Photo credits: Stewart Cohen
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Two years after splitting from The Richards Group (now TRG), LERMA/ is on a tear: It has grown from 35 to 135 employees, and combined fees and billings jumped 63% last year to $330 million. Lerma/ is also defying norms with breakthrough if sometimes controversial work, while helping to redefine and broaden the definition of “multicultural” agency for the industry at large.
Leading this charge is CEO and founder Pedro Lerma, who is of Mexican descent and grew up in the small town of Wichita Falls, Texas. Lerma was raised by blue-collar parents. His dad worked in construction and his mom worked in a meatpacking plant.
“When I applied there I had a friend of mine take a picture of me in front of the building with my hands held up, and I used that to mock up a cover of Ad Age that said, ‘Lerma Joins The Richards Group, has the competition scrambling.’”
Lerma turned that mock-up into the cover of his two-page résumé and cover letter.
“When I think back on that, it was kind of cheesy, but it set me apart and it got somebody to make a phone call and invite me in for an interview,” said Lerma.
Now job candidates are calling him, looking to be part of an agency that produced three Super Bowl spots last year and picked up the lead agency role on Avocados From Mexico (which accounted for one of the Big Game spots), and won new accounts including Jim Beam, Maker’s Mark, the National Medal of Honor Museum Foundation, the TV series “The Chosen” and Instacart.
Lerma has built the agency on the idea of being “cross-cultural,” an evolution from its previous multicultural roots. See AdChat QuickChat™ Interview.
“‘Multicultural’ has now been primarily drawn along racial or ethnic lines. For us, cross-cultural is a broader term,” Lerma said. “We believe that we can credibly address and lead with underrepresented segments of the market so it’s not just about being inclusive within the agency, but it’s about having a real respect, and being willing to lead with a perspective that is other than your own.”
This has led to work beyond its Hispanic AOR relationship with Home Depot, for example.
Last year, Lerma started a Hispanic earned-media agency in partnership with Alma’s founder Luis Miguel Messianu and PR agency Edelman and launched an AI model meant to combat bias in the technology. The agency’s most polarizing and notable work has been its ads for “He Gets Us,” the campaign centered around rebranding Jesus for the contemporary world. Lerma/ created two Super Bowl ads for the initiative in 2023 and again in 2024 which garnered millions of reactions.
The controversy stems not just from the subject matter, but also from the conservative views of one and possibly other financial backers of the campaign.
While Lerma agrees that the ads have stirred controversy, he said the agency took on the account as long as the work can live up to the agency’s inclusive values. Lerma also confirmed that both Christians and people of other faiths work on the account, and said the donors haven’t been involved in the creative approval process.
“Our vision as an agency is to channel creativity for good,” Lerma said. “I think ideological purity is the enemy of progress. We see that play out every day in our politics. There is an unwillingness to preach compromise to advance a greater good. So if you asked me, ‘Are you willing to work with someone with whom you have ideological disagreements to advance a greater good?’ My answer would be yes.”
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