SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Consumer brands, especially those in mature industries, can find growth by diversifying their advertising to include the burgeoning market of Spanish-speaking consumers in the United States.
That was one of the key messages from Donna Speciale, the advertising veteran who last year joined Univision as president of sales and marketing, in a “fireside chat” at the Beet Retreat conference on March 16-18.
“It’s an audience that can’t be missed and I still cannot believe — because I did my homework — how many marketers and advertisers don’t lean into this audience,” she said in conversation with Sean Cunningham, president and chief executive of trade group VAB.
Since joining Univision, one of Speciale’s biggest undertakings has been to educate more advertisers about the opportunities in reaching Hispanic consumers with growing spending power. Her efforts are showing results, with 75 new advertisers that had never bought commercial time on Univision before.
“We see with a lot of the new advertisers coming along, and we obviously talked about business outcomes,” Speciale said. “We see it — I mean huge business growth because it’s a new audience.”
Univision is adding to its range of offerings as the company integrates operations with Televisa’s media and production assets following a merger. The streaming platforms of the combined company are being grouped together under the ViX global brand.
ViX currently offers ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) and this year will launch a subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) tier called ViX+. Though ViX+ won’t have commercial breaks, advertisers will have opportunities to appear as sponsors of live sports programming.
Representative Currencies
As media buyers and sellers seek new ways to set the value of advertising transactions with improved audience-measurement methods, Speciale said she wants to see currencies that adequately reflect the cultural and ethnic diversity of the U.S. television audience.
“I’m really excited that we are talking about different currencies and measurement because I do think we need to get there, but I’m concerned,” Special said. “Before we even start talking about what currency should we use, is there the right representation in the data that we’re trying to use to actually represent what’s going on in the country?”
You are watching coverage from Beet Retreat San Juan 2022, presented by AppScience, Infillion, MadHive, SpringServe, Univision & VideoAmp. For more videos, please visit this page.
