Cross-border reverse marketing
Univision Mobile Money · 2019
A family invitation in Mexico brings a new sender from the US.
- Reach Mexican families
- Invite US relative
- Send first remittance
The problem
Univision Mobile Money, the Univision group’s remittance platform, needed users who would send money from the USA to Mexico. Buying media for Hispanic audiences in the United States is very expensive; in Mexico it is significantly cheaper.
The money moves north to south, and traditional marketing says you must reach the one who pays: the sender in the USA.
What we built
We flipped the acquisition logic. Instead of spending in the USA on the sender, we spent in Mexico on the receiver: migrants’ families, concentrated in states and cities we could identify from remittance flow data. The message: ask your relative in the USA to send through Univision Mobile Money and you both get benefits, from mobile data to cashback and extra money.
The full cross-border flow: a user in Mexico sees the campaign, downloads the app and sends an SMS invitation to a relative in the USA. The relative downloads the app, makes a first deposit and sends the remittance.
To prove that spend in Mexico drove conversions in the USA, we integrated Kochava as the MMP for cross-border tracking, Mexico–USA campaign tracking, SMS platforms for the invitations, middle data warehouses for both geographies and end-to-end analytics linking an ad in Mexico to a remittance from the USA.
The result
Measurable proof that ad spend in one country drives conversions in another. An acquisition model built on family ties, where the receiver becomes the sender’s acquisition channel.
Why it’s innovation
It reversed the acquisition logic of an entire industry, with media cost arbitrage between two countries and full cross-border traceability: linking a click in Oaxaca to a deposit in Houston.
We didn’t invent a new platform; we invented a strategy. That is what sets an innovation studio apart from an agency that executes briefs.
