A sports fan can recognize a club from two colors, a crest, even the particular irritation caused by a rival. A marketing brief tends to ask for something tidier: an audience, a language, a deliverable. Sportivo works in the gap between those two ways of seeing people. Its business begins with the possibility that a brand can know exactly whom it wants to reach and still misunderstand how to approach them.
Consider an assignment from the Los Angeles Gladiators. The Overwatch League team wanted help understanding Latino audiences. Sportivo supplied cultural guidance, then conceived and executed a finals viewing experience called Zócalo. An esports event became an occasion to celebrate Latino culture. The revealing choice was to build an experience around the people watching, as well as the game on the screen.
That is a useful introduction to this Los Angeles agency. Soccer runs through its portfolio, but so do basketball, apparel and videogames. The specialty is an audience and the relationships around it. A change of scoreboard does not necessarily mean starting over.
A long relationship beats a crowded logo wall
Sportivo launched in 2003. Its name combines “sports” and “deportivo,” a small bilingual joke that doubles as a description of the business. The agency’s focus is U.S. Latino consumers, especially male sports fans. Its customers buy communications expertise: help deciding what to say, whom to involve and how to get a brand into conversations that matter.
The Nike relationship makes the offering concrete. Sportivo says it served as the company’s national Hispanic agency of record for more than ten years. The assignment covered media and community relations, influencer outreach, product seeding and strategic advice across sports and lifestyle initiatives. Put plainly, there was work to do before a launch, during the event and after the cameras went away.
The length of Sportivo’s historical Hispanic agency-of-record relationship, as described in its portfolio.
A client review supplies another perspective. Jacie Prieto Lopez, identified as communications director at Nike/Hurley, describes working with Mario Flores and his team for more than twelve years. She praises media coverage, onsite event management and support. Jared Kaufer, writing about his time in Red Bull communications, calls the team “communicative, honest and hard-working.”
Those are revealing compliments in a services business. The client remembers whether the people answered, whether the event worked and whether the next project was easier to entrust to them. A familiar brand name gets attention. A detailed account of repeated work helps explain why the relationship lasted.
LAFC needed an introduction
In 2017, LAFC brought Sportivo in as one of its early agencies. The brief included media relations, community insight and influencer outreach. Sportivo describes providing a framework for the club to connect with fútbol fans. The timing is the interesting part: cultural advice was part of introducing the club, when the relationship with prospective supporters was still being formed.
The Phoenix Suns assignment addressed a related question in another city. The team wanted a closer connection with the Valley’s Latino community; Sportivo provided cultural insight and ongoing marketing and PR guidance. Red Bull’s work was more event-specific, including Hispanic publicity around the Los Angeles stop of Neymar Jr’s Five.
Read together, these assignments suggest several ways to use the agency. A club can seek advice on its place in a community. A sponsor can seek attention around an event it already supports. A brand can ask for continuity across a series of launches. The deliverables change with the problem, even when the underlying audience knowledge overlaps.
The people behind the introductions
Mario Flores brought experience inside both agencies and a major consumer company. Before Sportivo, he managed U.S. communications at McDonald’s with responsibility for national Hispanic PR. Earlier roles included BSMG Latino, a Weber Shandwick affiliate, and Durazo Communications in Los Angeles. That background joins the client’s internal demands to the external work of earning attention.
Sportivo’s legacy management biography also identifies Roxana Lissa as a co-founder and partner. A native of Argentina, she held senior roles at Hill & Knowlton and Manning, Selvage & Lee before starting RL Public Relations in 1996. The agency’s roots sit firmly in Hispanic communications. Sports gave that experience a particular arena.
Its service menu still reflects that background: cultural consulting, media outreach, community relationships, athlete publicity, social content and sponsorship communications. Clients can hire it to help an athlete’s story travel beyond sports coverage or to plan bilingual content and influencer outreach. These are human services whose value depends on judgment, relationships and execution.
Community context
Influencer outreach
Ongoing content
The budget is part of the idea
Asked by Portada in 2018 what frustrated him about the market, Flores pointed to budgets. Brands treated Latino outreach as something requiring extra money, he said, then offered too little and lacked long-term commitment. He also recalled speaking with Los Angeles Latino influencers who had received no invitations to NBA All-Star-related activations.
“It’s no longer only about language”
Mario Flores · Portada interview · 2018
This identifies a practical failure point: planning can exclude an audience before the creative work begins. The lesson for a buyer is to establish the audience, responsibility and resources at the start. An invitation list deserves scrutiny alongside the copy. So does the question of what happens when the event ends.
The economics are those of a professional-services agency. Sportivo’s record includes a long-running agency-of-record relationship, individual projects and a retained assignment. Buyers are commissioning work and access to expertise. A useful brief should separate strategic advice, content, outreach and event execution so that the team and client agree on what each part is meant to accomplish.
A jersey, an award, another kind of sports client
There is an independently documented achievement beyond the client testimonials. Event Marketer named Solo Jamas the 2021 Ex Award winner for Best Multicultural Event Campaign. The clients were adidas and the Mexican Football Federation; the credited agencies were Moment Creative and Sportivo PR. Sportivo associates the work with a Mexico national-team jersey launch.
The shared credit is instructive. Specialist expertise can be one part of a larger campaign. A buyer need not expect a single agency to possess every capability. The more useful question is which skills the assignment requires, and how those responsibilities fit together.
In a newer announcement, Flores said DraftKings had retained Sportivo for strategic communications, media relations and cultural insight aimed at U.S. Hispanic sports fans and Spanish-language media in key markets. It extends the familiar communications proposition into another sports business. The audience remains central even as the client’s product changes.
Start with the fan you can actually describe
Sportivo occupies a specific place between broad sports marketing and multicultural communications. Alternatives include a Latino-focused sports agency such as Supremo, a larger PR firm’s multicultural practice or a capable internal team. Sportivo’s case rests on the combination visible in its work: sports familiarity, cultural advice and hands-on publicity.
The approach has conditions. A brand needs a real connection to the audience it names, people willing to listen and enough continuity to act on what they learn. Publicity cannot make an irrelevant offer useful. An event cannot carry every relationship a company has postponed. Those are practical limits to the method, rather than reasons to abandon it.
The move a reader can copy is modest: make the audience description more precise before making the campaign bigger. Describe the community, the occasion and the people whose participation would make sense. Then examine the guest list. Sportivo’s portfolio is a reminder that belonging has to be considered while there is still time to send the invitation.