Arrieta . Fri April 2007
San Francisco: Taking advantage of the trip to San Francisco to attend Ad-Tech SF, we coordinated a series of meetings with the main publishers and advertisers of the US West Coast. In this case with MySpace.
The purpose of the breakfast was to increase the business that we already have for more that a year, in which we are monetizing the Lating American inventory of MySpace with Directa Networks (specially now that the will launch their Spanish version for LATAM and the US-Hispanic version) and mainly to add MySpace as a official media in which we can use the Behavioral Targeting skill of Directa Networks to serve in the English content of the site, Spanish creatives to the USH users database. In reference to this last point I was surprised by several things:
Firstly, being Mark Papia, current Vice President- Performance Marketing, Fox Interactive Media, an eminence in network optimization, with an impressive career that includes a previous job in Yahoo, Monster and with more than 20 years of experience in media in the east coast as well as in the west coast in the present, I was surprised that at the beginning he thought that it was inappropriate from the user experience point of view, to have English content with advertising in Spanish. Besides all my explanation about the cultural relevance and the respect to the roots that the dialogue from a brand in the native language can provide to a US- Hispanic, what surprised me the most was the market research that the carried out to make a decision.
And this was to interview our waitress, first he asked her if she spoke Spanish, her answer was yes, then he asked her if she surfed on the Internet and her answer was affirmative as well, later if she knew or had an account in MySpace and she also answered yes “of course”. And at last he asked what she thought about surfing with a content in English and Spanish Advertising. Fortunately her answer was that even she didn’t like advertising of any kind on the Internet, she thought that it would be nice to see advertising in Spanish and that it would be a way of being taken into account as a user.
Finally Mark was delighted with the answer from the waitress, who was very attentive and kindly participated. Thanks to this meeting, besides increasing our business with FIM, today we can run Behavioral Targeting campaigns and retargeting of Directa Networks in MySpace and we are responsible of checking creatives in Spanish that are uploaded to this content. Even though I knew who I was meeting and we had talked several times I couldn’t help being surprised by the analysis capacity, experience and charisma of Mark.
I believe that the 25% tip that I left to the waitress. 
