The character was round, purple and cheerfully inconvenient. CultureSpan Marketing called him Spot. He was diabetes made visible - small when managed, much larger when ignored - and the people in a set of El Paso focus groups liked him better than the agency's other idea.
That other concept was perfectly reasonable. It described familiar, easily missed symptoms of Type 2 diabetes. It supplied information. It even performed adequately on social media. But when CultureSpan tested both directions for the Paso del Norte Health Foundation and the El Paso Center for Diabetes, the descriptive campaign did not travel as easily as the friendly character. So the agency changed course. Spot went into video ads, an online risk test became the call to action, and 973 people completed that test in the first four weeks.
This is the interesting thing about CultureSpan. The firm is easy to label - a privately held, full-service, bilingual agency in El Paso, founded in 1980 - and harder to understand until you watch an idea lose. Its advantage is not simply that people on the team can move between English and Spanish. Lots of agencies can translate a sentence. CultureSpan tries to learn which sentence, character or object a community will admit into its life.
“For a brand to be culturally engaging, it takes more than just translating words.”CultureSpan Marketing
The research gets a vote
CultureSpan calls its language work transcreation: carry the emotion, character and values of a message into another culture, rather than marching the original words across the border. The distinction can sound like agency vocabulary until a campaign puts it under pressure. In the diabetes work, street interviews found that local Hispanic residents could be guarded about discussing health, even inside their families. A stern warning risked producing more silence. Spot made the subject less accusatory without pretending it was harmless.
Notice what the agency did not do. It did not treat research as an ornamental slide at the beginning of a presentation. The losing concept was not buried entirely, either. Parts of its practical message were folded into the stronger direction. The transferable lesson is simple: test ideas that are different enough to teach you something, decide what evidence would change your mind, and allow the winner to borrow whatever the loser did well.
Make the number touchable
For El Paso Water, the problem was illegal dumping in waterways, storm drains and canals. The agency's focus groups found an elementary obstacle: many residents did not know exactly what illegal dumping meant or what it could cause. The statistic was 140,000 pounds of trash in a year. Accurate, but weight at that scale is mentally slippery. CultureSpan compared it to a herd of elephants, then commissioned local artist Jason Brewer of Jackrabbit Trading Co. to build a life-size elephant from discarded material gathered around the community.
The prop gave the campaign a plot. First, define illegal dumping. Then show its consequences. Finally, give people a hotline for reporting it. Paid media, social sharing and earned coverage carried the message, while placements concentrated on problem areas. CultureSpan did not merely visualize the mess. It connected surprise to a specific behavior.
The same habit appears in the Energy Savings Champion Challenge for El Paso Electric. Routine conservation tips had placed all the work on customers and offered lower bills as a delayed reward. The agency reframed efficiency as a game with three tiers of tasks, monthly prizes, gift cards and a custom championship belt. There was a local celebrity, a mariachi band and a luchador. Nearly 500 people registered during the three-month pilot; more than 30 won prizes, and two completed all 16 tasks needed to contend for the grand prize.
A fact becomes useful when someone can picture it. A behavior becomes possible when someone can see the next move.
A small agency with a long menu
CultureSpan sells the familiar full-service stack: research, strategy, identity, copy, websites, social media, SEO and SEM, media planning and buying, public relations, plus television, radio and long-form video production. Its published team crosses creative, media, digital, account and studio roles. Its portfolio is unusually civic. Utilities need people to conserve, report and understand. Health organizations need people to acknowledge risk. Schools need families to enroll. Credit unions need members to try a digital service without feeling abandoned by the institution they knew.
For Raiz Federal Credit Union and UTEP's College of Education, interviews pointed toward recent graduates as the credible messengers for teacher recruitment. CultureSpan says the first campaign phase accounted for 90 percent of visits and inquiries to the teacher preparation program. For Region 19 Head Start, a 2025 refresh used real family testimony and the line “My Child's Head Start”; first-month posts held above 2,000 interactions a day. For El Paso International Airport, the team made 6K video, bought national placement on Bloomberg Television and reached more than 80 ZIP codes across the West and Southwest.
What the public budgets actually say
Public contracts provide a rare view of scale, though not a rate card. In 2015, El Paso approved CultureSpan for a 36-month airport marketing agreement capped at $500,000. In 2019, El Paso Water selected CultureSpan alongside other firms for two on-call communications tasks with estimated annual cumulative pools of $155,000 and $100,000. Those figures are ceilings shared across scopes and vendors, not invoices to the agency. They do show the commercial shape of the work: long-running, multi-channel assignments bought through competitive procurement.
The legal company remains The Laster Group, Inc. Nancy Laster, identified publicly as a co-founder and president, helped rename the agency CultureSpan in 2013. Today Steffen Poessiger is CEO, and Mike Matthews serves as president and chief creative officer. The company lists 1980 as its founding year; its LinkedIn profile places it in the 11-to-50 employee range. In May 2025, the Better Business Bureau accredited the business and assigned it an A+ rating.
This method depends on access. It works when a client can recruit real participants, expose competing ideas to criticism, and change creative direction after the evidence arrives. It weakens when “bilingual” means a last-minute translation, when research samples are too thin to challenge anyone, or when a regulated message leaves no room for a culturally distinct expression. A memorable prop also needs a clear next action; without the hotline, test or registration page, the elephant is merely an elephant.
The copyable part
CultureSpan's work suggests a five-part brief. Begin with the behavior, not the media list. Ask what the audience currently misunderstands or avoids. Build two genuinely different ways into the problem. Test both with the people who live inside it. Then turn the winning insight into an object, character, testimony or challenge that can carry a call to action.
The purple spot is a modest hero. It did not invent a diagnostic tool or deliver clinical care. It made an uncomfortable subject discussable long enough for 973 people to answer a few questions about their own risk. In advertising, that is often the whole contest: not who speaks most fluently, but who earns the next small act.