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The market needs more Cesar Martinez. That’s the short answer.
The current chief commercial officer at media and podcast company Sonoro has built, broken, and repaired far more organizations than his age would suggest. His ability to adapt in a constantly shifting digital media landscape is just taken for granted at this point. His operational expertise is world-class, but again, these are just table stakes in his world. Because at that moment, he’s still trying to fix what should have been a sure shot all along.
“The Latino media landscape so often still comes down to three free TV channels that you can get if you’ve got an antenna,” Martinez jokes. “We are not premium enough. Creators are at the center of content, and that’s where everyone and everything is heading, Latino or otherwise. And that’s how we make our voices heard for real.”
This Should All Be Bigger
For all the data points about Latino population growth and spending power, Martinez just doesn’t see the turnover. He says there should be fifty scaled Latino digital media platforms with real investment behind them, and there simply aren’t.
He believes the industry squandered earlier windows that have snowballed over time: organizations failing to consolidate, leaning too hard on “minority-owned” narratives without delivering results, and businesses getting trapped in tin-cup fundraising instead of building durable businesses. While Martinez was building success stories, the broader Latino market just wasn’t adapting.
If Latino media is going to truly scale, we need more leaders like Martinez, leaders who have lived through cycles and are still optimistic enough to build the next iteration, knowing full well that seismic change is always ahead.
Creator Centered, and Two Decades of Earned Experience
Martinez arrived at Sonoro at what was a fairly traditional podcast network. The CCO has helped reshape the organization into a true creator platform where content development is inherently connected to monetization (“50 different ways,” Martinez jokes), scale, and multi-pronged revenue, including merchandising and co-production ventures.
This is the horizontal mindset you hear about in sports, music, and cultural content. And sports, Martinez argues, is the next big wave. Sonoro’s sports and culture initiatives, including partnerships with properties like Futbol de Primera and other sports storytellers, are built around the idea that creators with deep, niche communities are driving algorithmic sports moments instead of passive, once-every-four-years big-bet buys.
“There are massive entry points to sports, and the most meaningful ones are going to be done by creators,” Martinez says. “These are people who have deep connections with their communities, and those interactions can happen in real time.”
Before Sonoro, Martinez spent nearly a decade on the front lines of Latino digital media, most visibly at mitú and REMEZCLA. At mitú, he helped the company pivot multiple times from an early, unscalable YouTube creator network to a brand-as-creator model with a heavy IP and digital publishing bent, then again when the cost and risk of original IP forced a more media-centric approach.
At REMEZCLA, he took on chief revenue responsibilities for a beloved legacy brand that was still doing great creative work, but like many other small publishers, wasn’t immune to the market dynamics and impact of COVID. In 2022, Remezcla was successfully sold to multicultural media company MyCode, which was acquired by Ariel Investments in 2023.
Harnessing Culture Intelligence to Grow Business
Martinez is in high demand. Even though he’s left previous organizations, he lends his time to helping find the right candidates for roles within them. If there is a P&L rolling out, Martinez is the person in your network taking a look at it and telling you why you might be five stops removed from where you think you are.
In his scant spare time, Martinez has built a small executive network, Stadion Advisors, that he believes operates like a surgical-style shop that aids executives and companies with very nuanced challenges, like cultural strategies, intelligence, market experience, infrastructure.
It’s a stealth advisory firm with a network of extremely heavy hitters, executives Martinez says most organizations wouldn’t be able to afford for such specialized work. Stadion isn’t there to solve every problem, think of them as a SWAT team for helping address the most complex questions.
“We use cultural intelligence to grow businesses. We want to create a new way of thinking about advisories using a human and cultural lens as the vehicle for transformation,” Martinez explains.
Stadion Advisors understands cultural intelligence and its relation to how audiences are engaging, or looking to engage, with content. That includes AI pushback, more IRL “in real life” experimentation, and “raw” social editing, which impacts every single business from media to brand partners looking to develop go-to market strategies.
The CCO isn’t trying to get his shop’s name skywritten. There probably won’t be any flashy ads. He hasn’t even taken the time to get the website up and running as of yet. With the network he’s assembled, word will get out soon enough. And he’s busy enough as it is.
“We can help executives avoid the mistakes we’ve all seen so many times,” Martinez says. “Sometimes that means telling people information they don’t want to hear, but it’s necessary to create something that truly lasts. That’s what we’re trying to contribute to.”
It’s a wonder that anyone can last in this business. But Cesar Martinez has, and he’s not just holding on. He’s the person you call if you want to build something that can scale, that can flourish, and that can endure. That’s what he’s doing at Sonoro, and that’s what he hopes to do for more leaders in the space.
