Today the Round of 32 begins. Every remaining match is elimination. And the brands that have been getting Latino marketing wrong are about to find out exactly what that costs.
There is a moment in every penalty kick shootout — before the run-up, before the ball moves — where the match is essentially already decided. Not by the goalkeeper’s positioning. Not by the placement of the shot. By whether the player stepping up to the spot has done the mental and technical work long before this moment arrived. The kick itself takes less than a second. The preparation for it takes years.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup enters its knockout stage today, with a Round of 32 match in Houston — a city where 44 percent of the population is Latino, where over a million Hispanic residents are living this tournament, not just watching it. The group stage is over. Casual presence is no longer enough. Every brand in the room right now is stepping up to the spot, and the Latino audience they’ve been trying to reach all month is watching to see what they do next.
Some brands have been preparing for this moment for years. Others ran up to the spot having never done the work. You can usually tell which is which inside about three seconds.
Four penalty kicks brands take against Latino audiences. Four ways to choke. And what converting actually looks like.
Penalty kick one: Translation vs. bilingual creation.
The choke: You take your English campaign, run it through a translation service, and call it a Hispanic campaign. The copy is technically Spanish but it doesn’t sound like anyone who speaks Spanish. The idioms are wrong. The register is off. The humor lands flat or doesn’t land at all. The visuals were shot for a different audience and no one touched them. Latino consumers can identify this within seconds — not because they’re looking for it, but because culturally accurate language and imagery registers immediately, and the absence of it registers just as fast.
According to MRI-Simmons, 74 percent of Spanish-dominant Hispanic adults agree that companies who advertise in Spanish respect their culture and want their business — and even among English-dominant Hispanics, 54 percent say the same (MRI-Simmons, 2025). The number that’s even more instructive: 71 percent of Spanish-dominant Latinos say they are more likely to pay attention to and remember an ad presented in Spanish. That is not a language access issue. That is a cultural respect signal that drives recall and purchase behavior simultaneously.
Converting looks like what IKEA did — launching a fully Spanish-language e-commerce platform built around the linguistic reality that Latinos don’t use one word for “trash can,” they use zafacón, basurero, cesto, or papelera depending on where they’re from. The campaign celebrated that specificity rather than flattening it. The result was a 165 percent increase in website sessions and a 113 percent spike in online sales within a month (Hispanic Market Guide, 2025). That is what happens when you stop translating and start communicating.
Penalty kick two: Celebrity placement vs. cultural casting.
The choke: You want to signal Latino relevance so you put a recognizable Latino face in your campaign. The problem is that the person was selected for name recognition and demographic optics, not for cultural credibility with the specific community you’re trying to reach. The audience notices. Research on diversity representation in advertising identifies what it calls “diversity washing” — representation that is perceived as surface-level or performative — as consistently associated with negative consumer reactions, including reactance that can damage brand perception more than no representation at all (Campbell, Sands, McFerran, & Mavrommatis, 2023). Casting a Latino celebrity in a commercial that has no other cultural intelligence behind it is not inclusion. It is decoration — and Latino audiences in 2026 are very good at telling the difference.
Converting looks like Home Depot casting Ricardo Pepi — a Mexican-American striker from El Paso, raised on the Texas-Mexico border, whose biography maps directly onto the lived experience of millions of Latino consumers in Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. No explanation needed. No cultural footnote required. The casting itself is the message, because the cultural truth behind it is real. Or Adidas casting Bad Bunny in “Backyard Legends” — not as a diversity signal, but as a cultural anchor that reframes the entire campaign’s address to Latino audiences. The casting decision is the strategy.
Penalty kick three: Event presence vs. community participation.
The choke: You buy a logo placement in the fan zone. You run a World Cup-themed banner ad. You slap your brand colors on something adjacent to the tournament and call it a multicultural activation. You were there. Technically. But the audience experienced none of you — because presence without participation doesn’t register as care. It registers as transaction.
Research in Hispanic consumer behavior identifies reciprocity and loyalty as core value orientations — Latino consumers tend to stay with brands that demonstrate genuine investment, and the relationship between brand and consumer is understood as mutual (Korzenny, Chapa, & Korzenny, 2017). A logo in a fan zone does not signal investment. A 27-foot mobile truck with Andrés Cantor’s voice traveling from New York to Mexico City — stopping in Latino neighborhoods, generating a custom chant, showing up where the community already is — signals investment (Buchanan’s Whisky, 2025). The Buchamión isn’t a marketing vehicle. It’s a community participant. That distinction is everything.
The Hispanic Market Guide makes this point in hard numbers: Latino fans are 39 percent more likely to recommend a brand that sponsors a sport they follow, and 37 percent more likely to remain loyal to it over time (Hispanic Market Guide, 2025). But those returns accrue to brands that earned them through genuine presence — not to brands that purchased proximity and waited for the loyalty to materialize.
Penalty kick four: One-off campaign vs. earned relationship.
The choke: You activated for the World Cup. You built something. You ran it for the group stage, called it a success, and now you’re planning to go quiet while the knockout round — the part of the tournament where the emotional stakes for Latino fans are highest — plays out without you. You’ll come back for Heritage Month. Maybe the Super Bowl. Maybe the next World Cup in four years, if someone on the team remembers to include it in the brief.
This is the most common choke, and it’s the most expensive one — because it trains the audience to expect your absence. Research consistently associates Latino consumer loyalty with brands that demonstrate consistent presence rather than seasonal acknowledgment (Korzenny et al., 2017). Since 2020, the desire among Latino consumers for brands to acknowledge their cultural uniqueness has increased eleven percentage points (Hispanic Market Guide, 2025). That upward trend is not a temporary phenomenon driven by one World Cup or one cultural moment. It is a structural shift in how Latino consumers decide which brands deserve their attention and their money.
Converting looks like building relationships in July, August, and September — and October, and November — not just in the weeks when a FIFA logo is involved. The brands that will win with Latino audiences over the next decade are not the ones that peaked in June 2026. They are the ones that kept showing up after the cameras moved on.
Penalty kicks are decided before the player runs up. The brands that converted this summer started the work long before June 11.
Fifty-seven percent of Latino consumers attribute brand loyalty as a direct way of showing respect for their heritage — meaning the purchase decision is also a cultural statement (Hispanic Market Guide, 2025). The brands that get Latino marketing right understand that they are not just competing for a transaction. They are competing for a place inside a value system where loyalty, reciprocity, and cultural respect are deeply intertwined. When a brand earns that place, it tends to keep it. When it demonstrates it doesn’t deserve that place — through bad translation, performative casting, transactional presence, or seasonal engagement — it tends to lose it in ways that are very hard to recover from.
The tournament runs through July 19. The Round of 32 is today. The Round of 16 is next week. The quarterfinals, the semifinals, the final — each one a moment of peak emotional intensity for the most engaged sports audience in the United States, inside the fifth-largest economy in the world (Latino GDP Report, 2025). Forty-four percent of U.S. Latinos plan to actively follow this tournament through to the end (For Soccer, 2025). They are not going anywhere.
The question is not whether your brand can still get in the game. It can. The question is whether the instincts you’ve built — in your briefs, in your production process, in your casting decisions, in your community relationships — are the right ones. Because penalty kicks are decided before the run-up. The player who converts has already done the work. The one who chokes is trying to figure out the technique on the way to the spot.
At Vaquero, we help brands build the right instincts — not just for the World Cup, but for every moment that follows it. If you’re ready to stop chocking and start converting with Latino audiences, let’s talk.
Works Cited
Campbell, C., Sands, S., McFerran, B., & Mavrommatis, A. “Diversity Representation in Advertising.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, vol. 53, published online 26 Dec. 2023, pp. 588–616. I For Soccer / forsoccer.com. 2026 FIFA World Cup Interest Report. 2025. I Hispanic Market Guide. Hispanic Market Guide 2025. 2025. I Korzenny, Felipe, Sindy Chapa, and Betty Ann Korzenny. Hispanic Marketing: The Power of the New Latino Consumer. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2017. I Latino GDP Report. U.S. Latino GDP Report 2025. 2025. I MRI-Simmons. The State of the Hispanic American Consumer 2025. MRI-Simmons USA, Spring 2025.
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