The subtitles hijack

Here comes a fantastic, barely legal, example of disruptive (and free) media placement. The right message, at the right time, to the right audience. This is the winning trick of media planning and advertising, right?

Let me start from the beginning… All around the world when you live outside the US and you don’t have access to services like Netflix or iTunes, you download American TV series from pirate websites. Breaking the rules is the rule to get access to great fresh content without waiting for the episodes to be localized in your own language. However a lot of the people who download the shows in English don’t know the language well enough to understand what the heck they are saying on the screen. So they download translated subtitles in the form of .srt files.

And this is were the genius of Y&R Peru started to play. They hijacked the subtitle files, by uploading their own, not perfectly translated version of the transcript, where characters like Walter White were coming up with completely random and out of context lines. Wanna know what Mr White was really saying? Improve your English, go to Británico English Institute.

Great insight, fantastic thinking out of the box. However, I can’t help it, I have to keep my client hat on: too bad the video doesn’t show the results. Without a bit of the context on consumers reactions and conversion rates it’s hard to get the full picture and tell if this was really a good campaign.

via Ads of the World