Viewers of the NBA Finals last week saw a 30-second TV ad for the 2013 Ford Escape — in Spanish, with English subtitles. This was the first time that a Spanish-language ad was shown by an English-language network during an NBA final. The NBA ad was the highest profile Spanish-language ad to air since April of this year, when ESPN first introduced Spanish television ads on its English-language platforms for the network’s most popular program, SportsCenter.
“They told us it was the highest penetration they were ever seeing of Hispanic viewership of a [non-soccer] sporting event in the U.S.,” Matt VanDyke, Ford’s director of U.S. marketing communications, told Forbes. “One-sixth of the viewers were Spanish,” mainly because of a huge concentration of viewers in the Miami area. Overall, the surge in Latino viewers of the NBA Championship was helping create the biggest audience for five-game pro-basketball finals since 2004, even though the Heat’s dominance was making it a less-than-thrilling series.
Ford was open to the networks’ feelers in part because the Hispanic market is an important one for Escape: Hispanics account for about 13 percent of U.S. purchases of vehicles in Escape’s small-utility segment, slightly higher than their share of the overall American vehicle market.
