FCC Fine for Univision reveals bigger Industry & Social Issues.

According to recent reports, Univision agreed to pay a $24 Million fine by the FCC for failing to meet the 3 hours weekly minimum of Kid Friendly Educational Programs that broadcasters are required to air.

According to these reports, Univision passed off some of their many, imported South American tele-novelas as “Educational and Kid Friendly” from 2004 to 2006. When the FCC rejected this claim, Univision agreed to the record fine (the previous record was $9 Million) so that they could begin the transfer of their stations’ licenses to a new buyer (who paid over $13 Billion).

Reading this report brought back memories from when I was working at Univision (1997-2000) as a sales executive and how we’d pitch advertisers the tele-novelas and Sabado Gigante (“Big Saturday” – a quirky, throwback variety show taped in Miami), to advertisers as family-friendly programming.

A typical pitch often featured a bunch of Univision “gringos” (myself included) in a room talking to another bunch of ad agency or client “gringos” about how Hispanics, from kids to grandma and everyone in-between, each and every Saturday like clockwork, stopped what they were doing and gathered around the one TV set and watched three straight hours of Sabado Gigante’s “family entertainment.”

The advertisers ate it up! We conjured up images of 1950s Americana when the whole family gathered to watch primetime entertainment featuring old-school, not-so-subtle product pitches in the show (a.k.a. “Product Integration”).

However, we failed to mention that Sabado Gigante regularly featured scantily clad girls, thong bikinis and hot “mami” or “papi” contests. We never mentioned it, the advertisers never asked and most certainly never actually watched the programming.

And why should advertisers doubt that what Univision sales reps were saying was true? After all, we produced Nielsen Research that showed that almost all Hispanics watch Spanish language TV.

Turns out the thong contests weren’t the only things we failed to mention. We never mentioned that Nielsen’s research doesn’t include a sampling of U.S. born Latinos (over 60% of U.S. Latinos who do not tend to watch Spanish TV) or that other research (1999 Tomas Rivera) indicated that only 20% of Spanish TV’s audience were U.S. born Latinos?

“It just complicates things and confuses people” say some in the Hispanic marketing and media world. “Why do you want to take money from Spanish language TV?” ask others.

Whatever happened to telling advertisers the facts? Letting research be research and let the chips fall where they may?

By allowing this injustice to occur we seem to be saying its ok to “conveniently forget the facts” if you can find research that justifies your business model, you can just use that. If that research doesn’t exist, you can do what Spanish TV did and create it by collaborating with research companies such as Nielsen Media Research, and pay them big time!

Spanish TV flies so far under the radar that most people never notice (remember not so long ago when Spanish TV was replete with “cancer cures” and “hard liquor” ads that you’d NEVER see on general market TV?) and government agencies can all be lobbied and bought off with the kind of big money Spanish TV is now raking in. What took the FCC so long to figure out that tele-novelas are NOT educational?

Sales are all about accentuating the positive and downplaying the negative right? It’s not like we lied, we just didn’t tell the whole story. The result not only kept advertisers in the dark but as evidenced by the FCC fine, resulted in few if any educational programming for young, Latinos.

According to Nielsen Media Research “The George Lopez Show”, one of the few shows featuring an almost all Latino cast and crew, allegedly has more African-American viewers than Hispanic viewers. Also, according to Nielsen, ABC’s wildly popular “Ugly Betty”, (takes inspiration from a bonafide Spanish language novella “Betty La Fea”) has less than stellar ratings among Latino viewers when compared to non Latino viewers. The Super Bowl takes second place to soccer telecasts on Spanish TV and the Latin Grammy telecast tripled its audience when it moved from CBS to Univision a few years back.

Yeah! Right! Who actually believes that non-sense when only 20% of U.S. born Latinos (over 25 million) EVER watch Spanish TV?

So who is hurt by this misrepresentation of Hispanic TV viewing? As evidenced by the FCC fine, Hispanic kids and U.S.-born Latinos mostly. Univision has never been overly concerned about actually serving the entire Hispanic marketplace, so long as they can get away with taking the low hanging fruit (non U.S. born Latino adults, less than 40% of the market) and still get virtually all the TV ad dollars (Spanish TV gets over 90% of Hispanic TV ad dollars).

Univision has been loathe to invest in local or national original programming, preferring to buy cheap programming (most imported from South America for pennies on the dollar), minimizing their risk, maximizing their profits and never mentioning to advertisers the fact that most young U.S. Latinos are born in the U.S. (median age of 18), speak English and would like to watch something relevant to their lives (as evidenced by U.S.-born Latino’s snubbing of Spanish TV fare- Tomas Rivera 1999, Pew Hispanic Center, etc).

Even in this era of media fragmentation and choice, the power of broadcast television is second to none. For U.S. Hispanics it is even more powerful, because there is still scarce choice out there for them, despite their growth and power as a consumer group. U.S. born Latinos (25 million) remain ignored and stereotyped on mainstream media and completely left out of the Spanish TV equation.

The smoking gun for this imbalance is Spanish TV’s collaboration with Nielsen Media Research, which created a flawed ratings methodology over 15 years ago that excludes sampling for U.S. born Latinos and sends the misleading message to TV execs and marketers that its a waste of time to develop programs for U.S. Latinos in English, because they all just watch Spanish TV.

Latino Kids are left with steamy, imported tele-novelas or inappropriate Spanish TV programming as their supposed educational Television fare. The FCC reaps a $24 Million payday for our government while Univision gets a pass on the rules that every other broadcaster must follow. Everybody is happy, except the viewers who are left out and the advertisers who are misled.

I propose that a portion of the $24 Million dollar fine be directed by the FCC to cover the costs of Nielsen finally doing the right thing and changing their sampling methodology to include the correct percentage of U.S. born Latinos (60%) in their samples.

The result of this change would probably lead to the new Univision owners’ to voluntarily creating legitimate educational and informational programming (maybe even some in English!) and a much more vibrant Hispanic media and marketing business with TV programs in English and Spanish for both viewers and marketers to choose from.

I won’t hold my breath, but last I checked this is still the United States of America, and I am still allowed to dream aren’t I?

By Robert G. Rose

Robert Rose is CEO of AIM Tell-A-Vision Group (a division of Artist and Idea Management, Ltd.) and American Latino TV, LLC and founder of Help! Change TV. The opinions expressed are those of the author alone, and not of the companies with which he is affiliated.

Note:

HispanicAd.com is a platform to our Industry, we published this article because we believe there is a need for all voices in our Industry to heard. By publishing this article we do not take sides or agree with the statements made in this article. We also offer the opportunity for counter arguments on this issue at any given time. This article appears as another element that will help in the debate on how to grow our Industry in the future.