After decades of being shunted to the sidelines, Hispanic media outlets have joined the big leagues of TV research.
Ratings giant Nielsen Media Research plans to pull the plug on a separate service that it created 15 years ago to measure the size of Hispanic TV audiences, concluding Hispanics are too important to the overall TV ratings picture to be relegated to a separate system.
So Nielsen’s sole source for national ratings will come from its influential “people meter” survey, which is produced daily from the TV program choices made by viewers in about 12,000 homes equipped with Nielsen set-top boxes. That panel includes about 1,400 Hispanic families.
“We’ve had to work real hard to get to where we are today,” said Hector Orci , chairman of La Agencia de Orci & Asociados, a Los Angeles advertising firm. “Trying to get Nielsen to change its methodology is like moving a mountain — a very big mountain. This move says that Latinos make up an important market that continues to grow.”
Added Danielle Gonzales , managing director of Chicago-based Tapestry, a top agency that specializes in Hispanic media: “This is a turning point: The television industry has acknowledged the strength of the Hispanic population.”
The move to one system comes as major media companies and advertisers are eager to reach Hispanic consumers. There are more than 44 million Hispanics living in the United States, making up about 15 percent of the total population. Some studies have estimated the collective buying power of Hispanics in the United States at more than $800 billion a year.
“We are approaching a critical mass of consciousness by the industry and marketers who have discovered the enormous economic buying power of Hispanics,” said Don Browne, president of Telemundo, the Spanish-language network owned by NBC Universal. “They see who is moving through their stores, and who is buying their products and services — and it’s increasingly Hispanics.”
The history of the separate Hispanic Television Index that Nielsen is now scrapping shows just how much Spanish-language TV has evolved.
When it debuted in 1992, the system, which measured viewing by Hispanic viewers of both English- and Spanish-language programs, was considered groundbreaking for seeking to figure out what Hispanics were watching.
Nielsen had created the special index after Spanish-language network executives complained that ratings were artificially low because of a shortage of Spanish-speakers in Nielsen’s sample audience. Univision and Telemundo subsequently agreed to pay $40 million to help finance the creation of a separate system.
In 1992, Univision and Telemundo were the primary Spanish-language broadcast networks. Together they attracted an average 2.5 million viewers in prime time. That year, Spanish-language TV advertising revenues reached $220 million.
Last year, ad spending on Spanish-language television topped $3 billion, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus. Now there are four major Spanish-language broadcasters, including Univision-owned TeleFutura and Azteca America, which is affiliated with Mexico’s second-largest media company, TV Azteca.
Big media companies also have embraced Spanish-language TV. Five years ago, General Electric Co.’s NBC spent $2.7 billion to buy Telemundo and its small cable channel, mun2. Others added cable channels that target Hispanics , including such recognizable brands as Fox Sports, Discovery, CNN, and MTV.
Doug Darfield, Nielsen’s senior vice president for Hispanic services, said there were several reasons for having a separate survey. Nielsen’s national “people meter” sample audience in the early 1990s was about one-third the size it is today. And, at that time, Hispanics made up a smaller slice of the U.S. population.
There were about 500 Hispanic homes in Nielsen’s people-meter audience, which was too small a number to provide accurate ratings for shows that ran on the Spanish-language networks, Darfield said.
“You needed a more robust sample size,” he said. Nielsen’s Hispanic Index was made up of 1,000 homes in which the head of the household was Hispanic.
Nielsen also encountered obstacles when it tried recruiting Hispanic families to join. Some people , including recent immigrants, were wary of letting the Nielsen representatives and their electronic equipment into their homes.
Ceril Shagrin, who designed and managed the system during her 27-year career at Nielsen, said the Hispanic survey immediately gave Spanish-language networks more credibility with advertisers. Over time, she said, Nielsen documented the growth of the Hispanic audience, which encouraged companies and advertisers to enter the market.
But the system became problematic.
There was no easy way to blend the data from the Hispanic Index with Nielsen’s larger national people-meter sample. Side-to-side comparisons didn’t match up. Estimates of viewership for Spanish-language programs produced from the two separate surveys often varied widely. That’s because there were different families in the two panels that watched different shows.
“It was very difficult,” Gonzales, of Tapestry, said.
“Advertisers wanted to go after the total market, but the question was what to do with all of this different data. For some advertisers, it became too much trouble and they would tell us, ‘We’ll talk about it later.'”
There also were debates about whether Nielsen’s sample was accurately representing the Hispanic population. Did the sample audience have too many or too few Spanish-speakers? Another problem was that many of the most influential advertising buyers paid little attention to the increasingly big ratings of Univision and Telemundo’s Spanish-language shows. Univision’s numbers, for example, did not show up in the overnight Nielsen ratings.
Instead, executives at boutique ad agencies monitored those ratings, and handled the buys for Spanish-language networks. More than five years ago, Univision began lobbying Nielsen to do away with the separate Hispanic survey.
By last year, Nielsen had increased the size of its people-meter sample audience and the number of Hispanics included. Univision and Telemundo began subscribing to that service. Ratings for Spanish-language networks were being reported along with those of ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox.
Nielsen’s Darfield said the move was made to provide the most accurate measurement.
“It reached a point that if you are not getting the Hispanics right, then you are not getting rest of the population right either,” Darfield said.
