MLK’s Dream Is Our Brief, Not a Seasonal Theme. Making His Dream Our Creative Mandate.

By Luis Miguel Messianu

Martin Luther King Jr. never asked America to be polite. He asked America to be brave.

As a kid growing up in Mexico, the United States was, to me, an idea before it was a country: a messy, noisy, colorful experiment that somehow kept promising more than it delivered and yet never stopped reaching for better. King’s words traveled further than any border patrol; they reached living rooms, classrooms, and later, conference rooms – including the ones where I’ve spent most of my professional life trying to convince brands that culture is not a risk, it’s a gift.

Today, as the U.S. feels more fragmented, the world more anxious, and our industry more tempted by cynicism, I find myself returning to King not as a holiday reference, but as a creative brief.

Not a “nice‑to‑have” brief.
A non‑negotiable one.

King’s legacy is not a quote, it’s an operating system

We have domesticated Martin Luther King Jr. so much that we forget how profoundly disruptive he was – and still is. He did not preach comfort; he preached nonviolent confrontation of injustice. He did not advocate for “both sides”; he advocated for the side of human dignity, without apology.

At the heart of his philosophy is a simple, radical conviction: you do not destroy people; you destroy systems that deny their humanity. You fight segregation, not the segregated. You confront laws, not the souls trapped beneath them. That distinction is as urgent in 2026 as it was in 1963.

In advertising terms, King wasn’t asking for a new campaign; he was asking for a total rebrand of power. He wanted a country where equality wasn’t a tagline, but the brand truth – consistently delivered across every touchpoint: the ballot box, the classroom, the courthouse, the workplace, the neighborhood.

If we claim to be storytellers, how can we treat that as background noise?

America: the brief that’s still open

Let’s be honest: the United States is closer than ever to the demographic future King imagined and yet further than it should be from the emotional maturity that future requires. A generation that is beautifully multicultural, multilingual, and multiracial is coming of age in a nation that still behaves as if inclusion were a zero‑sum game.

From my vantage point as a Mexican‑born, U.S.‑forged creative, I see a country that is already the “Beloved Community” in raw material – but not yet in mindset. We still talk about “minorities” in a landscape where so‑called minorities are the emerging majority. We still treat bilingualism as a special skill rather than a strategic advantage. We still debate whether representation “goes too far” instead of asking why it took so long.

This is not a data problem. It’s an imagination problem.

The question is not, “Can America handle this diversity?” The question is, “Can America finally live up to the creativity that this diversity unlocks?”

The world: a global Beloved Community or branded chaos

Look beyond U.S. borders and the picture is just as contradictory. On one hand, we witness war, displacement, intolerance, and leaders who build entire careers by weaponizing fear of “the other.” On the other, we have unprecedented interconnectedness: cultures remixing each other’s music, food, fashion, and language in real time.

King warned that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Today, that isn’t a philosophical statement; it is a daily push notification. Supply chains, climate migration, social platforms – everything is interwoven. A decision made in a boardroom in New York or Miami ripples to neighborhoods in Lagos, Monterrey, Mumbai, and beyond.

The world is already behaving like a single ecosystem. The only question is: will we run it on a software of fear and extraction, or on one of dignity and shared responsibility?

Brands are not innocent bystanders in this story. They are global citizens with passports to almost every screen and every household. Their choices – where they invest, what they normalize, whom they empower – shape the emotional climate far more than they care to admit.

Our industry: the comfort of “neutrality” is over

Now let’s talk about us – the makers of messages, the curators of images, the professional creators of “normal.”

Advertising likes to pretend it is a mirror, just reflecting culture. That is a comforting lie. We are not mirrors; we are amplifiers. We decide whose faces get scaled up, whose stories get repeated, whose accents sound “aspirational,” and whose are “too niche.”

When we erase communities, we are not just failing to “check a box”; we are telling millions of people that they don’t belong in the main story. When we reduce cultures to stereotypes, we are not “having a little fun”; we are casually reinforcing the same narratives that King risked his life to dismantle.

And when we trot out his quotes on a Monday in January while cutting DEI budgets on Tuesday, we are not honoring his legacy; we are exploiting it.

But here’s the plot twist: the market is no longer buying that hypocrisy at full price.

Purpose‑driven brands with authentic commitments are not only doing the right thing; they are winning. They are growing faster, attracting more loyal consumers, and retaining employees who actually believe their work matters. The data finally caught up with the intuition many of us have had for years: conscience and commerce are not enemies; they are allies.

The frontier now is not another glossy brand film about “unity.” The frontier is structural:

· Who is in the room when the brief is written.

· Who gets hired, promoted, and funded.

· Which communities receive sustained investment, not one‑off stunts.

· How “risk” is defined when the idea centers a historically excluded voice.

If we want to honor King, we have to stop renting his language and start changing our infrastructure.

The optimistic lens: why I still believe

People sometimes confuse my optimism with naiveté. “How can you be so positive when you see what’s happening in politics, in society, even in our own industry?” they ask.

The answer is simple: I have seen what happens when multicultural creativity is allowed to lead instead of follow. I have witnessed the chemistry when a Mexican strategist, a Black copywriter, a Cuban art director, a Colombian planner, and a first‑generation Asian American client build something together that none of them could have imagined alone. I have seen brands discover entirely new dimensions of themselves when they truly listen to communities they once treated as afterthoughts.

That is not naive optimism. It is experienced optimism.

King’s genius was that he combined severe realism about injustice with an unshakeable belief in humanity’s capacity to grow. He did not deny the darkness; he simply refused to surrender the narrative to it.

As multicultural marketers, we are heirs to that balance. We know the pain – discrimination, erasure, tokenism – but we also know the joy, the humor, the resilience, the beauty of cultures in constant conversation. Our job is not to decorate the status quo with a little Spanish or a diverse cast; our job is to rewrite the script so that more people recognize themselves as protagonists.

A personal call to my peers

So, if this were not just a Substack post but a creative brief to the industry – to my colleagues, clients, and friends – it would sound something like this:

· Stop quoting King if you are not willing to be uncomfortable.
If your use of his words never costs you budget, political capital, or a tough conversation, it is décor, not conviction.

· Stop treating multicultural audiences as an “option.”
They are the center of gravity, not a line item. Build for them from the start, not as a late add‑on.

· Stop asking if work is “too political.”
Start asking if it is too small for the world we’re actually living in.

· Stop talking about diversity exclusively in recruitment decks.
Start tying it to who gets real authority and who gets to say “yes” and “no” to the work.

· Stop bracing for the future.
Start designing it – with the courage to make inclusion the default, not the exception.

If the arc of the moral universe truly bends toward justice, then our arcs – as creatives, strategists, CMOs, founders – must bend with it. Faster. Bolder. With more imagination than we have ever dared to deploy for a product launch.

King left us a dream, yes. But more importantly, he left us a responsibility.

As a Mexican creative who fell in love with the American idea, as someone who has built a life and a career on the belief that culture is our greatest asset, I choose to see his legacy not as a distant monument, but as an everyday assignment:

Make the work worthy of the people it speaks to.
Make the work worthy of the world it enters.
Make the work worthy of the dream that made all of this possible.

And if we do that – not perfectly, but persistently – then maybe one day, some young kid, in some other country, will look at our messy, noisy, colorful experiment and think:

They didn’t just quote King.
They listened. And they acted.