The level of cultural influence that Hispanics have gained in the last few years has been remarkable. Hispanic music, for example, is more popular than ever. In August 2017, there were seven Spanish songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, compared to only five Spanish songs appearing on the chart for the entire 2016 calendar year.

Hispanic cinema, on the other hand, had seen no significant gains in popularity, underscoring the challenge that the CLFF was facing. To us, the opportunity lay in capitalizing on a more influential aspect of Hispanic culture. With the growing popularity of Hispanic music in the U.S., we opted to transform CLFF movie trailers into reggaeton songs, and to promote the festival through this music in the places people were already tuning in: radios and dance clubs.

We promoted the CLFF with our "Danceable Trailers" on various radio stations the week leading up to and throughout the festival. Media placement was a regular radio ad, but each spot was produced to sound just like a reggaeton song. A VO at the end of the song revealed that it was actually a trailer for one of the movies featured at the festival. We created three different tracks, followed by a call to action to attend the CLFF, which aired on the following Chicago stations:

WGCI-FM (iHeartRadio), WKSC-FM (KISS FM), WVAZ-FM, WLIT-FM, WEBG-FM, and WGRB-AM.

We also secured placement at four popular Chicago nightclubs on Thursdays and Fridays throughout the festival: Cava Room, The MID, Barra Ñ, and Estereo. DJs at the clubs were given longer versions of the tracks to play or mix live, and delivered the call to action live at the end of the song.

The CLFF had its most successful year ever, with 24 sold-out screenings, including the opening- and closing-night galas, and almost an equal number of near-sold-out showings.

A total of 35,000 people attended the festival, and 25% of them were non-Hispanic Americans.