Latino TV to Commission Own Ratings

From its inception a quarter-century ago, the Spanish-language TV industry in the United States has bitterly complained that major ratings firms have undercounted its audience and, as a result, stunted its growth.

The rating giants have sympathized with Spanish-language television’s quandary, but claimed their patrons paid them for monitoring the total universe of English-language TV viewers, not a selected linguistic sliver of the audience.

Now all this will change because the Telemundo and Univision networks, the nation’s prime Spanish-language broadcasters, have joined forces to commission their own, specialized ratings service.

Network officials acknowledged last week that an earlier field of five firms has been narrowed to A.C. Nielsen Co. and Arbitron Ratings Co. The officials said that each firm must now submit final proposals by Sunday. The winner, which probably will be selected by mid-January, will get as much as $40 million over five years to wire as many as 1,000 Latino households nationwide to the latest TV metering devices.

“Without providing them some additional compensation, they’ve been unwilling to do a proper job,” said Larry McBride, senior vice president of marketing and sales at Telemundo. “So we are now willing to pay a small fortune to get the job done properly.”

Spanish-language broadcasters contend that the more extensive ratings will reveal they have more viewers than previously was believed, and thus will lead to a boost in advertising revenue.

“Serious money is involved now,” said Carlos Garcia, director of Research Resources, a Westlake Village-based firm specializing in Latino marketing.

“They (Telemundo and Univision officials) are convinced that they’ll be able to charge a lot more for their air time because they’ll be delivering an audience and can prove it,” he said. “Before, they were delivering the audience but couldn’t prove it.”

Although Nielsen and Arbitron, the nation’s No. 1 and 2 ratings firms, contend that they have improved their methods of measuring Latino viewing habits, they acknowledged that some of the criticism leveled at them by Spanish-language broadcasters is justified.

“I think it’s fair in one sense,” said Pierre Negroz, Arbitron’s vice president of TV sales and marketing. “When Arbitron or Nielsen conducts a survey, we pick a sample that represents the whole marketplace, the whole geographic universe of people, including Hispanics. There is never really going to be as much sampling as Hispanic broadcasters would like because we are not designed to measure just those populations.”

Telemundo, the nation’s second-largest all-Spanish network--reaching 68% of the nation’s 20-million-member Latino market--joined forces with Univision, the nation’s largest all-Spanish network, reaching 83% of this market, six months ago to form the Spanish Television Research Committee, the panel charged with selecting the winning bidder.

McBride, Telemundo’s committee representative, said that each network will pay $2.5 million to $4 million a year over five years to the company that comes up with the best proposal. The project’s first stage will be implemented next fall when the winning firm installs 150 meters in Los Angeles, he said. The project’s next stage will follow after the Los Angeles test results have been analyzed, he said.

(At present, Nielsen and Arbitron base their measurements of the viewing habits of the 4.8 million households in Los Angeles and Orange counties on separate samplings of about 500 homes each.)

Norm Hecht, a private ratings consultant hired to chair the committee, said Telemundo and Univision will pay as much as the major English-language networks do annually--about $4.5 million each--for installing Nielsen’s “people meters” or Arbitron’s SCAN-AMERICA devices.

The size of this investment is extraordinary, he said, because domestic Spanish-language network revenues are just a fraction of English-language TV’s multibillion-dollar revenues. Moreover, he added, ABC, NBC and CBS represent only a third of the firms subscribing to Nielsen’s and Arbitron’s new metering services--local stations, advertisers and marketing firms also pay for them--while the Spanish-language networks may foot as much as 90% of the bill for the new ratings.

Despite the financial inequities, Telemundo’s McBride insisted that the costs are well worth the price. The Spanish-language television industry, he explained, currently garners about $220 million a year, or 1% of the total amount of money spent on TV advertising--while Latinos represent more than 8% of the national population.

Consequently, he said, even if only half the nation’s Latino TV audience are shown to be regular Spanish-language TV watchers, the proportionate advertising investment would be $1.1 billion.

“We can’t lose,” he said. “We can’t possibly get worse numbers than we’re getting now.”