There is a small trap hidden in the word multicultural. It sounds like an extra: a version of the big campaign with a different cast, a translated tagline and perhaps a plate of familiar food placed just so. BODEN Agency built its business by noticing that the extra was becoming the center. The firm did not discover that Hispanic culture mattered. It made a working method out of paying attention to how it mattered, where it moved next and what a brand could usefully do about it.
The method has a disarmingly ordinary name: Escucha, Spanish for listen. BODEN describes it as a planning process that looks at what consumers think and feel, what they say and what they hear. The interesting part is not the vocabulary. It is the order. In a business paid to talk, BODEN begins by shutting up.
The private tension: aspiration, worry, pride, memory and the reason someone might care.
The public language: social conversation, jokes, complaints and the words a community uses for itself.
The surrounding signal: media, creators, family, music, sport and the stories already moving through culture.
The Houston clue
A useful early example came from the least glamorous corner of marketing: a value menu. McDonald's wanted Hispanic customers to buy from its $1 $2 $3 Dollar Menu while strengthening the brand's standing in the community. BODEN's research found that these diners wanted value without surrendering quality. More revealingly, when McDonald's had suspended its earlier value menu, Hispanic customers did not obediently trade up. They went elsewhere.
That was the first thing that failed: the assumption that removing a low-priced option would leave the customer relationship intact. Geography changed the agency's mind about how to test the comeback. Value menus were struggling in some markets but working in Houston, a city where roughly half the population is Hispanic. BODEN treated Houston as the proving ground and built an integrated campaign around a character already meaningful to the audience. PR Daily gave the work its 2018 integrated marketing award.
The copyable move is not “use Houston.” It is to locate the market where the behavior is unusually visible, then study the behavior before building the national story. A demographic becomes useful only when it becomes a person choosing between two lunches.
A campaign becomes useful
BODEN's strongest work follows a recurring sequence: find a barrier, give the program a memorable identity, put resources behind it and let the usefulness earn attention. PepsiCo's Juntos Crecemos is the clearest version. BODEN created the name and led creative, public relations and social strategy for a five-year platform announced in 2021. PepsiCo committed $50 million to Hispanic-owned restaurants, bodegas and carnicerías, with a connected accelerator promising $10 million to 500 businesses across 13 cities.
PepsiCo's public commitment for Juntos Crecemos
Program funding, not BODEN's agency feeProduction support offered through each Spotlight Dorado opportunity
Client program supportThe distinction matters because the cost of hiring BODEN is private. The visible numbers belong to the interventions. Jefa-Owned, nested inside Juntos Crecemos, turned the Spanish word for a woman boss into a rallying cry for Latina food and beverage founders. It connected entrepreneurs with business support, took the message to the Nasdaq opening bell and built a national visibility moment around “National Jefa Day.” The public money made the promise credible; the cultural language made it travel.
“As an agency born in the Hispanic community, BODEN understands how to build trust with this coveted demographic and offers authentic cultural insights.”Esperanza Teasdale, PepsiCo Beverages North America
The mainstream moves
By 2023, the agency had reached its quinceañera. Rather than merely cut a cake, it introduced Hispanic+, a proposition that says Hispanic culture no longer sits downstream from a presumed general market. Music, beauty, gaming, food and fútbol move in several directions at once. A culturally specific idea can begin with Hispanic audiences and still shape everyone else's feed.
The portfolio makes the argument better than a manifesto. Target's Más Que went beyond a calendar-month salute by featuring products from Latino artists and founders. McDonald's Spotlight Dorado addressed the thin representation of Latinos in film with mentorship, a short-film contest and $75,000 in production support. Talking Sabor took Hispanic-owned restaurants to a Hulu series with chef Aarón Sánchez, then extended the program through screenings, Good Morning America, creators, restaurant menus and gift-card giveaways.
Microsoft appointed BODEN its multicultural communications PR agency of record in 2024. The later Abuela-Approved AI work is an almost comic collision of old authority and new technology: Latina mothers and grandmothers testing Copilot as a practical and cultural companion. The joke works because the grandmother is not decoration. She is the standard the tool has to meet.
Natalie Boden builds an independent firm around U.S. Hispanic and Latin American communications.
BODEN helps turn PepsiCo's small-business commitment into a multi-year public platform.
At 15, BODEN launches Hispanic+ and wins three agency-of-the-year honors.
The technology company selects BODEN to deepen communications with U.S. Hispanic audiences.
BODEN takes the PR and influencer brief as fútbol commands the American summer.
Small enough to specialize, broad enough to build
BODEN sits between two familiar alternatives. On one side are giant global PR networks with multicultural practices inside them. On the other are advertising shops known primarily for Spanish-language creative. BODEN is an independent PR-led specialist that stretches across research, earned creative, media relations, influencers, social, events and brand marketing. LinkedIn lists a team in the 11-to-50 range. The agency itself lists Miami, New York/New Jersey, Dallas and Los Angeles.
Its economics are those of a private services business: projects and agency-of-record relationships, not software subscriptions or venture rounds. Public rates, retainers, revenue and valuation are not part of the pitch. The evidence is continuity and scope. McDonald's dates to the agency's earlier years. PepsiCo's relationship has expanded across entrepreneurship, music, creators and sport. In a 2023 awards entry, BODEN reported that revenue had grown 44 percent and the team 65 percent since July 2021.
The internal culture mirrors the external one. Atrevidos - the gutsy ones - is the chosen word. BODEN Academy, Trending Thursdays and a Hype Squad add structure to it. Founder Natalie Boden, a Honduran immigrant who once organized her childhood books with a homemade card catalog, has built an agency whose signature capability is still classification: what is changing, who is overlooked, which signal belongs to which story.
What another team can borrow
- Study a specific behavior in a revealing market before reaching for a national message.
- Give the audience a resource, platform or access point that would matter even without the publicity.
- Let cultural specificity sharpen the idea instead of sanding it down for a fictional “general” consumer.
- Pair community insiders with measurement, media craft and a long enough client commitment to learn.
There are conditions. This approach loses force when a brand wants a one-week observance, will not invest beyond content, or expects a community to lend credibility without receiving value. It also depends on trust: enough access for the agency to challenge the premise, enough time to spot a pattern and enough humility for a company to accept that the audience may know something it does not.
BODEN's achievement is not that it predicted one campaign or coined one Spanish phrase. It recognized a structural change. The American mainstream is no longer a fixed place into which culture must be translated. It is made, continuously, by communities once assigned to the appendix of the brief. BODEN listened while that change was happening. Then it taught brands how to hear it.