‘Hispanic Market Should Be Foundation in Marketing Plans’: Univision’s Donna Speciale

‘Hispanic Market Should Be Foundation in Marketing Plans’: Univision’s Donna Speciale

Advertisers seeking to reach a high-growth consumer group must have a strategy for the Hispanic market.

With Generation Z emerging as the most multiethnic group in U.S. history and the Hispanic population forecast to expand 20% to 74.8 million people this decade, marketers can't ignore a huge market with growing spending power.

"The Hispanic market should be a foundation in your marketing plan.

It is a business imperative," Donna Speciale, president of sales and marketing at Univision, said in this interview with Beet.TV.

"You're only going to be able to grow your business if you include it." Speciale is a seasoned veteran of the media and marketing industries, having led advertising sales at WarnerMedia and overseen investment, activation and agency operations at MediaVest Worldwide.

She joined Univision in January amid the American Spanish-language broadcaster's expansion into streaming media.

"Since I've been here, I've been doing some due diligence and looking a lot at the advertiser base," she said.

She found that more than 1,900 brands run ads in English, while only 400 do so in Spanish — and segments like pharmaceuticals were underrepresented.

"That was shocking to me, given the inequities in what is happening with our healthcare," Speciale said.

"I'm working really hard to get to those clients, pharma specifically, and trying to educate them on why our Hispanic audience is so important, because we're 60 million people and growing." As big as the Hispanic market is, marketers shouldn't look at it as a uniform group of consumers, Speciale said.

She sees opportunities for more granular audience segmentation based on other attributes including behavior.

"We have a really big segment of Afro-Latinos, we have LGBTQ — then you dive into behaviorals with auto intenders and stuff like that," she said.

"You can dissect the Hispanic audience just like you do segments within English-language.

Audience targeting levels the playing field." As more Hispanic consumers watch video on connected devices like smart TVs and mobile phones, Univision is now rolling out Prende TV as its ad-based video-on-demand (AVOD) service.

Univision last month bought Spanish-language streaming service VIX to round out its digital  offering.

"We will be the only destination for streaming for Spanish-language in the country," Speciale said.

"That is a powerful statement to say." As one of the architects of OpenAP, a collaboration among major media companies to define audience categories in a more uniform way for audience-based ad buys, Speciale is well familiar with advanced TV.

"We will be building our audience capabilities.

They will be ready for this upfront to be diving into, and cross-platform will be part of that initiative," she said.