Edelman says big brands must do more to include Hispanics

“CALL us what you want

— Hispanics, Latinos, Latinx. Labels don’t matter and we won’t cancel you. But what does matter to us is representation, recognition and investment by big brands and media.”

This is how Hispanic media star Claudia Roma Edelman, founder and CEO of New York-based DEI non-profit foundation We Are All Human, describes her mission at this year’s Cannes Lions. And she will be taking that message on to the conference stage tomorrow, when she hosts Unveiling Hispanic Sentiment Insights for Forward-Looking Industry Strategy.

The fact that today’s event is only the second Hispanic seminar in the history of the

Lions reinforces Edelman’s contention that her demographic has been consistently ignored by the big brands. “Hispanics are resilient, proud and united, but we feel disregarded,” Edelman said. “So this is a call to brands and media to take action and start prioritising Latinos in their strategies.”

Quite apart from the issue of exclusion, discounting the US Hispanic market is bad business, she added:

“If the US Hispanic community was a stand-alone country, we’d be the fifth largest in the world — bigger than the UK or Italy — so it’s not smart to ignore us.” Brands in need of more persuasion might also consider that US Hispanics are the largest and youngest cohort in the US, with a purchasing power of $2 trillion — statistics that represent a 30%-120% growth for Fortune 500 companies in the next five years.

In addition to explaining how brands can “activate

Weather: nature’s market forecaster

WHATEVER the prevailing conditions, the weather has the ability to shape our individual lives, world events and ultimately consumer decisions. That’s the message from IBM’s The

Weather Company.

“Weather impacts every person on the planet every day,” CMO Randi Stipes told Lions Daily News.

“The weather impacts the decisions we make con - sciously, or more often than not subconsciously. What we buy and how we feel.

“It can be as simple as influencing what you wear or it can influence your mood. From a marketing standpoint we can leverage those insights to better connect with consumers and ensure the message is resonating at the right time.”

Stipes focuses on how the weather is altering in a session today, Future Gazers: Mother Nature’s Influence, Liquid Reality and Real Human Connections, Connecting Creativity to Neurodiversity (12.45, on the Terrace stage).

“When we talk about the influence of mother nature, we need to think about the fact that weather is becoming more erratic,” Stipes said, citing the heatwave that the Hispanic market”, the seminar sees the launch of the 2023 Hispanic Sentiment Study, compiled in partnership with We Are All Human, Nielsen and TelevisaUnivision. The panel will also discuss the NFL’s pioneering efforts to embrace inclusivity in their marketing campaigns, notably the Super Bowl ads featuring Mexican flag football star Diana Flores. “Diana will be telling her story, which is very moving,” Edelman said. “She was once asked whether, when she was a child, she ever dreamed she’d be captain of the Mexican team and the star of a Super Bowl ad. She replied that she never had dreams, because she never saw anybody like herself in ads or movies. It was only when she was a teenager and was exposed to role models that she felt she was allowed to have dreams of her own.” brought record high temperatures to 100 different locations in Europe last Summer, and that parts of California had blizzard warnings and experienced snow.

“The influence of mother nature is becoming more profound because there are no longer these seasonal norms,” she said.

Understanding changes in the climate presents an opportunity for marketers to better understand the weather’s impact on consumers so that we can leverage those insights, she said: “We can’t control the forecast but we can extract the insights and better use them in our craft.”

To further illustrate the influence the weather has on our lives, the company has created an exhibition, The Weather Gallery, which explores how key events in time might have turned out had conditions been different.

“We are exhibiting the weather’s influence on catalytic cultural and historical moments over time,” Stipes said. “This is a festival of creativity so we have enlisted artists from around the globe to use generative AI to reimagine what those moments would look like had there been a different weather condition.”

The Battle of Waterloo is one of the events featured at the gallery. “It was a muddied battlefield, so we’re imagining what if the conditions had been different? What if Napoleon had known the forecast? Might he have been victorious at Waterloo?”