SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – The passion of viewers alone will not close a deal as marketers seek business outcomes from their media partners, according to Richard Bertodatti, svp of multimedia and advanced ad sales at TelevisaUnivision.
Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Beet Retreat San Juan, Bertodatti said the Hispanic audience may be deeply engaged with music, sports, news and micro dramas, but advertisers still want proof that all that enthusiasm leads to results.
“The biggest opportunity to turn TelevisaUnivision’s audience and its passion into measurable outcomes is… there’s a litany of ways,” Bertodatti said.
To bridge that gap, the company leans on traditional measurement tools along with third-party partners. But Bertodatti admitted that isn’t enough.
“We have to go the extra step… of verifying and validating those results,” he said, noting that Hispanic audiences are often “underrepresented by a lot of data sets by up to 50%.”
In other words, if the data says the audience is small, the data might just be wrong.
Hispanic audiences are no longer a side dish
If advertisers still think of Hispanic audiences as a niche buy tucked into a multicultural budget, Bertodatti suggests updating that mental model.
“The perspective of TelevisaUnivision and the audience that it brings to the table has definitely changed over the last five years,” he said. What used to be treated as a distinct segment “over here” is now central to general market strategy.
Cultural influence has gone mainstream, whether through music stars on the Super Bowl stage or the broader spread of Hispanic culture across the U.S. Bertodatti stopped short of calling it a sudden crossover, but the implication was clear. The audience didn’t move. The industry did.
“This audience is now far more relevant in general market executions,” he said, adding that brands are finally catching up to what the census and pop culture have been signaling for years.
Live content is the ultimate attention magnet
For brands chasing attention, TelevisaUnivision is leaning heavily into live programming. And not just a little.
“We have the most live programming of any platform out there,” Bertodatti said, citing a steady stream of sports, music events and original content that runs year-round.
The trick is not just capturing attention in the moment, but extending it. Advertisers can activate campaigns across linear TV, streaming, social, audio and even on-the-ground experiences.
“We are harnessing intent and engagement by offering multi-platform capabilities,” he said, explaining that brands can avoid the dreaded “one and done” problem of live events and instead stretch engagement across multiple touchpoints.
Translation: your ad doesn’t have to disappear the second the final whistle blows.
From premium video to actual purchases
Premium video has long been associated with brand building, not immediate sales. Bertodatti is on a mission to change that perception.
“Commerce and outcome-based executions have been around for a while,” he said, but TelevisaUnivision is connecting the dots more directly between exposure and purchase.
Through partnerships with retail media players like Walmart Connect and others, campaigns can now be tracked down to whether someone actually bought a product. “We can pretty much work with any and all partners… and then follow that path down to actually point of sale,” he said.
Yes, even your beautifully produced video ad now has to answer the question: did anyone buy anything?
Fixing the data problem, one household at a time
Measurement remains the industry’s favorite headache, and Bertodatti didn’t pretend otherwise. Instead, TelevisaUnivision built its own solution.
“Measurement is incredibly important at TelevisaUnivision,” he said. After recognizing major gaps in existing data, the company partnered with TransUnion and Truthset to build a household identity graph covering “99%-plus of the U.S. Hispanic households.”
That effort aims to correct what he called “data infidelity” across linear and streaming environments. The goal is simple: prove the audience exists and performs.
“It is. It’s just not being measured properly yet,” Bertodatti said.
For advertisers still squinting at spreadsheets and wondering where the audience went, the answer may be hiding in plain sight.
