What we talked about
Jose Herrera is a creative force whose journey spans cultures, industries, and decades of storytelling. Born in Eureka, California, raised in Guadalajara, Mexico, and later building his career in San Jose, Jose embodies the spirit of bridging worlds. From his early days producing at Telemundo, Univision, and CBS, to founding MiO Productions, he has spent over 25 years telling powerful stories through video, events, and digital media.
Show notes
Jose Herrera sketched the concept for Corazón Musical on a fabric napkin at a San Francisco restaurant, and then went out and beat Telemundo’s corporate newscast in local ratings with a two-person crew. Sixteen years after that napkin sketch, he is now in his tenth month running an outdoor billboard company that has operated for 60 years, applying the same cultural fluency he built through two decades of Spanish-language media production.
What we covered
- Corazón Musical was born after Jose watched a woman conducting street interviews on Avenida Las Vegas in Guadalajara and realized he could bring the same concept, positive, apolitical, community-focused entertainment, to the Bay Area’s Latino audience. The show ran on Azteca America from 2003 to 2005.
- Jose describes nostalgia as the commercial superpower he brought from Guadalajara: understanding what people from Zacatecas, Jalisco, Michoacán, and Oaxaca each miss about home, and using that emotional connection to make commercials and content that actually resonated. A single ranch commercial he shot on a client’s camera lasted three years on Telemundo’s air.
- One of the biggest culture shocks after leaving CBS and NBC to go back to Spanish-language media was discrimination, fielding calls from people who assumed that “Jose” was calling about landscaping or construction rather than professional media production. He changed his name back from “Joe” to Jose specifically as an act of professional reclamation.
- Building Corazón Musical taught him that a production company cannot have two bosses giving contradictory direction. An external consultant he hired to diagnose why the team was deteriorating came back and told him the problem was Jose and his co-producer, they were giving conflicting instructions. He handed full operational control to his producer.
- Jose is now nine months into running Adco Outdoors, a 60-year-old family-operated billboard company in California where he walked into an industry conference and found he was almost the only Latino in the room. He describes outdoor advertising as a largely hidden but lucrative business that the Hispanic market has barely touched.
- His closing advice: don’t hire employees, build a team. He notes that if he called any former employee today, they would come back and work with him, a track record he attributes to treating people as teammates rather than staff and delegating full ownership of departments rather than micromanaging.
About Jose
Jose Bernardo Herrera is the founder of MiO Productions, a San Jose-based media production company that has operated for nearly 25 years, and currently serves as a senior leader at Adco Outdoors, bringing fresh commercial strategy to one of California’s longest-running outdoor advertising companies.
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jose-bernardo-herrera
- Website: https://mioproductions.com
Episode 53 of the PreVetted Podcast.