There is a moment in the life of an advertisement when someone opens the approved English script, makes a copy and begins replacing words. The product remains where it was. The offer remains where it was. The media budget remains mostly where it was. Only the language travels. Then, several weeks later, a marketer studies a disappointing sales report and concludes that the Hispanic market did not respond.
d2H Partners exists because Marcelino Miyares Jr. and Patricia Testa believed the failure happened earlier - at the moment of the copy. They founded the Los Angeles agency in 2014 around direct response, the unglamorous discipline in which an ad must cause a call, a click, a lead or a sale. Their specialty was even narrower: helping established direct-to-consumer and business-to-business marketers reach immigrant, first-generation and bilingual Hispanic customers in the United States.
The distinction sounds semantic until money is attached. Translation asks how to reproduce a sentence. d2H's preferred word, enculturation, asks which cues make a person stop, trust, understand and act. That can change the script, the casting, the channel mix, the call-center conversation and the way success is counted. The agency calls the result “Fluent Hispanic Lift.” The more revealing phrase is its quieter one: build brands one sale at a time.
The Hispanic Marketing Council's 2023 directory reported 12 employees. Capitalized billings are media volume, not agency revenue.
The first thing to fail is the shortcut
For years, large agencies promoted “total market” planning: find a message broad enough to represent everyone, then seek efficiency across audiences. d2H argues for something closer to a whole market made of parallel plans. A Spanish-preferring customer receives a campaign designed with equal seriousness, not a cultural garnish on the general-market buy.
“Authenticity is absolutely not just about language and skin-tone.”Marcelino Miyares Jr., 2024
The practical objection is budget. Miyares has written that some advertisers spend seven times as much per person in the general market as they do against Hispanic consumers, then demand comparable return. d2H's answer is proportional investment along the full journey. If the television spot is culturally fluent but the landing page is clumsy, the phone script feels foreign or the fulfillment team cannot continue in Spanish, the ad did not really cross over. The leak simply moved downstream.
Rebuild the reason
Find the cultural motivators, objections and permissions that make an offer relevant.
Plan in parallel
Fund the audience across linear TV, CTV, social, programmatic and digital on its own terms.
Follow the response
Connect creative and placement to calls, leads, subscriptions, transactions and return.
This is what the company sells: market and budget blueprints; creative development and production; traditional and digital media planning and buying; analytics; social media; lead generation; subscription marketing; and campaign management. Its public work spans funeral insurance, supplements, telehealth, beauty continuity, financial services and nonprofit advocacy. Lincoln Heritage uses short-form direct-response television. Great HealthWorks has used long- and short-form DRTV. Meaningful Beauty appears in the agency's beauty continuity portfolio. Different products, same test: did attention become action?
Television grew more doors
When the partners started d2H, direct response still conjured an 800 number glowing at the bottom of a television screen. A decade later, the screen might be connected TV, an ad-supported streaming channel or a phone held during a social-media scroll. The vocabulary acquired CTV, OTT, ROAS and attribution. The agency changed its channel list without changing the central question. What happened after the person saw the ad?
That continuity is the advantage of coming from direct response rather than brand theater. Media is not merely where culture is displayed. It is where a proposition encounters friction. A household may watch English-language programming and still prefer to buy in Spanish. Spanish creative increasingly appears on English-language outlets, just as streaming has scrambled the old boundaries between networks and audiences. Language preference and media choice no longer arrive as a matched set.
d2H says it points out microaggressions, authenticity problems and cultural mistakes in a client's existing campaign. Some prospects walk. The ones who remain have accepted that uncomfortable advice is part of the fee.
This is also where the model has a clear condition. It works for an advertiser whose product has a credible Hispanic opportunity and whose leadership will fund the complete acquisition path. A company seeking cheap translation, a token media test or identical results from a fraction of the investment has rejected the mechanism before launch. d2H even says it will tell a prospect when a proposed campaign is not relevant and is unlikely to produce lift. In advertising, declining the fantasy can be a product.
Then Hollywood entered the response loop
In December 2020, d2H acquired Arenas Group, founded by Santiago Pozo in 1988 and described at the time as the first Hispanic entertainment-marketing agency of its kind in Hollywood. Arenas had worked on more than 600 film and television campaigns, including projects associated with major studios and streaming companies. The announced combination kept both names while joining publicity, promotions and entertainment creative to d2H's media and direct-response machinery.
The deal made sense precisely because streaming was collapsing old categories. A movie opening, a subscription offer and a consumer product could all meet the same household on the same connected television. Arenas brought decades of entertainment fluency; d2H brought the insistence that a message should lead somewhere measurable. The acquisition price was not the interesting public number. The useful number was 600 - three decades of cultural pattern recognition suddenly connected to a response engine.
The agency launches. Miyares and Testa build around unmet demand for U.S. Hispanic direct response.
Arenas joins. Entertainment publicity and creative meet performance media and measurement.
Billings reach a marker. An industry directory reports $20 million in capitalized billings.
Ten years in. The screens have multiplied; the one-sale-at-a-time doctrine remains.
A playbook worth borrowing
The transferable idea is not specifically Spanish. It is that a segment deserves an internally consistent system. Start with a blank plan. Ask what inhibits response, what grants permission and where the customer actually watches. Budget the journey, not just the media impression. Carry language and cultural fluency through the form, phone call and fulfillment. Then compare performance only after investment is proportionate.
There is something pleasingly old-fashioned about d2H's obsession with a sale. It disciplines the newer language of identity and representation with a concrete obligation: the customer must recognize herself well enough to do something. Meanwhile, the company staff page lists Yoda as Feline in Charge and Felix as Canine in Charge. The joke works because the rest of the operation is so intent on accountability. Even the office pets have deliverables.
The founders once asked whether opening a Hispanic direct-response agency was crazy. It was the wrong question, but a productive one. The better question was whether brands could keep translating the surface of a campaign while leaving its machinery untouched. d2H has spent a decade betting that eventually the sales report would answer.