Sunday, March 16, 2008
Ignorance like a gun in a hand...
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Producer battles Nielsens over missing Latinos
By Simon Houpt /
12-11-06
Hispanics are hot! Shakira and her hips shimmy up the charts. Mexican directors Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (
del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) are
advertising-industry magazine these days without hearing about the importance of the exploding Latino market.
Not that you’d know it by watching
Eva Longoria’s catty sexpot on Desperate Housewives, there are woefully few Hispanic leading men and women on network TV. The George Lopez Show (currently on hiatus on ABC)
illustrates the dearth: As if recognizing its role in U.S. culture as The Token Hispanic Show, its web page points viewers to sites about Hispanic art, culture and business opportunities.
“The only time they put Latinos on TV is when they’re on the news, or there’s an immigration debate,” Robert Rose told me the other day. Rose is a 39-year-old businessman,
a former employee of the wealthy Spanish-language TV network Univision, who now operates out of a cramped and ramshackle office in an unglamorous part of town.
Last week, sitting beneath a portrait of Che Guevara, Rose outlined the guerrilla campaign that he and a handful of colleagues have started to try to change the face of
The problem, he says, is simple: Nielsen Media Research, the ratings company, doesn’t include enough U.S.-born Latino viewers in its audience sample. (About 60 per cent of U.S. Latinos are native-born.)
By including too many foreign born Latino viewers who don’t speak English, he believes Nielsen is giving the mistaken impression that Hispanics watch only Spanish-language TV.
“It leads to the marginalization of Latinos on TV, which leads to the marginalization of Latinos in society,” he said. It also suggests the 40 million Hispanics aren’t interested in assimilating, which runs
directly counter to most of the available social, economic and political data.
Last month, Rose kicked off his low-budget effort to pressure Nielsen, placing local radio promos and buying about 100 ads on the backs of buses that feature a
striking image: a woman with a piece of duct tape over her mouth, on which has been scrawled the word “Nielsen.”
The campaign calls on viewers to visit a website, HelpChangeTV.com, where they can sign a petition calling for a change in the viewing sample.
Nielsen currently tries to ensure its Hispanic sample matches the language preferences of the wider U.S. Hispanic population.
(The sample is sliced into five categories, ranging from Spanish Only to English Only.) It ignores nativity, or place of birth.
But Rose argues nativity is far more important in determining viewing habits. His case is intuitively true: How many second generation immigrants do you know,
even those who still speak their mother tongue in the home, who spurn the tacky bazaar of American pop culture?
Nielsen, which is already under attack from the TV industry for failing to adapt to new viewing technologies, has shot back with a volley of arguments, none of which are very convincing.
But if you look at the numbers, something seems severely out of whack. Take Ugly Betty. Despite heavy promotion in Hispanic communities that trumpeted them show’s
South American origins and its executive producer and occasional star Salma Hayek, Nielsen concluded that the show’s early episodes performed dismally among Hispanics,
drawing only about 768,000 out of a total audience of about 16 million. (That is, less than 2 per cent of Hispanics tuned in versus about 5 per cent of the general population.)
“A Latin-themed show did worse among Hispanics than it did among everybody else?” asked Rose. “That math just doesn’t add up.
“Think of how much bigger a hit it would be if they accurately monitored Hispanics,” Rose continued. “Think about the implications if ABC looked at
their numbers and said: ‘You know what, 25 per cent of our viewership for this show are Hispanics and it’s a hit, let’s get some more shows featuring Latino characters.’
“All of a sudden viewers would see that Latinos aren’t these evil people crossing the border, taking their jobs and denigrating the culture by only speaking Spanish.
They see that Latinos are doctors, lawyers, they’re integrated into our society.”
Nielsen understandably doesn’t want to rock the boat. Univision is the company’s largest Spanish language client. Nielsen research consistently finds the 10 most popular
Spanish-language shows are on Univision, which naturally wouldn’t be interested in seeing data suggesting their viewership is actually sharply lower. And the Spanish-language
ad agencies have little incentive to tell their clients they’ve helped facilitate a multibillion-dollar sham.
There’s a kicker, though: Rose is in it for the money, too. His company, AIM Tell-A-Vision, produces and syndicates English-language TV entertainment
magazines that celebrate Hispanic culture, with titles like American Latino TV and LatiNation.
If he can prove his viewing numbers are higher than the ratings indicate, he could be a rich man. So he’s trying to do well by doing good.
But that doesn’t negate his argument.
“There’s been an explosion of Latin film, there was an explosion in Latin music. No explosion in Latin TV? I wonder why?
What’s the one thing Latin TV has that those other two don’t have?” Rose asked rhetorically. “The Nielsen ratings service and a flawed methodology.”
On Thursday, I was on the line with a Nielsen spokesperson when I mentioned that I’d heard the company, under public pressure at a TV convention last January,
had promised to study the issue and get back to Rose by the summer. But there had been no follow-up.
The spokesperson excused himself and said he’d get back to me.
I’m still waiting for his call.
By
Simon Houpt
