Has Been Saying It All Along.
Written By BILLY YOSTPortraits by ANTOINE VERGLASDesign By ARTURO MAGALLANES
March 11, 2026
Liz Castells-Heard
has spent more than four decades in advertising proving a point that too many brands still resist. Culture is not a segment; it is the market.
“I sometimes feel like I’m stuck between Mad Men and Groundhog Day,” the CEO and chief strategy officer of INFUSION by Castells jokes. “In different ways, I’ve been preaching the same thing for years, and people are finally coming around to understand it.”
Who has listened? The agency’s core clients––McDonald’s, Toyota, and Spectrum––are brands known for staying ahead of multicultural growth, along with P&G, Unilever, and many others.
Yet Castells-Heard says that about 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies still treat cultural marketing as an option, add-on, or initiative rather than infrastructure, or don’t engage.
There’s a lesson in that gap. When nearly half of America is multicultural, they drive 100 percent of population, job, and household growth, shape trends and demand. Even more telling: Two-thirds of white Americans say the rising multicultural majority enriches America and influences their own brand decisions, and this reality should be reflected by brands.
Castells-Heard won’t stay quiet getting this message across anytime soon. “I’m a Latina Scorpio from New York,” she says with a smile. “Subtlety isn’t my thing.”
The Making of a Multicultural Lifer
Castells-Heard is often called bold, smart-as-a-whip, fearless. Her conviction was forged early. “I was born in Cuba, a seven-month preemie with my brain and mouth on overdrive,” she jokes. She was exiled at age four by the Castro regime—birthday cake in hand, family jewels hidden in frosting, and little else. Displacement shaped her understanding of identity. A truth only sharpened by a life lived globally.
“Culture is DNA,” she says. “It codes who we are and how we move.”
Moving from Puerto Rico to Pittsburgh, she was bullied but won people over. In Connecticut, she burnt bras for women’s rights. She was a tenacious, inquisitive, and vocal kid, or as she puts it, “double annoying.” Those qualities became her edge as a future CEO.
She started in investment banking in Geneva. At Stanford Business School, a last-semester marketing class she took “for fun” changed everything. She fell in love with decoding the human “why” behind the numbers—and pivoted instantly. “My classmates may be billionaires or own sports teams now,” Castells-Heard says, “but I genuinely love what I do. I get to build brands, drive clients’ results, shape culture, and the next generation.”
Her advertising career began on Madison Avenue at a time when women and people of color were barely visible. A few female MBAs were guinea pigs of sorts in management-track roles. She was told she was “too outspoken for a woman, too educated for a Latina, too pretty to be smart, too much.” Castells-Heard just leaned in more.
She cut tension with jokes about the testosterone in the room, letting the guys know that she meant business—refusing victimhood without denying reality. She got big agency and client experience and worked harder. Later, Castells-Heard lost earned partnerships but chose not to litigate, knowing that her next opportunity would be better. It was. One firm collapsed after she left.
“I learned early that ‘no’ just means ‘how,’” she says. “Impossible is a condition of the mind.”
She is a champion of education, the advancement of, and appropriate portrayals of women and multicultural communities in media. Today, success also means something more personal: the number of people she’s trained and mentored who are now running the show and making a difference. Her advice to those she mentors mirrors her own experience.
“You can take something terrible and turn it into something magical,” Castells-Heard says. “How you handle difficult situations is what defines you, not the situation.”
“Effectiveness lies in strategically knowing how and when culture matters, where there’s a gap or opportunity, where intersections exist, and how to authentically bring that to life.”
A Much-Needed INFUSION
That mindset defines Castells-Heard’s leadership: candid, collaborative, grounded in grit, corazón, constant learning, and a no-BS ethos. She says: “Analytics is our lifeblood. Strategy is our superpower and creativity our soul. But heart is the compass.”
Founded in 1998, the agency is a tight, nimble, client-centric shop, one that embedded AI across the board long before it was fashionable to stay ahead, sharper and adaptable. The bar is high. People must be flexible, multifunctional, curious, and accountable. If they want a tidy checklist and a nine-to-five, this is not the place—and she’ll help them find their true path.
Despite her volume and velocity, her leadership is rooted in generosity, listening, empathy and loyalty. She never asks anyone to do what she won’t do herself, still works fifteen-hour days, celebrates her team’s wins loudly—and still considers former employees part of the familia.
A pivotal chapter in the agency’s evolution came when she partnered with Leticia Juárez. Where Castells-Heard’s kinetic force and vision pushes brands to think differently, Juárez’s calm steady command, approachable style, and insight delivers precise orchestration as the clients’ voice of reason. “Our clients know we’re all in,” Juárez says. “That creates trust and magic.”
They’re a powerhouse duo in cultural marketing, positioning INFUSION as a strategic growth partner—not a tactical vendor. They sit upstream, embedding cultural fluency into business decisions and frameworks. “Our job is to power our clients’ growth in collaboration by infusing innovation and insight,” Castells-Heard says. “Clients face pressure, shifting goals and chaos. We help them turn monkeys into rocks—creating clarity and uncovering opportunity. The more we know, the more we can impact.”
Their consistent results speak loudly.
With McDonald’s, their Hispanic marketing by development phase playbook, border guidelines, and segmentation work became corporate policy.
For Time Warner Cable, their acculturation and cultural media marketing models, and 5-P “Life My Way” platform tripled Hispanic awareness and share.
For Nestlé Pure Life, their Hispanic-only led launch drove outsized growth. Not only were the strategy and campaign later adopted by the general market, but it also delivered Nestlé Waters’ only global sales growth in the 2008 recession, an outcome still incredible by any metric.
Castells-Heard invokes the team she’s built early and often. It’s here that you understand the push and pull of her tenacity and heart. “I may be the energy and the vision,” she says, “but it’s my team’s amazing talent and work that makes it repeatable.”
Transculturation: Are You Listening Yet?
Over twenty years ago, Castells-Heard coined the term “transculturation” to describe a way of working many marketers have yet to embrace. As an MBA who came up in a world where awards often rivaled business results, she wanted something more rigorous.
Transculturation, she explains, is “embedding cultural fluency across the organization––from metrics, sizing, opportunity, operations, customer service, and then the five Ps of marketing, of which advertising is just one.” It requires “the 3 Cs”: cultural intelligence, customer intimacy and cultivated lived experience.
It starts from the premise that all consumers are not alike and that effective marketing must operate on three levels at once: universal drivers that everyone shares, transcultural ideas that resonate across multiple groups, and unique efforts that honor specific cultural codes.
She explains why culture matters. For most multicultural consumers who are bicultural or monocultural, culture is central to identity and daily life, shaping values, behavior, trust, response, choices, and media habits. Culture is their lived operating system, unlike white Americans who identify more by age, life stage, profession, income, or affinities.
Take Hispanic family orientation. It’s not about showing the family with abuela in tow—it’s the collective mindset and decision-making process. That’s why smart car dealers’ showrooms have play and tech areas, knowing the whole family participates from first-look to sale.
INFUSION helps clients embed that nuance across messaging, operations, and training so teams can flex tone and cues authentically. Hispanics prefer slower, more relational interactions, and Black Americans seek clarity, respect and solutions that work for them. When brands feel real, are committed, in the community, and ‘get’ them, they earn deeper trust, loyalty and even grace. When they don’t feel valued, they move on faster—having heightened sensitivity shaped by past exclusion and bias.
Transculturation can be compared to tailoring marketing differently across generations—it’s disciplined audience intelligence. Research shows two-thirds of consumers today feel unseen and unheard in advertising, with multiculturals at over 80 percent and boomers not far behind. That’s a blunt verdict that nobody is paying attention to.
“It’s not brain surgery; it’s embedded cultural fluency,” she says. “It’s not about changing a paradigm; it’s about evaluating it and adjusting it. Effectiveness lies in strategically knowing how and when culture matters, where there’s a gap or opportunity, where intersections exist, and how to authentically bring that to life.”
SIDEBAR
Two Scorpios, Forty Years
Liz Castells-Heard has just as much to be proud of in her personal life as her professional. She and her husband Alan have been married over forty years, a stretch that routinely inspires strangers to ask for relationship advice. “Everyone says we should have a blog,” she jokes.
Their formula is something of a paradox. “You have to be different enough to keep it interesting, but your basic core values have to be aligned,” Castells-Heard says. She means fundamentals like what counts as lying, what crosses a line, and what makes you laugh.
Both are Scorpios but polar opposites within that distinction. He’s the calm, cool one who, she adds, looks like an aging rockstar, a former ski‑jumper and baseball player who became an artist and builder. She’s the business marketeer—loud, kinetic, and, as she puts it, the kind of person who “touches something and it breaks.”
Castells-Heard also emphasizes to keep it interesting, take risks and view life as an adventure. That’s what they do from bungee jumping, safaris, dude ranches and Vegas jaunts to making everyday moments count with family, friends, their seven godchildren, two German Shepherds and a rescue chihuahua who thinks he is one.
The most important part? They don’t try to sand each other down. “People get annoyed at things about their partner and think, ‘We can change that over time.’ Uh‑uh,” she says. “You either love the person as they are, or you don’t.”
She applies the same principle to clients: If you don’t like “loud and honest,” she tells them, “there are plenty of other fish in the sea.”
Who Should Be Seeking an INFUSION?
The answer: most of the Fortune 500 who don’t have cultural fluency.
The organizations that get the most from INFUSION tend to share a mindset. They treat agencies as partners, sharing data, inviting them upstream, and willing to test and learn.
They also put multicultural consumers at the center, not the margins. In markets like LA, where Hispanics are the majority and Asians economically dominant, ignoring that reality is ignoring revenue. Toyota and McDonald’s understood that customer base and supported it accordingly.
“Clients are most open to trying new things when they’re under financial strain,” Castells-Heard says. “That’s when we get to do our best work.” Today, the stakes are higher than ever. Budgets are tighter. Performance and efficiency mandatory. AI is table stakes. Trust is fragile. Consumers are overloaded yet feel unseen. In this environment, Castells-Heard sees enormous opportunity for the right kind of client.
Who should call INFUSION? Brands whose growth depends on diverse consumers, whose share or relevance is slipping, or whose AI models risk blind spots.
“You can’t be effective today without cultural fluency,” she says. “That’s just reality.”
General agencies bring scale. Cultural agencies like INFUSION fill the gap—bringing the depth of knowledge, experience, frameworks, nuance, and context needed.
“Analytics is our lifeblood.
Strategy is our superpower
and creativity our soul.
But heart is the compass.”
Are You Still Getting It Wrong?
One of the biggest misunderstandings, in her view, is conflating DEI with basic marketing. Did some companies swing too far or too fast in their DEI programs? Maybe. “That’s the pendulum,” she says. “It goes way to the left or right, then hopefully adjusts in the middle. But that is entirely separate from marketing. Culture didn’t stop. Neither should smart marketing and segmentation.”
When brands like Target or Bud Light backed away from multicultural efforts, their sales eroded. “Fear or playing it safe isn’t a strategy, it’s bad business,” she says. Companies that stay the course or increase their cultural investments see better long‑term results.
Another persistent failure is treating multicultural work as an afterthought—token gestures like translation, diverse-cast and surface optics without understanding deeper values and nuances, not aligning media with multicultural habits and passions, or confusing language with culture.
People want to feel unique and reflected, not put in demographic checkboxes. That recognition must be layered, cultural, generational, even regional—and built with the communities, not at them.
In her mind, the 67‑percent‑feel‑unseen statistic is the wake‑up call. “It’s marketing 101,” she says, almost exasperated. “Know your audiences. All of them.”
“In this era, I call ‘Culturenomics,’ cultural fluency reduces risk and fuels growth,” she says. “The question is whether brands are structurally prepared for the diverse America that already exists.”
Castells-Heard shares this advice freely because it’s just the surface. If your organization is still focused on casting or translation, you’re missing the point.
That’s Castells-Heard’s point.
That’s why she’s loud.
That’s why she doesn’t stop.
She loves the work—and too many people still get it wrong.
Credits
Writer Billy Yost
Design Arturo Magallanes
Photo Manager + Video Director Cass Davis
Phothography Antoine Verglas
Web Development Jose Reinaldo Montoya
Client Services Manager ANDREW EVANGELISTA
