From shaping Canela’s audience engagement strategy to fostering a creative, connected team, Oswald Méndez shares his approach as CMO.
For Oswald Méndez, every day as CMO of Canela Media looks different, and that’s precisely what he loves about the job. While his responsibilities shift depending on projects and priorities, the through line is clear: staying hyper-focused on KPIs, driving innovation, and keeping his team motivated and engaged.
Canela Media is a media company built to serve the U.S. Hispanic and Latin American audiences. Its flagship service, Canela.TV, has thousands of hours of free, ad-supported programming, including news, sports, music, and kids’ content delivered both on-demand and live. Their programming is exclusively streaming content meant to serve, Spanish speaking and bilingual viewers who are often overlooked audience in streaming.
This week, Canela Media announced the launch of the AI-generated host Diego who is the new face of their company’s reward program, Club Canela.
“We want Diego to show up across the Canela ecosystem and interact with our audience,” said Méndez. “We’re giving Canela a face.”
Ultimately, Méndez views his role as a connector, ensuring that voices across the company are heard and valued.
“We work in a business where we’re so rigorous about our KPIs and deliverables,” Méndez said. “but I also think we’re in a very human business, and I don’t lose sight of that.”
Andrew Byrd: Canela is known as a platform “by Latinos, for Latinos.” How do you approach advertising partnerships, especially when it comes to brand safety and engaging the right audience in today’s climate? 
Oswald Méndez: I’ve been in this industry long enough to see the attention advertisers pay to multicultural audiences go through peaks and valleys. It’s a pattern I’ve observed across the entire multicultural advertising environment.
What’s different now is that we, as publishers and agencies, are equipped to quantify the business opportunities these audiences represent clearly. Multicultural consumers have significant purchasing power, and ignoring that isn’t just a missed opportunity from a purpose standpoint; it also affects a brand’s bottom line.
Whether companies are motivated by doing the right thing or by commerce, engaging this audience is essential for future growth. If brands don’t pay attention, they’re missing out on some of the fastest-growing and most influential segments in the market, and their usual strategies won’t drive the same results.
AB: Canela Media just launched Diego this week. Can you walk me through your role in developing him and how he fits into the platform?
OM: From the very beginning, I was involved in shaping Diego, and it was truly a collaborative effort across our creative solutions, B2C, and Club Canela teams. We spent a lot of time not just designing what he looks like, but defining his personality, like his tone, humor, and how he communicates. The idea was to create a character who could live across our entire ecosystem and give Canela a recognizable face.
Within Club Canela, which is our audience rewards program, Diego helps personalize the experience. Some users watch content and passively earn points, while others get deeply engaged through challenges and trivia. Diego adds a new layer by interacting directly with users by sending personalized messages, congratulating winners, and even wishing them a happy birthday. Over time, he’ll also host trivia and other activities inside the app.
That kind of scalable, one-to-one engagement wouldn’t be possible with a single human host, but AI makes it possible.
AB: Within Club Canela, you’re gathering a lot of first-party data. How are you using that to better understand and connect with your audience?
OM: We learn a lot from our users and create audience cohorts and addressable segments. For example, super fans of drama will see more drama content, and sports fans will see more sports. Our consumer engagement platform allows us to tailor messaging and experiences based on those preferences, making the interactions more personalized.
AB: And is that tied to your Canela Audience Solutions, your OTT-first data platform?
OM: Exactly. Canela Audience Solutions builds on this foundation [of first-party data]. We start with the 76 million devices that have engaged with Canela.TV, which translates into about 20 million unique IDs. From there, we apply filters and create audience personas, helping advertisers reach the right viewers with relevant messaging.
AB: With 76 million unique devices engaging with Canela, how do you navigate the fragmentation in CTV and still deliver personalized advertising at scale?
OM: Fragmentation is definitely a challenge, which is why we position Canela as an always-on platform. Tools like Club Canela help keep users returning, not just for content, but for interactive experiences like gamification.
That repeated engagement allows us to maintain connections with our audience and deliver more meaningful, personalized advertising.