Donna Speciale de Univision Communications
Donna Speciale, president of Advertising Sales & Marketing at TelevisaUnivision and a member of the Hispanic Marketing Council (HMC) board of directors, said with regard to the measuring and analysis of multicultural audiences that “the data is not all there and we all know that what we have is defective.” “Our clients and all of you take advertising decisions based on erroneous data. So I believe that this is the year when everyone will up the pressure,” said Speciale, who moderated the first meeting of the HMC Summit, held with the participation of Kirk McDonald, CEO of GroupM; Dave Penski, CEO of Publicis Media; Doug Rozen, CEO of dentsu Media; and Ralph Pardo, CEO of Omnicom Media Group.“I want to make this a discussion of measurement. We’ve already talked about that, but where we can make the biggest difference, the biggest change is from the viewpoint of measurement,” Penski said, adding that he thinks statistics present a “huge challenge” when it comes to convincing brands and companies to invest in the multicultural market. But of course in this case, “one size fits all” does not exist. Penski noted that most of his clients count on statistics when doing special business, particularly when making investments in the multicultural segment. “We want to see statistics in order to take decisions, and we need to have the research, impartial research and a large enough panel to take those decisions,” he said.“How do we get the best data about multicultural audiences from a panel of households? How can we improve what the language means to those panels? We already know that those panels are, I’m sorry to say, erratic from the start,” Rozen said with reference to Penski’s view. He explained that delving deep into what these key audiences say comes up against too many stumbling blocks to operate on the scale required. “Up to now, this has made it hard to rationally obtain the statistics that would justify using the results we have to go forward.” McDonald agreed with most of the panelists that the measuring tools available to the industry need improvement. “Closing the gap between our predictions and what will actually happen in our advance toward the future is what we battle against most of the time – but you can’t manage what you can’t measure,” he said. Pardo also considers that measurement data must be looked at through a very sharp lens. “We realize that various audiences are under-represented in many statistical studies across the industry. He said that in GroupM what they have done is a curatorship at the level of a census panel. “In fact, we take an excessive sample of multicultural audiences, which include Hispanics, Blacks, Asiatics, etc., to make sure we can begin to fill the empty spaces.” He insisted his focus is on finding solutions. “I believe that as good partners, we support all the efforts the industry is making as a whole, but we are also focused on how to help create solutions for our clients, because, as we all know, growth from a business perspective, whatever the business, would probably lead to an increased multicultural segment within a more extensive mix of businesses,” Pardo said.For Speciale, the under-representation in population measurement is key. “Everyone in the industry is focused on transparency and whether the statistics are trustworthy and what the figures are, but no one looks to see nor asks whether the data and the measurement methods take a holistic view of population segments.” She explained that the HMC is also constructing its own graphics of households, because it sees that the currency used to evaluate the data do not now represent any of the areas related to the property of minorities. “And that is a big problem because we can’t start off with a new measurement currency and be mistaken once again,” she said.
