Buen idea: A Spanish ad in NBA finals

Last week LeBron James won his first career NBA championship, which got a ton of attention, but the finals also delivered another first: the first Spanish-language ad during an English-language NBA telecast.

During games four and five of the NBA championship series between the Miami Heat and Oklahoma City Thunder, ABC aired a Spanish-language ad from Ford for its 2013 Escape, a first for Ford, ABC and the NBA.

Targeting Hispanic viewers on English-language TV made perfect sense–the first three games of the Finals on ABC averaged 2.03 million Hispanic viewers, according to Nielsen, and the games finished as the top three English programs among Hispanics during the week ended June 17 (numbers for games four and five will be released today).

By comparison, the No. 4 English program among Hispanics that week was NBC's "America's Got Talent," which averaged 692,000 Hispanic viewers.

The NBA says the first three games of the series were up 20 percent versus last year among Hispanic households.

Miami-Fort Lauderdale is the nation's No. 3 market for Hispanic TV households, behind Los Angeles and New York. Just over 5 percent of the country's Hispanic TV households are in the market.

The ad ran with English subtitles.

Tags: abc, ford, los angeles, Miami Fort Lauderdale, nba, nba finals, nba finals ford ad, nba finals spanish ad, nbc, New York, spanish ad, spanish-language ad, spot, Targeting Hispanic, tv