I was watching CNN in English on my TV in Mexico City recently. The interview was with Robert O’Neill, the Navy SEAL who has made headlines for his decision to come public about his role in the operation in Abbottabad.
But this post is one of those instances, as tends to happen, when the advertising caught my attention more than the content.
As I was watching the interview in English on a channel in a Spanish speaking country, I began to look at my iPhone when I heard the sounds of Portuguese. beginning to sell me on a product.
My ears perked up and they did not let me down. It was in fact a commercial for Chevrolet Brazil.
What’s the point of this story?
The holy grail of media buying is to not waste a single impression. Right viewer, right time, agnostic of where that viewer may be. Thanks to technology that enables automated media buying, known in the biz as programmatic, this is becoming more and more of a reality online and on our phones.
In TV, this is still a ways away, although maybe not as far away as we think.
Personally, I found it pretty cool to see a Portuguese ad on a Spanish-speaking cable provider hosting an English-language network. It was a mind game, testing my mind to jump between three languages.
But from a media-buying perspective, it was the definition of waste across the most expensive medium.
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