If you're a startup selling a complex, high-ticket product to executives outside the US or the UK, you already know the problem. LinkedIn ads get expensive fast, Meta rewards volume over precision, and the buyer you actually need, a senior decision-maker with a long sales cycle, doesn't behave like a typical performance-marketing target.
What often gets missed is a simple fact about that buyer: fluent English is disproportionately concentrated among exactly the audience B2B and enterprise sellers are chasing. Research on Latin American professionals has found that while a large majority of job postings in Mexico call for English, only a small fraction of the workforce can actually speak it, and separate academic research has documented a real correlation between English proficiency and higher socioeconomic origin. The EF English Proficiency Index reaches a similar conclusion at the country level, finding that English skills track closely with human capital, productivity, and economic opportunity almost everywhere they've been measured. In practice, that means the sliver of any market outside the US and UK that speaks fluent English tends to be wealthier, more senior, and more internationally minded than the population average, which is precisely the profile most B2B sellers are trying to reach.
This isn't a Mexico or Colombia phenomenon. The same logic holds anywhere English isn't the first language: a CFO in São Paulo, a founder in Warsaw, or a procurement lead in Manila is more likely than the average person in that market to be bilingual, and more likely to be listening to the same handful of English-language shows that dominate US and UK charts. The opportunity isn't regional. It's structural, wherever a market sits outside the US and UK, the same gap between who's bilingual and who's being advertised to in English tends to exist.
Podcasts add a second layer on top of this. Independent research has consistently found that podcast listeners skew higher income and more educated than the general population. That means the same channel already reaching this bilingual audience is also disproportionately reaching the people with the budget and authority to act on what they hear.
The inventory is bigger than most advertisers realize
Shows like The Daily and Hard Fork from The New York Times, Pod Save America, The Bulwark Podcast, and History Daily aren't just US phenomena. Our own inventory data over the past month shows The Daily alone generating over 400,000 monthly ad impressions among Mexican listeners and close to 500,000 among Spanish listeners, alongside meaningful reach in Brazil, Colombia, and beyond. Pod Save America delivers over 140,000 impressions a month in Mexico and over 250,000 in Spain. These aren't rounding errors. They're a standing, renewable audience that most advertisers never buy against, because nobody is targeting it.
That's the gap. In the US, a spot on The Daily commands a premium few early-stage startups can justify. Geo-targeted into Mexico or Colombia, that same inventory is priced for a market where almost no one else is bidding.
What this looked like in practice
We tested this with a Mexican B2B SaaS company selling into complex, enterprise deals with an average ticket size around $100,000 USD, the kind of sale where traditional digital channels struggle to produce qualified conversations at any price. Over one month, we ran a geo-targeted campaign across top English-language US podcasts, listened to almost entirely by an audience physically in Mexico and Colombia.
The Mexico campaign spent roughly $4,200 at an $11 CPM, generating 385,000 impressions and 89,000 unique reach, and produced two qualified leads at a cost per lead in the range of $2,700. Run the math on a $100,000 average deal size, if even one of those two leads closes, the campaign pays for itself many times over, before accounting for anything else the exposure might generate. A smaller test in Colombia spent under $500 and produced a lead as well, which is worth saying plainly, it's early, and the sample is too small to draw a conclusion from. What we can say with more confidence is the cost comparison, this company's typical cost to generate a comparable lead through traditional paid channels runs roughly three times higher, and that inventory is being served to this exact audience every single day, whether anyone buys it or not.
There's a second benefit that doesn't show up in a leads column
Executives notice where a brand advertises, even when they aren't the buyer. Showing up in The Daily or a show with that kind of editorial weight carries a credibility signal that a LinkedIn sponsored post doesn't. It's not the reason to run the campaign, but it's a real, if harder to measure, byproduct of buying premium editorial inventory instead of a generic programmatic feed.
Why this isn't just a LATAM play
The US and UK markets for this inventory are saturated and expensive. Nearly everywhere else, the exact same shows are underpriced, largely because most buyers haven't thought to target them. For a startup selling a high-ticket product to a bilingual, senior audience, wherever that audience sits, that mismatch is an opening, not a rounding error in a media plan.
We tested this out of Mexico because that's where we had the relationships and the data, but the underlying logic travels. We're continuing to test it across more shows and more markets, and we'll share what we learn as the data comes in. If you're trying to reach senior, bilingual audiences outside the US and UK and traditional channels aren't producing the leads your sales cycle needs, this is worth a conversation.
Genuina Media is a podcast advertising agency that runs geo-targeted campaigns on premium English-language shows like The Daily, Hard Fork, and Pod Save America for audiences in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Spain, and other markets outside the US and UK. Genuina Media helps B2B, fintech, and remittance brands reach senior, bilingual decision-makers through podcast inventory that most advertisers never target. Genuina Media has run campaigns for brands like Wise and Sendwave. If your startup sells a high-ticket product to executives outside the US and UK, talk to Genuina Media.
Sources: English proficiency and job-market figures for Mexico via Latin Business Today; the correlation between English proficiency and socioeconomic origin via peer-reviewed research on Colombian researchers; country-level correlations between English proficiency and human capital, productivity, and economic opportunity via the EF English Proficiency Index. Campaign data is Genuina Media's own, from a one-month test.