Welcome to Ethical Voices, a weekly podcast where real pros share real stories about real ethical issues. I’m your host, Mark McClennan. Joining me on this week’s episode is Fabiana Melendez Ruiz, a strategic storyteller serving as the founder and CEO of Refuerzo Collaborative. She discusses a number of important ethics issues including:
- How to counsel effectively when your client has a culturally insensitive idea
- How you can help organizations move beyond their biases
- Unexpected ways PR pros fail ethically with the media
- The most overlooked part of a PR person’s job
Why don’t you tell our listeners more about yourself and your career?
I’m the co-founder and CEO of Refuerzo Collaborative, a Latina-owned public relations agency based in Austin, Texas. We focus on nurturing stories that reinforce community, so we work with many nonprofits and mission-driven organizations or leaders. We’re one of the few agencies in a state that is 42 percent Latino doing media relations in Spanish. We do it in both English and Spanish.
Thinking about your career and your work, what is the most difficult ethical challenge you have ever faced?
I confront ethical challenges all the time. As the media landscape shifts and we see newspapers folding, you encounter more ethical issues. I’ve had what I would consider minor ones and really big ones.
I’ve had, clients who, for example, are putting out a book and they ask me to review it on Goodreads or Amazon. I’ve worked with agencies where this is a very gray issue. There are some people that are like, it doesn’t matter sure, we’ll review it. But I’m very black and white on that particular issue. I will never review a book on behalf of a client because it’s not an authentic review. And if I hate it, what are the repercussions if I review it one star?
That’s on the less intense side of ethical issues. On a bigger scale, my ethical issues intersect with DEI issues, which I know is like a spicy word nowadays, but it’s true.
Fortunately or unfortunately for me, I’m usually one of the few hires of color, usually the only Latina or, and or any, anybody else. Insert miscellaneous in the groups there. I’ve had issues where, for example, one of my clients was a hotel group.
They were a huge client, very important. They were debating whether they should throw a Cinco de Mayo party and if they should call it Cinco de Drinco. I always preface my comments and explain. I’m not Mexican. I’m Venezuelan and there is a difference, but also sometimes I have to speak up on behalf of other people.
I was like, we can’t do that, and we can’t call it that because we’re in Texas. Where a lot of the population is Mexican, and someone is going to bring it up. You may think that it’s a non-issue and it’s going to be a fun party and everyone’s going to be too drunk to care. But someone somewhere at some point is going to turn this event that’s supposed to drive publicity into a crisis situation.
I had a client who shall remain nameless, but somebody on their team decided a seven deadly sins party would be a good idea, for Halloween. And then they follow it up with let’s put Hanukkah gelt and dreidels in the greed room.
I was a very junior publicist, but I immediately knew that this was going to turn into a bigger issue. Thankfully, it didn’t happen, but they could have done it without my input and then where would we be?
Let’s take a step back. When somebody, and we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt in good faith, comes up with an idea that they think is brilliant, that is completely culturally insensitive, that is completely inappropriate, stereotypical, tokenizing, whatever word we want to use. How do you recommend people counsel clients and their organizations to step back and understand what they’re saying.
I’m glad you brought this up because I do genuinely believe that a lot of these mistakes happen in good faith, people just don’t know.
You don’t know what you don’t know. And there’s also things I definitely don’t know that I find out later. I always come from a place of curiosity. If a client or an agency that I’ve been with has an idea and they’re like, it’s brilliant, the best idea we’ve ever had, and it ends up being “problematic”. I always ask first okay, how did you come up with that? What was the thinking behind the idea? What was the core nugget that led to we’re going to throw this event in this way?
Then I help them work backwards. We’ll say, okay, you wanted this. And when we cross-examine the idea, it started here, but you want this thing, let’s go through it and break it down together as PR people, and discuss all of the little things that could be an issue.
Then they’re usually yes, this is a great way to turn a really good idea into a crisis issue. And we don’t want to do that, right? But your core nugget is brilliant. So, let’s find another way to get to this thing that you want that it’ll be less of a problem.
Usually when you strip down big ideas, you can find the little pieces that you can still salvage.
So maybe it’s not a seven deadly sins party. It’s a Halloween party. Do we want to tie it to a religious theme or do we want a harvest party or an equinox party? Something that still honors the traditions of this holiday or this thing that you want to do but is a little less likely to blow up
One of the things you talk about getting to the root of the issue with the Cinco de Mayo party or Cinco de Drinco or however they end up saying it is assumptions and stereotypes that organizations are making. How should organizations think and act to go beyond their inherent biases?
I have an answer that’s I think going to displease everybody. I counsel everyone to hire people from those minoritized communities. That is the answer. When I bring this up, I get two non-answers back. Either “the talent isn’t there”. Like the talent pipeline, we’ve tried to hire Latinos, but we don’t have any.
That’s untrue.
Or we want to steer clear of any DEI issues. And I’m like, so you’re saying that hiring diverse people. Would become a DEI issue. Why are we immediately going there? What are we doing internally as an agency that’s turning it into that? Really, it’s not even about the diversity. You want to reflect the world you want to live in, right? You want campaigns and your workforce to reflect the world you want to live in.
The reality is we live in a diverse world, whether people love that word or not. So the best way to make sure that you’re doing right by those communities is by having people of those communities within the organization who can then raise the red flags when they need to or offer the diverse perspectives that you need to.
It’s interesting because there’s so many other Industries that have roles specialized for that. In publishing they have sensitivity readers who make sure it is not overly offensive. Not so much in PR, where I’m like, this is all going to be public facing, no matter what you do, it’s public facing.
People also get very hung up on the ethics thing because they’re like we can’t make everybody happy. We’re just so tired of everybody being so upset all the time. And I’m like don’t you realize that it’s a consequence of many years of not doing the right thing?
This rage, this perceived collective rage, didn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s been many years of a lot of things. We don’t have to go down all of the history. It’s come to a crux.
Usually, when things explode and you’re at a crossroads, you can make two decisions. You keep the status quo, or you do the right thing and you reassess and you pivot. And those that don’t pivot die, metaphorically, right? What happened to the languages that didn’t evolve? They’re dead languages for a reason. Agencies that don’t pivot are going to do bad work and they will no longer be here.
It’s one of the arguments I’ll use occasionally with the executives that don’t listen to the moral right thing to do. Being diverse and knowing your communities is good business. You do better. There are enough studies out there that show organizations that do this make more money. So let’s be selfish and do it.
You’re totally right. I hate that I have to pull that trigger, but if that’s the lever we have to use, it is the level you use. If you don’t want to do it out of the goodness of your heart, Latinos, for example, have studies have come out that we have a $1.3 trillion spending power. Latina’s GDP spending power is greater than the state of Florida. But make sure you’re not painting with too broad a brush
Beyond your own personal experience, what are you seeing as the key ethics challenges facing our profession today and tomorrow?
I love this question. The first one would be in line with a lot of what we talked about, but diversity is still a problem. A lot of agencies are underutilizing this diverse talent pipeline that they have, either because they don’t want to, or for some other reason.
The second challenge is also very controversial. I believe that as PR pros, we have done a disservice to the media. Essentially, I think one of the big ethics issues is media isn’t doing well. And part of it is pivoting, which is great, we’re seeing a lot of media companies moved to TikTok or Reels. That is whether you like it or not, the way a lot of people nowadays are consuming the news.
We just had a newspaper in Bartlett, Texas, close. This newspaper had been publishing regularly since 1886, every single week, without fail. And it just folded. It couldn’t survive.
It died. And one of the things I see when I go to PR panels and people talk about ethics or what’s going on in our industry, I seldom see or hear the conversation steer towards our duty to support journalism.
For me, it’s less of I need media for my job and more of I respect the work that they’re doing. I recognize that like every ecosystem, it is a fragile ecosystem. Even if things evolve, TikTok isn’t going to be enough for what we used to do.
I’ve worked in a lot of agencies where clients get placed in Business Insider or even a local newspaper and they’re like, I want to read it. I think it’s cool to send clients the clipping so that they have it. That’s part of what we deliver. But I’m the first one to tell clients you need to buy a subscription. If you really want to be in Forbes or whatever, you need to start buying the magazine because if you really care that deeply, you should also be reading it. I want to keep publishing alive.
I think you’re right. Also, the evolution of the landscape is going to be very interesting. Back when I first started a long time ago, there was a strong firewall between pay and earned. Because of the decline in subscriptions and the change in advertising, that wall is becoming more fractured and blurred.
It becomes a problem, right? It’s a hell of our own making. You have clients that get spam emails from PR agencies that say we can guarantee you press, but they don’t understand that it’s not guaranteed earned media. It’s paid.
That’s the thing I told people. I’m like the 2010s were F around and the 2020s are find out.
The scary thing is that Fred Cook did a study out of UNC Annenberg that found consumers are increasingly unable to distinguish between paid, earned, shared and owned. And the scary thing is about 55 percent of them said they don’t care, which really is a very chilling impact overall.
It’s interesting. I spend a lot of my time educating consumers and clients, because I think it’s worth “wasting my breath” if it moves the needle a little bit. People should care because you have all these conversations and media trust barometers where consumers are concerned about fake news or news not being accurate or news being distorted. Guess what, if we blur the line between earned and paid, and the people telling the news now are being paid to say certain things. You are getting distorted news. The source does matter. And what happens behind the scenes for that source also matters. It behooves all of us to care very deeply.
What is the best ethics advice you ever received?
Trust your gut.
Just trust your gut because PR is a difficult job. Not because of the actual work, but because we work with people. That’s a piece that is forgotten about or isn’t talked about enough. Like 90 percent of my job is emailing people, calling people or going to an event to talk to people. That is the job. A lot of the things that you learn you can put in a formula – how to do a press clipping or how to build a media list. But a lot of the rest of the job you learn through doing and the thing with people is every person is different.
I can have a formula for how to respond to a certain thing or how to deal with a certain thing, but it’s always going to be different. I’ve learned that to be a good publicist, it’s 50 percent training and 50 percent intuition – because I’ve had situations where, it’s a similar situation to a thing that happened with another client and I was ready to handle it the way we handle it for the other client. But then intuitively I was like, No, I think I feel really strongly that we need to do it this other way.
And 9 times out of 10, when you lean into intuition for ethics things…you’re right. Intuition is an evolutionary thing we’ve developed as humans to let us know that danger is near or that something isn’t right.
You should lean on both your training and whatever that feeling is.
Listen to the full interview, with bonus content, here:
- How to Counsel Effectively When Your Client Has a Culturally Insensitive Idea – Fabiana Meléndez Ruiz - March 10, 2025
- Acting Ethically With Financial Numbers - January 6, 2025
- How to best counsel your client when they want to respond unethically to an unethical competitor – Tatevik Simonyan - October 28, 2024
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