Pedro Lerma, founder and CEO of LERMA/, has led culturally impactful work for brands like He Gets Us, Home Depot, and The Salvation Army. Through his cross-cultural agency, he’s helping push DEI and cultural fluency forward across the industry. Driven by a mission to “channel creativity for good,” LERMA/ has built innovative tools like a Brand Inclusivity Performance Index that helps brands assess their multicultural representation, and LERM@NOS, an AI-powered tool designed to identify and combat bias in generative AI systems.
Here’s our hottest takeaways from our time with the service-minded leader, including the truth behind the viral 2024 He Get Us Super Bowl campaign.
How brands can achieve cultural fluency
How do you move beyond just giving everyone a seat at the table? Build cultural fluency into the work itself. Here’s the framework LERMA/ used to help The Home Depot earn ANA’s Most Culturally Inclusive Brand in 2023.
1. Elevate:
Champion underrepresented communities through authentic, nuanced storytelling that reflects their full humanity – not stereotypes. It’s not just about visibility, but meaningful representation that uplifts.
2. Mitigate:
Anticipate and address blind spots before they become missteps. This means pressure-testing creative choices and interrogating assumptions to ensure your inclusion efforts aren’t causing harm.
3. Grow:
Engage emerging growth audiences in ways that feel culturally relevant and additive, while still honoring and retaining legacy consumers. True inclusion expands the brand; it doesn’t fracture it.
When brands consistently elevate, mitigate, and grow, the result is work that boosts cultural relevance, builds employee pride, and drives growth.
Huge into AI? Here’s what you need to know about racial bias.
As generative AI rapidly reshapes the creative industry, it brings both opportunity and risk. While AI can unlock speed and scale, it can also replicate and amplify the biases embedded in the data they’re trained on. For agencies committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, pitching in to eliminate that bias is a shared responsibility.
Rather than waiting to see how bias would play out in generative systems, LERMA/ took proactive steps to influence how AI depicts its outputs.
Inspired by Pedro’s experience asking AI to generate an image of a CEO – and seeing results that were overwhelmingly white and male – they snapped into action. The team developed LERM@NOS, an AI-powered tool designed to counter bias in generative models and increase accurate representation in image output. More than 20 of the agency’s staff members offered their likeness to give the AI a larger range of characteristics to learn from. LERM@NOS is free for brands and creatives to use. Here’s how it works. And here’s how you can use it today.
Radical accountability can disarm even the toughest clients
Mistakes, everyone makes them, but it’s what you do after them that separates you. Early in Pedro’s career, while leading his own small agency, a scheduled media placement failed to go live as planned. With a pit in his stomach, he immediately set up a meeting with the client in their office and took full responsibility. Expecting the worst, he owned the mistake and presented a plan to ensure the media lapse never happened again. And something happened that he’s taken with him for the rest of his career, the client didn’t chew him out or fire him – they thanked Pedro for his ownership and moved on.
The lesson is all this: In our industry, perfection isn’t the goal – accountability is. Trust isn’t built by never messing up; it’s built by owning it when you do.
The truth behind the “He Gets Us” Super Bowl backlash
“You might have thought it was AI, but it wasn’t.”
That’s the headline Pedro would have written after the viral “Foot Washing” spot with He Gets Us ran during the 2024 Super Bowl. The :60 spot sparked a year’s worth of debate. Its imagery that closely resembled AI-generated photos drew a lot of criticism. People weren’t happy that what they thought was AI being used to convey such an emotional message tied to faith and Christianity.
As his headline states, the spot didn’t use a lick of AI. Julie Fullerton-Batten, the fine art photographer behind the images, shot in the surrealest style years before generative AI hit the mainstream.
People getting upset about the spot didn’t surprise Pedro or the client. But neither of them thought audiences would be upset because the images looked AI-generated. All in all, the impact of people reconnecting with their faith outweighed the controversy. Plus, it was arguably one of the most talked-about campaigns in Super Bowl history. LERMA/ went on to produce Super Bowl spots for He Gets Us in 2025 and 2026.
The lesson: Even the loudest minority can’t topple a human truth that connects.
But wait, there’s more…
Want to hear more from Pedro? Like what it takes to bring a Super Bowl spot to life? His service-minded leadership philosophy, or why there’s a full-on music venue in their office? Catch the full episode on YouTube. And, as always, drop your favorite takeaways on our social posts and leave a review wherever you listen to your podcasts.
ABOUT THE QUESTION EVERYTHING PODCAST
Part interview, part therapy, part Price Is Right, the Question Everything podcast puts your favorite CMOs and thought leaders in the hot seat. That means while they're facing off against our game board, you'll learn from the successes and failures of the best in the biz who were daring enough to be curious.
