On a spring day in 2020, the useful question for a Mexican restaurant chain was not how to make a prettier advertisement. The dining room was beside the point. The customer had moved - abruptly - to the drive-through and the ordering screen. Marketing SI answered with a bilingual campaign for Miguel's Jr. designed to widen the audience and shorten the trip from appetite to purchase. The agency tested versions, watched the response, and adjusted in real time. Its reported results read like the dashboard of a much larger machine: twice the planned reach, 42 percent more unique new users, and 171 percent more time on the site.
This is a neat introduction to Marketing SI because it contains the whole company in miniature. Research before decoration. English and Spanish without treating either audience as an afterthought. Creative work attached to a specific behavior. And a small team willing to remain in the room after the concept has been approved.
The Los Angeles firm was founded in 2015 by Bessie Ramirez, its president and CEO. LinkedIn shows 13 employees and describes an 11-to-50-person company. Its headquarters sits in Lincoln Heights, a largely Latino neighborhood northeast of downtown that the firm identifies as a designated HUBZone. Marketing SI also lists Texas and Florida locations and says it works with brands anywhere in the United States.
The agency inside the agency
Advertising is usually organized around a handoff. A client writes a brief. An agency returns with ideas. Other specialists buy media, build assets, wrangle approvals, or measure whatever survived the process. Each handoff creates a small opportunity for the original problem to become someone else's problem.
Marketing SI's wager is that the seams are the work. It offers strategy, change management, stakeholder engagement, customer research, positioning, design, media, project management, and in-market execution. The list can look sprawling until you notice the logic: these are the places where an internal marketing department must keep the story straight. The agency describes itself as both a virtual marketing department and a full-service shop. It wants to operate within the client's workflows, accountable to the same objectives.
“We believe in designing WITH, instead of designing FOR.”Marketing SI's stated design principle
That preposition matters. Multicultural marketing has often been sold as a late-stage translation exercise: make the general-market idea, then adapt the words. Marketing SI puts community understanding upstream, beside the business objective and the customer evidence. Its public language is specific about serving general, multicultural, and Hispanic audiences. Its team, it says, is a mix of cultures, identities, orientations, MBAs, and award-winning creatives. The claim is not that difference automatically creates insight. It is that the people affected by a decision should help shape it.
Two named methods make the model tangible. G-R-A-F-T is intended to weave the agency into a partner's marketing organization, creating clear points of communication among internal teams, stakeholders, and vendors. The SI Wheel is an iterative process for distilling insight into creative ideas. The names are proprietary; the transferable lesson is not. Before commissioning the big idea, draw the operating system around it. Decide who knows what, who approves what, and what result will change the next decision.
Hot sauce is a data problem
Consider TABASCO. The assignment was increasing turns on the shelf - the unromantic retail phrase for getting more bottles into baskets. Marketing SI says it began with primary research and syndicated retail data, then repositioned the brand, wrote a strategic plan, and connected the work to shopper programs. Partnerships, influencers, coupons, digital media, and in-store execution followed. The reported outcome was a 15 percent increase in units sold without an increase in budget.
The same brand later appeared beside the Denver Broncos. The goal was to recover regional share amid rising competition. Marketing SI built a 360-degree program around a limited-edition product and retail displays, then added radio, television, online and social outreach, plus an augmented-reality interaction. The firm reports higher market share, stronger relevance, and increased regional shipments. The useful feature is the shape of the work: turn a sponsorship into a product, the product into shelf theater, and the shelf into a media event.
with no budget increase
versus prior efforts
after optimization
For Technology Credit Union, the canvas was less delicious but more measurable. Research and analytics led to brand repositioning, search advertising, retargeting, and a campaign optimized through A/B tests. Marketing SI reports twice the previous click-through rate, a CPM five times more efficient, and a 42 percent reduction in cost per click. This is where its market position becomes clear. It is not merely a multicultural creative boutique, and it is not quite a management consultancy. It lives in the busy territory between the two, where a strategic sentence must eventually become a purchased click.
Then a school building collapsed
The most revealing assignment did not involve a consumer product at all. A 33-ton section of a classroom building collapsed at Lynwood High School at Imperial. Lynwood Unified School District needed California officials to understand the damage, the disruption, and the stakes for a student body that was 99 percent students of color.
Marketing SI developed a strategic communications campaign around the idea of making Lynwood whole. It produced short documentaries for government officials and the media, arranged press announcements and a press conference, created collateral, and built a microsite. The district ultimately secured $250 million in state funding to rebuild and reinstate the campus.
It would be tidy to say the campaign caused every dollar. Public funding never moves because of one vendor alone; school leaders, public officials, community members, and the facts of the collapse all mattered. But the episode shows what Marketing SI understands about persuasion. A structural failure was also a narrative failure waiting to happen. Tons of concrete, a state budget, and a teenager's future occupy different mental drawers. The job was to put them in the same drawer.
What another team can borrow
The first copyable move is to define the behavioral or institutional result before choosing the channel. Shelf turns, completed applications, online orders, allocated public funds: each is clearer than “awareness.” The second is to bring cultural insight into problem definition, not merely execution. The third is to treat alignment as a deliverable. G-R-A-F-T may be Marketing SI's name, but any team can map the decision makers, feedback loops, and measurement cadence before work begins.
There are conditions attached. An embedded agency needs access to operating data and internal people. Community co-design requires time and the willingness to let outside knowledge alter the brief. Real-time optimization needs enough traffic to distinguish signal from noise. And a small team taking broad responsibility depends on clear scope; intimacy can turn into overload when every task becomes urgent.
Marketing SI's public case studies offer a consistent trail from problem to intervention to result. In an industry skilled at making ordinary work sound mysterious, that sequence is refreshing. The firm's best argument is not that strategy and ingenuity belong together. It is that neither counts until somebody does something differently.
Marketing SI is privately held and founded in 2015. Public profiles place the team in the 11-50 employee range; LinkedIn currently displays 13 employees. Campaign results above are the agency's published figures.