• by Mark Naples , August 1, 2003

I had a dream vacation last week, Marlin fishing in the Sea of Cortez off southern Baja, Mexico (BCS - Baja California Sur, to be precise). One of those breaks when you really get AWAY, you know?

If you have much familiarity about Baja, it probably revolves around the heat, which can reach 115 degrees this time of year, and the remoteness of the place, with villages that are reachable only by burro or 4WD vehicles. Baja has some of the best fishing in the world, too, in beautiful, clear waters.

I really love the place, especially now that some of those villages have high-speed Internet connections available in cafes for less than $5/hour. I'm not making this up. Of course, the obvious question is why is this available there - and so inexpensive - when similar service is available only in some of our domestic airports - and scarce in our cities outside of Kinkos. Don't point to government subsidies to explain why. That's not it.

The nationalized then privatized phone carriers have nothing to do with it either, I'm told. Seems that private investors pulled an MCI, which had laid its first major long distance cables on rail lines. These amigos stretched broadband down the length of Route 1, all the way to Cabo San Lucas.

Wireless equipment takes it from there into villages with as few as a couple hundred people. One minute, you can stand in a 320 year-old Mission, the next, you're online reading my column, as I was last Sunday. Why it's so cheap may have more to do with the cost of living there than it does with the cost of bandwidth. All I know is that gringos and locals alike kept the Celeron desktop computers in cafes I visited very busy.

But, this is not the most significant Internet-related story to come out of my intrepid MediaPost assignment in Baja last week. The best Web Ad item came during a nationally televised soccer game. Mexico's 1-0 defeat of the Brazilian under-23 team in the CONCACAF Gold Cup final riveted the entire country. So when we stopped for lunch while crossing the peninsula, we had to wait and watch in a crowded bodega while our meals were prepared.

Why is this relevant? During the game, all the advertising that appeared on screen was Internet style banners and - yes - rich media-ish floating ads.

Mind you, this was nothing like the Budweiser attempts during the last World Cup's telecast here in the US. Some of you may recall the trade media musing about how advertisers and networks would manage the real estate around the game. What we were left with was a scorekeeping widget that was akin to what Fox does with the NFL in an upper corner, accompanied by occasional branding across the lower third of the screen (yawn).

This past Sunday's Mexican telecast featured Mexican Telecom giant TelCel as the main sponsor. So, what viewers saw were banner-style ads across the lower quarter of the screen, with Shoshkele-style floating ads across the screen during side outs, goal kicks, and just before brief corner kick stoppages. At no point was the action interrupted. Perhaps best of all, the floating ads always seemed to be coordinated with creative schemes along the freestanding placards that flank the opposing sidelines. So, in much the same way that a PointRoll "TowelBoy" ad migrates across the screen and then snaps back into the banner, a TelCel ad would appear, move across the viewing space, then suddenly seem to disappear into the actual placard.

Anyone who has watched a Major League Baseball game can see similar style ads in the space behind home plate, which becomes a palate of sorts for all manner of advertising that only TV viewers can see. While those are sometimes very colorful and easy on the eye, and even locally targeted by cable providers, they seem like banners compared to the TelCel ad, even though it was only a two-color application.

"This kind of advertising makes sense in soccer stadiums and throughout so much of the programming in Latin America, which is still largely shot in front of a live auditorium-style audience," said Peter Gervai, Managing Director for Real Media Brazil.

It also makes sense here in the states, as franchise owners continually scramble for more revenue sources. Don't want pay-TV to support your Yankees' 185 million-dollar payroll? How would you feel about more integrated campaigns between the television and broadcasts for Major League Baseball on RealNetworks' bespoke viewer? It's happening today - not to the same dramatic effect that I witnessed in Mexico last week. But, this is another, new frontier. Who knows? Maybe we'll soon see similar ads during the huddle in NFL broadcasts with more than program promos. Sports programming in the US is already behind in this regard. I'm banking that it'll catch up soon.