Pack up the flip-flops and deflate the floaties. Kids are heading back to school. And if most of them are like my daughter, it's all about what you wear and how you wear it.

In the shopper marketing business, much revolves around the "sell-in."

With an eye on strengthening CVS's position in the Hispanic marketplace, the company recently announced plans to acquire Navarro Discount Pharmacies, the largest Hispanic-owned drugstore chain in the U.S. With over 50 years of experience serving the Hispanic community in South Florida, there's a lot a successful local chain can teach the national giant on marketing to Latinos. This recollection of my first visit to a Navarro drugstore explains much of their success.

Every year around this time I am excited to analyze the Advertising Age Hispanic Fact Pack from a digital perspective. Every year I am optimistic that marketers will finally realize that U.S. Hispanics spend most of their time consuming digital media and allocate their marketing budgets accordingly.

Two of the hottest topics in Hispanic marketing in 2014 have been the "Total Market Approach" and Hispanic Millennials. The emergence of the Total Market Approach in the last couple of years has kicked off a heated debate in the marketing industry around which marketing model makes the most sense.

Since I emigrated from Mexico City in 1997, I have lived in the United States. I made the United States my home; I became an American and had my children here. I have found the opportunity I was seeking when I came to this country with a dream. I have been very fortunate to have had terrific educational and career opportunities in the United States. Throughout my life here and more recently through my own podcast, I have come across more and more Latinos and Latinas who are having a tremendous impact on our country in business, technology, culture, education, …

Summer is in full swing! The kids are out of school, the temperature is rising, and many of us have a stack of unused vacation days just waiting to be redeemed. So we pack up the car, fill up the tank, and hit the road.

Every four years we have a FIFA World Cup. And every four years we examine what brands do at retail to leverage the surge of interest in soccer among U.S. consumers. I recently traveled to several markets across America and visited more than 60 Hispanic grocery and mass merchandiser stores to determine how successful different brands were in using soccer fever to generate shopper excitement. Efforts varied, but each fell into one of the following five categories, or tiers.

Some rules in soccer, as in other sports, are based on absolutes: if the ball crosses the touchline, it's out of bounds. The offside rule is different; it's based on the relative position of players from both teams.

By now, marketers are well aware that the U.S. Hispanic population is highly engaged online. The Internet is a popular and effective way to keep in touch for extremely social, family-oriented Hispanics whose loved ones are often very dispersed geographically. (Facebook is the number one social media site used among this sector.) Hispanics are also motivated to engage with Hispanic-targeted ad messages online. Research shows that Hispanics who are exposed to an ad online are more likely to engage with that ad than are non-Hispanic consumers with comparable ad exposure opportunities.