Had a conversation with a brand director last week who shared their frustration: they’d worked with three different agencies on their US expansion, and each one treated it like a scaling problem instead of a strategy problem. More budget, bigger influencers, same creative. Obviously, it didn’t work.
I think the issue is structural. Most agencies—American ones especially—don’t have the depth in LATAM markets to understand what makes a brand successful there in the first place. So when they take that brand to the US, they’re essentially erasing the thing that made clients trust it.
What I’ve learned is that successful cross-market campaigns need three things:
First: Cultural translation, not just linguistic translation. The tone, the humor, the values—these shift by market. A brand voice that kills in Mexico City might feel slightly off in Miami, even if both cities are Spanish-speaking. The subtlety matters.
Second: Creators who live in both worlds. Not necessarily bilingual influencers (though that helps), but creators and strategists who understand both audience psychographics. What LATAM audiences value as “aspirational” might look different through US consumer eyes.
Third: UGC as the foundation, not the afterthought. Authentic user-generated content performs better in both markets when it’s built into the campaign from week one. It’s not “polish the brand message then find someone to say it”—it’s “here are real community members expressing this authentically.”
The agencies that nail this tend to have teams embedded in both regions who actually collaborate, not teams in separate offices handing off work. That bilingual, bicultural approach isn’t a feature—it’s the whole game.
What’s been your experience? Have you seen brands successfully transition between markets, or do most of them stumble?
You nailed it. The structural problem is exactly the issue we faced when we first tried expanding. We hired American talent without LATAM experience and wondered why client brands felt… watered down. Took us a year to realize we needed to hire or partner with people who lived the market, not just had resume points.
One thing I’d add: the collaboration piece you mentioned is harder than it sounds operationally. Different time zones, different work cultures, different pace. We eventually moved to having sync calls with both teams on every major decision point, not async handoffs. Slower at first, but the work quality jumped.
How are you structuring incentives? We found that when the LATAM team and US team had separate success metrics, they’d optimize locally instead of globally. Once we tied bonuses to campaign performance across both markets, the cross-pollination actually started happening.
Also curious: are you seeing this as a service differentiator in client pitches, or is it still considered table stakes?
This totally validates what I’ve been feeling. I’ve worked with brands on both sides of this transition, and the ones with someone (or a team) who gets both markets just… feel different to work with. They give better creative direction because they’re not confused about who the audience is.
The UGC-first thing—YES. So many brand briefs are like, “Here’s our US ad campaign, now make user-generated content that matches it.” But authentic UGC doesn’t work that way. It’s messier, more personal, sometimes contradicting the polished brand message. The best campaigns I’ve been part of? The brand was actually cool with that messiness. They knew it would resonate more because it felt real.
Literally just finished a campaign where the brand is Mexican, expanding to US, and the brief was basically, “Show how Latinas in America use this product in their real lives.” No script, just vibes. Performance was wild. Engagement 4x higher than their US-first campaigns.
This is solid strategic thinking. The three-point framework you outlined (cultural translation, bicultural talent, UGC-first) is actually what I’d expect from a high-performing agency in this space. But I want to poke at the operationalization:
You mention embedded teams in both regions ‘collaborating’—but collaboration at what cadence and structure? Are we talking weekly syncs, daily Slack conversations, or monthly strategy reviews? Because each model has different cost implications and different effectiveness around creative iteration.
Also, when you say brands feel ‘watered down’ under traditional approaches, can you quantify that? Are we talking CAC differences, LTV differences, brand perception scores, social sentiment? I ask because it’s easy to feel like the work is better, but data is what actually justifies the investment to CFOs.
One more: have you observed whether the bicultural approach actually creates competitive moat for agencies, or is everyone starting to build this capability now?
The UGC-first point deserves more depth. In my experience with DTC scaling across regions, early-stage UGC campaigns tend to have higher engagement but sometimes lower conversion than brand-controlled content. Are you seeing that conversion fatigue when audiences are primarily exposed to less-polish content? Or has the authenticity actually moved conversion metrics in your campaigns? Asking because the strategy optimizes differently depending on whether we’re optimizing for awareness, engagement, or ROAS.