto Montaner agreed to write the foreword, he brought with him the authority of someone who understood memory not only as sentiment, but as civic and moral duty. Carlos knew that remembering is a form of resistance: against erasure, against indifference, against the temptation to simplify what was complex. Through his generous lens, I began to see each poem and photograph as a small testimony, a fragment of a larger human archive that refuses to disappear.

In that spirit, another passage emerged that still feels true to me today:

La memoria es como un pasajero que viaja libremente sin visa ni pasaporte
cruzando las fronteras del tiempo y el espacio…
Es un lente a la mente que caprichosamente refleja sueños y momentos…
que filtra sensaciones, experiencias y vivencias.

Memory moves through us with no respect for borders or chronology. One object, one smell, one shaft of light on an old wall—and suddenly we are transported, without warning, to another country, another age, another version of ourselves. Sometimes that journey is tender. Sometimes it is brutal. But it is always revealing.

There is also a more intimate side to this exploration: the invisible cells we build inside ourselves. I tried to name them in lines like these:

Hay prisiones invisibles, hechas de caricias que ya no existen,
y de voces que aún susurran en el eco del silencio.

Those invisible prisons, as painful as they can be, are also sanctuaries of meaning. In them we encounter not only who we were, but who we are becoming. Memory, with all its contradictions, invites us to face ourselves honestly—to hold joy and loss in the same breath, to cherish both the ache and the beauty of what endures.

As I revisit La Prisión de la Memoria today, I feel more gratitude than pride. Gratitude for Elena’s quiet, powerful images; for Carlos Alberto Montaner’s guiding words; and for every reader willing to enter this space with an open heart. My hope was never to monumentalize the past, but to offer a moment of stillness—a place where each person might recognize their own shadows and their own light.

Because in the end, memory is both mirror and compass.

En cada recuerdo late una promesa:
lo vivido no muere, sólo se transforma.

If this book helps someone honor their past without being imprisoned by it—if it offers even one reader the courage to look back with tenderness and walk forward with a little more understanding—then this “prison” of memory will have done what it was meant to do: not to lock us in, but to quietly, humbly, set us free.

One hundred days before World Cup 2026, the world doesn’t just flip a calendar. It holds its breath. You feel it in airports, WhatsApp chats, corner bars, school playgrounds and brand war rooms: fútbol is about to reclaim its place as the beautiful common language of the planet.

If the Super Bowl is America’s biggest show, the World Cup is that rush every single day for almost a month. Every match is somebody’s final, somebody’s heartbreak, somebody’s miracle. Work schedules bend. Cities change their rhythm. Kids learn geography through jerseys and chants, not textbooks. For brands, this isn’t “big media.” This is borrowed heartbeat. You’re not buying impressions; you’re stepping straight into the emotional operating system of billions.

This time, that heartbeat has three homes: Mexico, the United States and Canada. Three countries, three flags, one shared stage. In a moment when borders and identity dominate every argument, fútbol will quietly do what politics can’t — turn North America into one continuous emotional territory. Fans will cross from Tijuana to San Diego, from Montreal to New York, from Guadalajara to Houston, carrying drums, accents, songs and stories. Politicians talk about walls; fútbol builds bridges.

And it all begins where the game has always lived in the streets: June 11, in Mexico. A country where a beat‑up ball on a dusty pitch can still turn an ordinary afternoon into pure joy. Where kids play until the light disappears and a mother’s voice is the only final whistle that counts. Starting the biggest tournament on earth there is poetic justice. It says to the world: the game begins where the game has never stopped — in places that create magic out of almost nothing.

No other sport activates identity like fútbol. A single goal can make an entire nation forget its problems for ninety seconds. A missed penalty can unite millions in the same stunned silence. In those moments, ideology, hashtags and algorithms step aside. What remains is raw emotion — messy, loud, deeply human.

For multicultural families, especially across the Americas, this is more than entertainment. It’s inheritance. It’s abuelitas who know offside rules better than any pundit. It’s parents who arrived in a new country with almost nothing and still found a way to buy that sacred jersey, two sizes too big, so their child could literally wear their roots on their chest. It’s group chats in Spanglish, Franglais or Portuñol where a single emoji and a voice note say more than any speech.

That’s why this World Cup is more than a sponsorship window. It’s a character test.

You cannot show up to this moment with a safe, beige “We are all united” spot and expect anyone to care. Unity is not a tagline; it’s a decision. It’s who you cast — and who you’ve never bothered to cast. It’s which languages you honor — and how sincerely you do it. It’s which communities you keep talking to when the confetti is swept away and the cameras go home.

From Mexico City to Los Angeles to Toronto, the stands will be a living mosaic: Mexican‑American kids in split jerseys, Canadian fans waving more than one flag, immigrants cheering with equal passion for two anthems. If your work doesn’t look, sound and feel like that mosaic, people will feel it instantly. Not as a strategy error — as a lack of respect.

Because multicultural is not a “segment” anymore. It’s the default setting of this World Cup — and of this continent.

For brands, the brief is brutally simple and beautifully demanding: don’t treat multicultural audiences as an “add‑on” line in the media plan. Start with them. Build from them. Put people who live between cultures in charge of the stories you tell. If you don’t, your campaign will feel like cultural tourism — and in 2026, tourism isn’t enough.

The upside is enormous. When a brand gets it right around the World Cup, the work doesn’t just sell a product; it becomes part of family memory.

“Do you remember that spot that made your dad cry before the quarterfinal?”
“Do you remember that ad that made your mom shout ‘¡Así somos!’ at the TV?”

That’s the power of showing up with courage, humility and emotional intelligence in the most watched, most beloved event on earth.

As the countdown hits 100 days, every brand has a choice: be a sponsor of a tournament, or a steward of a moment.

Sponsors buy space around the game. Stewards help write the story of who we are when we’re at our best. Stewards put migrants and bicultural fans at the center, not in the background. They understand that identity in 2026 is layered and proud — Mexican and American, Nigerian and Canadian, Brazilian and Japanese — and they treat that complexity as their greatest creative advantage, not a “problem to simplify.” They invest not only in glossy World Cup films, but in the neighborhoods, local clubs and community pitches where the next generation of players — and customers — is actually growing up.

World Cup 2026 will give us something bigger than highlights: it will give us proof that, even in a noisy and divided world, we still know how to feel the same emotion at the same time. For one month, three nations will breathe in different languages but exhale the same roar. Brands have a rare invitation not just to witness that miracle, but to amplify it — to bet unapologetically on a multicultural future that is not “coming,” but already here.

When the lights go down on the final, nobody will remember every scoreline. They will remember who was on their side — who honored their story, their accent, their flag, their journey. The beautiful game is about to write its next chapter on our continent.

The only real question is: will we have the audacity to match its beauty — or will we settle for watching from the sidelines of our own moment?

In the early 1970s, Nike was not yet Nike. It was a restless experiment, a young outsider trying to find its place in a world dominated by bigger, safer, more established players. Choosing Năstase as its first endorsed athlete was not just a marketing decision; it was a declaration of identity. He was outrageously talented, but also emotional, unpredictable, and sometimes infuriating—a walking contradiction. In other words, he was everything a cautious brand would avoid.

But Nike was never meant to be cautious. Much less their beloved and admired agency Wieden & Kennedy!

By aligning with Năstase, Nike quietly set its destiny in motion. It said, without yet having the language we know today: “We will stand with the ones who play on the edge. We will build our brand on real, imperfect, electrifying human energy.” That choice became the seed of a philosophy that would define its DNA and reshape creativity itself.

Once Nike experienced what happens when you fuse performance, personality, and storytelling into a single partnership, the game changed forever. The athlete stopped being a face in an ad and became the beating heart of the brand. From there, a new model emerged: build the myth of the athlete, and in doing so, you build the myth of the brand.

What followed is the history we all know, but still underestimate. Eras built around singular figures. Shoe lines that carried names instead of just technologies. Campaigns that didn’t merely show products, but dramatized doubt, failure, resistance, rebellion, redemption. Nike transformed endorsements from transactional deals into long‑term, soul‑level collaborations. Brand and athlete didn’t just share exposure; they shared a story.

This strategy didn’t just make Nike powerful. It reshaped how the entire world thinks about creativity.

Nike proved that a sports campaign could be art. That a single line could become a global mantra. That a commercial could be a short film about fear and courage. That design, copy, music, and movement could come together to express something profoundly human: the fragile, stubborn decision to try. Over and over again.

As the years went by, Nike kept pushing that idea further, especially around the notion of “crazy.” The brand began to celebrate the kind of ambition and conviction that looks irrational to everyone else—until it changes the world. “Crazy” stopped being an insult and became a compliment, a rallying cry for those willing to dream bigger than what feels reasonable.

That’s why their endorsement of Colin Kaepernick was such a defining moment. Once again, Nike chose tension over comfort, conviction over consensus. Backing an athlete who had become a lightning rod for cultural debate was the modern echo of that first bold step with Năstase—only now amplified on a global, hyperconnected stage. It was Nike saying, yet again: “We stand with those whose beliefs make people uncomfortable, because discomfort is often where change begins.”

In doing so, Nike evolved “crazy” into something almost sacred: the courage to stay true to your values when the world demands silence. It connected the dots between a fiery Romanian on a clay court, a quarterback taking a knee, and every individual who has ever been told that their dreams, their identity, or their principles are “too much.”

And at the very beginning of this revolution stands Ilie Năstase—a Romanian.

That detail is not incidental to me. It is deeply personal.

I was born and raised in Mexico, but both of my parents were born in Romania. They carried the Romania they had to fled with them in their accents, in late‑night stories about another time and place, in the flavors in our kitchen, in the sadness and hope mixed into every memory. Outside our home, I was the Mexican kid: fútbol in the street, Spanish on my tongue, surrounded by warmth, noise, color, and improvisation. Inside, our living room felt like a small Romanian outpost, orbiting around a country I had never seen—but somehow, viscerally, felt as mine. (I ended up visiting with my brother and sister in 2005).

I grew up between worlds. Between languages. Between identities. And that in‑between space, which could have felt like a fracture, slowly revealed itself as a gift.

So when I learned that the first athlete Nike ever endorsed—the spark that ignited this new era of brand‑building and courageous creativity—was Romanian, something clicked inside me. It felt like a quiet vindication, a whisper from the universe saying: your roots are not a footnote; they are part of the main story.

Năstase, with all his brilliance and imperfection, standing at the origin of Nike’s endorsement strategy, is more than a historical anecdote. He is a symbol of what happens when the world dares to look beyond the usual suspects. When a young brand says yes to a complex, unpredictable soul. When a Romanian, of all people, becomes the first carrier of a swoosh that will one day define aspiration for millions.

My creative journey has been shaped by that same tension: Romanian at the core, Mexican in my formation, global in my ambitions. Romania has given me depth, resilience, and a sensitivity to struggle and reinvention. Mexico has given me color, rhythm, humor, and a visceral understanding of culture as something alive and unruly. Advertising became the arena where those forces could dance together.

Every time I help a brand choose a spokesperson, a story, a tone of voice, I hear echoes of those Nike decisions—from Năstase to Kaepernick: dare to pick the person who is not “perfect,” but unforgettable. Dare to build your brand not on what feels safest, but on what feels most human. Dare to believe that the kid with an accent, the athlete with a temper, the quarterback with a protest, the creative with a divided identity might just be the one who changes everything.

That is the legacy of Ilie Năstase and Nike for me: the idea that greatness often begins at the margins, with a risky “yes” to someone who doesn’t fit the mold. It is a reminder that our origins—Romanian, Mexican, or any combination of places and histories—are not baggage to conceal, but energy to unleash.

My Romanian roots, filtered through a Mexican upbringing and a life in creativity, have become my compass. They help me recognize the power of the outsider, the beauty of the hybrid, the potential of the misunderstood. They remind me that the role of a creative is not just to decorate the world, but to reframe it—to elevate the stories and people that others overlook.

So when I look at that early partnership between a young Nike and Ilie Năstase, and at the later, louder choices like Colin Kaepernick, I see more than sponsorships. I see a mirror. A Romanian at the dawn of a brand that would teach the world to dream in new ways. A brand that keeps redefining what “crazy” really means. And I carry that with me into every campaign, every idea, every risk: the conviction that somewhere, in a small but brave decision—in a young athlete, a young brand, a young immigrant family—lies the beginning of the next legend.

In a world that feels increasingly divided, where anger too often drowns out empathy, I find myself wanting to pause and write a love letter—to love itself. To that universal force that, despite everything, continues to connect us, heal us, and remind us of what it means to be human.

Love isn’t naïve. It’s not blind to our fractures or immune to pain. It’s resilient because of them. Love is what helps us rise above cynicism, what gives us the courage to listen when it’s easier to shout, and to reach out when we’ve been taught to pull away.

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on how love hides in the smallest gestures: a stranger holding open a door, a parent’s patience, a friend’s text that says “thinking of you.” These acts might seem trivial, but they’re quiet revolutions against indifference. They remind me that decency, kindness, and compassion are alive—just less noisy than hate.

As someone who’s spent a lifetime telling stories—about brands, about people, about cultures—I’ve learned that love is the most effective story there is. Not romantic love alone, but the broader kind: the love that embraces differences, celebrates what makes us unique, and builds bridges instead of walls. In my work, I’ve seen how authentic love expressed through respect can transform not just marketing campaigns, but entire communities.

Love demands work. It calls for curiosity over judgment, dialogue over division, humanity over ideology. It’s not an escape from the world’s problems—it’s the only real solution to them. That’s why I choose to keep believing. Not because I’m blind to what’s wrong, but because I’ve seen what’s possible when people come together with open hearts.

So this is my love letter—to love as a verb, as a practice, as a daily act of resistance. To everyone who keeps choosing empathy in an era of outrage, who keeps showing up for others, who refuses to let hate be the loudest voice in the room.

Let’s keep falling in love—with people, ideas, cultures, differences, and the infinite ways we can show up for one another. Because love, at its core, is not just a feeling—it’s a decision. And in the face of darkness, it’s the bravest one we can make.