Univision is planning to build its addressable advertising capabilities, starting with beta tests with Vizio and Dish this year.
More partners will be brought on next year, said Donna Speciale, president of advertising sales and marketing at Univision, the big Spanish-language programmer. By the end of 2022, the industry should be in a position where addressable advertising should be scalable and provide the kind of precision marketers need.
“Since I’ve been here we’ve been increasing our focus in the audience targeting space, and addressable is part of that,” Speciale said.
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Univision earlier announced being involved in the beta testing of Nielsen’s addressable technology, since sold to Roku. It also joined Project OAR, a group led by Vizio that looks to set standards for addressable advertising.
Speciale said Univision is building out a Hispanic audience graph. Following that it will be able to create audience segments.
“We’ve been talking to a lot of clients on who wants to do some testing with us within different audience segments,” Speciale said. “A lot of clients are talking about it It’s not in a scalable set yet. So it really is smart for us to do slow betas to make sure we can get it right.”
A former top media buyer and head of ad sales for Turner before Time Warner was acquired by AT&T, Speciale joined Univision in January.
When she arrived, she said her goal was to increase the number of marketers advertising to Hispanic consumers in Spanish on Univision. At that point, of 1,900 English language TV advertisers, only 400 were advertising in Spanish.
“I’m proud to say that literally since the beginning of the year we now have over 80 new brands that have come on,” she said.
“A lot of clients believe that they can reach the U.S. Hispanic audience in English language. And you can reach some, but the connection doesn’t resonate. You really need to be in culture and in language for your brand to really pop.”
