Latino Networks Feel Underrated

How many Latinos are watching Spanish-language television?

About 30% more in Los Angeles than Nielsen’s ratings show, according to Spanish-language broadcasters, who say the TV ratings firm is chronically underestimating Latino viewers.

To try to keep up with changing demographics, Nielsen Media Research in the last decade has spent millions of dollars to create separate Latino audience panels to measure their TV tastes across the country and sent legions of bilingual recruiters to find more Spanish-speaking families to participate in the surveys.

But Nielsen still is under attack for underestimating Latinos.

“We’ve been telling Nielsen forever, ‘You need to fix it,’ ” said Michael Wortsman, president of Univision Communications Inc.’s television group.

Univision, the nation’s largest Spanish-language broadcaster, has refused to sign a multiyear Nielsen contract for its flagship station, KMEX-TV Channel 34 in Los Angeles, because of what Univision says are inaccurate ratings. Nielsen’s audience surveys for local stations are flawed, Univision says, because they contain too many English speakers. The broadcaster wants more Spanish speakers added.

“I can understand the frustration of some of our clients, but we’re trying to move as quickly as possible,” said Paul Donato, Nielsen senior vice president for research. “Everyone wants to do the right thing, but there’s no consensus on how to get there.”

At stake is about $100 million a year in extra advertising for Los Angeles-based Univision, its chief rival, Telemundo, and other niche networks, including Viacom Inc.’s Black Entertainment Television. Univision said the shortage of Spanish-speaking Nielsen families, particularly in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Sacramento, costs it at least $65 million a year in lost advertising revenue because of lower ratings.

Complicating this debate is that the major English-language TV networks and their affiliate stations have long resisted changes in audience surveys that might boost Univision’s or Telemundo’s ratings--at the expense of English-language broadcasters. The tension illustrates the tug of war over Nielsen’s ratings, which help steer an estimated $58 billion a year in national and local TV advertising.

“The English-language networks have more to lose than anyone else,” said Paul Casanova, president of Irvine-based advertising firm Casanova Pendrill, which specializes in Spanish-language media.

Nationwide, Spanish-language programs garner just 5% of the overall TV audience, according to Nielsen, and that translates into about $1.8 billion a year in advertising, or 3% of the market.

Separate Survey Set Up for Latino Preferences

Developing an accurate picture of Latino TV viewing has been a sensitive issue since the late 1980s, when Univision and Telemundo first approached Nielsen because it didn’t measure any Spanish- language TV viewers. At the time, Latinos made up less than 10% of the U.S. population, compared with about 14% today.

So a decade ago, Nielsen created a separate audience survey of Latino homes to rate national and local Spanish-language programming. This is in addition to Nielsen’s national and local-market surveys that primarily track English-language programming, although some Latinos are included in these audience panels.

But determining TV viewership by language is no easy task, given that two-thirds of Latinos in the U.S. understand English and Spanish, according to market researcher Strategy Research Corp. in Miami.

As a result, not all Latinos are glued to Univision or Telemundo. Latinos who speak or understand English still are more likely to watch English-language shows. In November, “Friends” and “ER” on General Electric Co.’s NBC were the top-rated shows for adults in Los Angeles, while the highest-rated Spanish-language show was Univision’s teenage soap opera “Amigas y Rivales” (Friends and Rivals), which ranked ninth. In this survey, of the 50 top-rated shows, only four were Spanish-language programs.

“We’re the only people who are working on independent [TV] estimates based on language,” said Nielsen’s Donato. “There are no government statistics that the television community can use.”

Increasing Spanish Speakers in Surveys

Facing pressure from Univision and Telemundo, Nielsen in its TV surveys has boosted the number of households where Spanish is the dominant language, particularly in Southern California. Today, 15.1% of Nielsen’s local survey group is Spanish-language dominant, up from 10.7% five years ago. But Nielsen acknowledges that the numbers still fall short of its target of 17.5%.

Change comes slowly.

For more than two years, Nielsen has been debating whether its fieldworkers trying to recruit families in Latino neighborhoods should begin a conversation with “Hola” instead of “Hello.” Some English-language TV executives complain that using “Hola” could unintentionally put off English speakers who then would be less inclined to participate and thereby cut the ratings of English-language shows.

Next week, Nielsen plans to unveil the results of its study that should resolve the debate over which language should be used in greetings. The study also will decide whether to include children in TV ratings samples, a decision that could boost ratings for some English-language shows because studies have shown that Latino children watch more TV in English.

Univision still is pushing Nielsen to give more weight to Spanish speakers in the local-market ratings surveys.

But critics said weighting the TV viewership sample toward one demographic group isn’t the answer.

“We have clients in the English-language media who have some legitimate questions on how we are developing those language- universe estimates,” said Doug Darfield, Nielsen’s director of Hispanic services.

One of Nielsen’s problems, industry experts said, is that it tries to measure the preferences of Spanish-language TV viewers with a separate panel of about 800 households and relies on a decades-old combination of handwritten diaries and TV set-top meters.

“It’s really 1950s thinking--that this is a separate audience that has to be treated separately,” said Jack Myers, publisher of the Jack Myers Report, a media newsletter in New York. “The Hispanic audience is integrating into every aspect of American life, with the exception of advertising buying.”

NBC research chief Alan Wurtzel said: “It’s really a problem when you wind up having lots of different sample panels. It would be valuable in the long term to have [one] large-enough panel to measure all TV viewed.”