Mike Valdés-Fauli on insights, not stereotypes

What this conversation is about

Mike Valdés-Fauli has spent more than twenty years in marketing, advertising and public relations, and is now chief operating officer of the agency Chemistry and president of its multicultural division, Chemistry Cultura. Glenn Llopis opened the episode by handing him three statements and asking him to reframe each one, which is the thing Valdés-Fauli does for a living: take a subject people find uncomfortable and show the opportunity inside it.

His first answer sets the tone. Where opportunity is obvious, he says, everyone is already sprinting in that direction and has been for generations. The work is finding the opening nobody has looked at yet, which means looking beneath the surface or rising above it.

Comfort is where growth stops

Asked why people keep betting on what they already know, he was direct:

"exactly at the point where you feel like you're over your skis is perhaps the moment where the opportunity will reveal itself. When you get out of that comfort zone, great things can happen. The trick is not only to find the opportunity, but to get comfortable in the discomfort." — Mike Valdés-Fauli · 00:04:21

His own career is the example. Each phase of it, he says, has been an attempt to leave the thing he was already good at:

"the phases of my career have been a series of trying to get out of what I was already good at and learn a new skill that I was decidedly not very good at." — Mike Valdés-Fauli · 00:05:16

He is honest that this sounds better on paper than it feels in practice: it meant falling in public and getting back up. And he applies the same test to companies:

"If you're not cannibalizing your own business and reinventing yourself and thinking about what the future holds, not just what proved successful in the past, you're probably going to hit a wall at some point." — Mike Valdés-Fauli · 00:10:28

Insights, not stereotypes

Much of his work involves helping brands reach Hispanic consumers, and his advice begins with a phrase he repeats like a discipline: insights, not stereotypes. Do the homework. Find where your product actually fits someone’s life. Start small and be respectful rather than reaching for clichés.

What he refuses to do is make it a moral argument:

"if you just reach out a hand and do it in a culturally relevant, respectful way, remember I mentioned the insights not stereotypes, you'll be shocked at the ROI that you get. So I'm not espousing that any of this is to check a box as the right thing to do. I'm saying this is a competitive business advantage." — Mike Valdés-Fauli · 00:16:19

He also describes a generational change he watches closely. The children and grandchildren of immigrant families no longer feel they have to drop one identity to hold the other:

"that has made the immigrant population's kids feel like they don't need to immediately pretend they're not Hispanic and Sprint only in the direction of English, but now preserving some of that culture, we use the term 200 percenters, which is it's okay that they feel a hundred percent American and a hundred percent Latino." — Mike Valdés-Fauli · 00:11:48

That is the edit and the claim in one sentence: a generation taught to erase half of themselves, and a generation that refuses to.

Change the conversation

When a subject becomes too charged to discuss, his answer is to change the words rather than win the argument. His example comes from living in Miami, where one of the most divisive subjects in the country turned workable the moment people stopped debating causes and named the problem they could all see: the water was rising, the flooding was worse after ordinary storms, and waterfront property was losing value. Reframed that way, people who agreed on nothing else could work on it together.

His counsel to leaders facing a polarized topic is the same: drop the acronym, pick the specific problem, and solve that. Disagree on four things, find three you agree on, and go make something better with those three.

What AI can and cannot do

In his industry, the fear is that clients will skip the agency. He is relaxed about it, for a specific reason:

"AI is incredible at consuming everything that's already happened and come before and giving you the best answer, but it's not creating anything new." — Mike Valdés-Fauli · 00:24:03

It will summarize everything ever written and give you what it thinks you want to hear. It will not invent the line that changes a category. Meanwhile his teams use it for faster testing, richer research and daily optimization of campaigns, which is the practical half of the story that the fear drowns out.

He is more worried about what negative narratives do to adoption. When the loudest story about a technology is dystopian, trust falls, conspiracy fills the gap, and the appetite to try anything new goes with it.

His advice to anyone building a career inside this: become an expert in your field, not only in your company, and protect time away from the calendar, because the ideas arrive when you are walking rather than moving between meetings. Glenn closed on the cost of that kind of honesty:

"we live in a time now where we need to get below the surface. And you know what I've learned? That creates a lot of discomfort because once you go below the surface, it begins to reveal you." — Glenn Llopis · 00:36:11