Fresh from merging with Grupo Televisa of Mexico, U.S. Spanish-language broadcaster Univision is pitching during the 2022-23 TV upfronts ad sales season with a bullish message.
Ahead of the deal, Univision had been building its streaming business by acquiring ad-supported platform ViX, planning to integrate it with its own PrendeTV. They relaunched as a combined ViX earlier in 2022.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Donna Speciale, president of sales and marketing at the combined TelevisaUnivision, says if media metrics did better at representing minority audiences, advertisers could achieve growth.
That is why TelevisaUnivision is launching a Hispanic identity graph at its upfronts pitch.
‘Grow with us’
Univision has been touting business growth to ad buyers.
“We are a community of 62 million and growing,” Speciale says. “We have the heart of what’s going on, we are 20% of the population.
“Clients can’t grow their business without the Hispanic audience. Between our transformation, our evolution and our population growing, it is the only place that they can grow their business.”
Grow through representation
Speciale says many other media metrics – even new-style cross-platform TV currencies – fail to recognize distinct cultures of audience. She says that means businesses fail to tap into valuable pockets of consumers.
“Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, I would say all minority audiences right now are underrepresented in all the data sets that are currently being used,” she says.
“No one’s looking at even the new currencies and ‘are they being measured correctly?’ The answer is ‘no’.
“We represent 85% of the us Hispanics at the launch (of ViX). Our goal is to get to close to 100%. Clients and agencies and third party vendors are going to be able to use this graph to help better look into their marketing plans.”
Spanish mega-merger
The combined TelevisaUnivision claims to reach over 100 million Spanish speakers every day – more than 60% of the respective TV audiences in both the U.S. and Mexico across television, digital, streaming and audio.
The company hailed the merger as uniting “the two largest Spanish-speaking markets in the world, (which) has created a company with tremendous potential”.
Speciale tells Beet.TV: “The merger supercharged everything that we did. We now have a global platform with VIX.
“VIX has been launched with 40,000 hours of original content across the board.”
Linear on fire
But it’s not just about on-demand.
Univision will also be telling upfront buyers its traditional linear channels are also a growth story.
“We will be the only media company that talks about linear growth,” Donna Speciale says.
“Everybody is flat or declining, we are growing – our prime-time portfolio is up 7% season-to-date. We are on fire.”
