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By that token, you might call Eleta P&G's chief backyard chef. As P&G's top ethnic marketer, she heads the company's Hispanic efforts from the division's headquarters in Puerto Rico. But the Panama City--born P&G vet doesn't spend too much time in the Caribbean--every month she spends a week or so in Hispanic hotbeds like Los Angeles, Dallas and New York City, managing retail relationships, meeting with customers. "She walks the stores, walks in the community," says Ernest Bromley, head of ad agency Bromley Communications, based in San Antonio, Texas. "She's not learning this stuff out of a book."

P&G has combined national advertising with grass-roots marketing to increase Hispanic share for three-quarters of the brands targeted by the multicultural unit. For example, P&G holds demonstrations in stores and homes to teach recent Hispanic immigrants the advantages of Bounty's "Quicker Picker Upper" paper towels vs. the sponges and rags with which many were raised. Bounty's Hispanic market share has jumped some 10%. "[P&G] won't lift a finger without talking to a customer, without finding out exactly what a customer wants," says Felipe Korzenny, a Hispanic-marketing professor at Florida State University and a consultant for several FORTUNE 500 companies. "They've just done it better than anybody else."

The Hispanic market didn't always get this kind of attention. For years before Hispanics overtook African Americans as the country's largest minority group in 2001, companies often marketed to U.S. Hispanics on the cheap. Even at P&G, which always dabbled in ethnic marketing, Hispanics weren't always a high priority. Sometimes, says Eleta, "Hispanic marketing was the first item out of the budget."

Companies like P&G can't afford to ignore the Hispanic market anymore. The U.S. Hispanic population has grown 85%, to 41.3 million, since 1990, compared with only 18% for the overall population, according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia. U.S. Hispanic buying power has more than tripled in the past 15 years, to $686 billion, whereas total U.S. buying power has grown at less than half that rate. The Selig Center projects that Hispanic buying power will grow an additional 45%, to $992 billion, by the end of the decade; and the U.S. Census Bureau says the Hispanic population will triple, to 102.5 million, by 2050, when Hispanics will make up nearly 25% of the U.S. population. (The group now has a 14% population share.)

Those demographics have spawned a marketing frenzy. Hispanic-targeted advertising more than doubled, to $3.4 billion, from 1997 to 2003, according to the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies. P&G spending has jumped 80% since 1997. Unilever, whose household brands like Surf detergent compete directly with P&G's, says it will triple its Hispanic advertising and promotional budget in 2005. General Electric, Telemundo's parent company, has identified Spanish-language TV as a strategic growth area. (Univision and Telemundo used to be the sole TV options. There are now 67 Spanish-language cable networks, from ESPN Deportes to the History Channel en Espa??ol.) To counter sluggish growth, Miller Brewing Co. signed a three-year, $100 million deal with Univision in October to sponsor programs, buy commercial time and place products on Univision's radio, cable and broadcast network properties.