Inbound

March 9, 2026

In-Culture Marketing Explained: How Two Women Are Redefining Sports Fandom

Sports marketing has a blind spot. And it's not small: it's 30 million people and growing, to be exact.

For decades, brands have treated the Latina consumer as a niche, a secondary audience, or worse, an afterthought. At INBOUND 2025, Karina Martinez (CEO) and Jennifer Yepez-Blundell (COO), co-founders of DRAFTED—a sports culture media company centering Latinas and the next generation of fandom—joined Sonia Thompson of the Inclusion and Marketing podcast to make the case that this audience isn't niche at all. She's the new general market.

Here's what they shared, and what marketers can start doing differently today.

The Fan Base Brands Keep Overlooking

Before DRAFTED could build anything, they had to answer a question that shouldn't have needed answering: do Latinas care about sports enough to build a company around?

The problem was that the data to prove it didn't exist yet. So DRAFTED built the first of its kind Latina fandom report to break down the motivations, purchasing behavior, and fandom preferences of this audience from scratch. In the report, they found that for every jersey a white woman owns, a Latina owns seven or more and that Latinas influence those around them at twice the rate of a white fan across seven categories: following a team, following an athlete, purchasing tickets, and more. In their words, "These data points never existed until we came along."

Do this: Audit your audience assumptions. Are you measuring who's actually buying or who you assumed would buy? Pull your customer data and look for the gaps between who you're targeting and who's actually engaging.

"I am a former athlete and played softball, and a decade in corporate America doing sports marketing and strategy being the only woman and Latina in the rooms and thinking we are leaving half of the population out equation." — Jennifer Yepez-Blundell

Data is the Difference Maker

Knowing the audience exists is one thing. Convincing a room of brand decision-makers to act on it is another.

There are 30 million Latinas in the United States today, and one in every four Gen Alpha children will identify as Latina in the next decade. Those numbers alone should move the needle, but DRAFTED knew demographic scale without behavioral data only goes so far, so they built the case from both directions.

Their research became the foundation for brand partnerships. When DRAFTED worked with Dove on a Super Bowl campaign, they leaned into cultural insight rather than demographic targeting, building social assets that spoke directly to what it means to be a Latina athlete. The result was engagement that dramatically outperformed Dove's general market benchmarks and became a catalyst for the brand to do more of it.

Do this: Identify one audience segment your brand has historically underinvested in. Is it because the data doesn't exist or because you haven't looked for it? Start with qualitative research: talk to the community, read what they're publishing, and look for the patterns your existing tools aren't capturing.

Why Culture Is Where Fandom Actually Lives

DRAFTED isn't a sports company in the traditional sense, but rather a culture company that uses sports as a gateway.

Their content framework spans fashion, beauty, entertainment, family and traditions, and next-gen athletes because that's how their audience actually experiences sports fandom.

Fandom, as Martinez described it, is a spectrum. Some fans know every stat and others are drawn in through a tunnel fit, a playlist, or a player's personal story. Meeting fans where their passion actually lives is how DRAFTED built an audience of over 100,000 across channels with 4.5 million in average monthly reach in just two years.

Through their research and work, they found that for their audience, sports isn’t the product, culture is.

Do this: Map out all the cultural touchpoints that surround your product category. Where does fashion, music, food, or family intersect with how your audience experiences your brand? Those intersections are often where the most resonant content lives.

How to Move Faster than the Industry

Coming from a decade in corporate sports marketing, Yepez-Blundell brought firsthand knowledge of how slowly legacy organizations move and how much that costs them. DRAFTED's lack of institutional inertia became a competitive advantage. They had a willingness to build something completely different.

"We are a speed boat not a cruise liner." — Jennifer Yepez-Blundell

That meant going social-first, English-first, and culture-forward, sourcing stories from international media outlets, collecting from the community, and showing up on the platforms where their audience already was.

The savvy CMOs are noticing. As Martinez observed, the brands that come to DRAFTED with curiosity and willingness to push the boundaries to try something new, are the ones producing the best work.

Do this: Identify one assumption in your current marketing playbook that exists because "that's how it's always been done." Design a low-stakes test to challenge it this quarter.

Lived Experience is a Superpower

Both founders spoke about the tendency (notably for women, and especially for women of color navigating corporate spaces) to keep their personal perspectives at bay in order to fit the status quo of whatever room they're in.

DRAFTED was built on the opposite instinct.

"Nobody has lived the life you live and nobody has the insights that you have," Martinez told the audience. Those lived experiences are the source of the cultural nuance that makes DRAFTED's work resonate differently than anything the general market has produced.

That logic extends well beyond DRAFTED's story. The most effective marketing has always come from a real perspective. And real perspective requires real representation.

"Sometimes unfortunately the way society works is we as women don't get access to the rooms and don't know the rooms exist so it is the job of the people in the rooms to know, there is someone missing here." — Karina Martinez

The Takeaways

The Latina consumer is here, spending, influencing, and showing up while most of the industry looked the other way. DRAFTED identified the gap and built the data, the community, and the proof of concept to close it.

For marketers, it’s a reminder to lead with real data, build from cultural insight rather than demographic assumption, and don't mistake translation for relevance.

The brands willing to move quickly are the ones already seeing what's possible.

Want access to more sessions and content like this? Join us in Boston this September.