Univision

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By JASON BOOTH

Staff Reporter

For most U.S. television broadcasters, viewer response to the World Cup soccer tournament has been as disappointing as the U.S. team’s performance at the event.

Despite high hopes that soccer was finally winning the hearts of American sports fans, ratings for the games aired so far are down sharply from the last World Cup four years ago.

The one exception is the Spanish-language broadcasts from Los Angeles-based Univision Communications Inc., which are enjoying strong viewership even though most games are being aired during the week in the morning and early afternoon.

“We are very happy with the World Cup,” said Henry Cisneros, Univision’s president and chief operating officer. “We have met or exceeded all of our expectations.”

Of course, those expectations were lower for this World Cup than they were four years ago. Even Univision’s ratings are slightly lower than they were for the 1994 tournament, despite the fact that the number of Spanish-speaking households tuning in to the event has increased somewhat. That’s because ratings figures are based on the percentage of total TV households tuning in to a given show, and the number of Spanish-speaking households is significantly higher today than four years ago because of increased immigration from Latin America.

There are a variety of reasons for the across-the-board decline in U.S. viewership of the World Cup. In 1994, the games were held in the United States, allowing networks to broadcast during prime-time hours. Organizers also attempted to schedule games that would appeal directly to ethnic groups in certain cities. Games involving Latin and South American teams, for example, were played in Los Angeles and Miami, while the Italians and Irish played in New York and the Poles and Dutch played in Chicago.

And the simple fact that an international sports drama was being played out in the United States attracted the interest of American viewers.

Optimism generated by the success of the 1994 tournament prompted Walt Disney Co. to pay $22 million for the rights to broadcast each of this summer’s 64 games on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2.

The results, however, have been disappointing, with TV audiences for the games down as much as 40 percent, according to industry sources.

“I’d be hard pressed to see how they got their money back on this one. The ratings are just not there,” said Bill Croasdale, president of national broadcasting for Western International Media Group. in Century City.

Meanwhile, Univision stands to make a profit on the $25 million it paid to air the World Cup in Spanish, according to Cisneros, who took the Univision job after resigning as President Clinton’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

While ratings this year are down slightly from 1994, Cisneros said Univision is still attracting enough viewers to meet or exceed the ratings levels it promised its advertisers. And the success of the broadcasts helps draw more mainstream advertisers to the Spanish-language network, which in turn may lead to further ad buys down the road.

So far, Univision’s ratings for the World Cup have averaged a Spanish-language Nielsen rating of 10, meaning that 10 percent of Spanish-speaking households were watching the broadcast. (Nielsen treats Spanish-speaking TV households as a different universe from its mainstream sample.) That compares to an average rating of 11.9 for the entire 1994 tournament. But with the critical final rounds of the tournament still to be played, mostly on weekends, ratings should continue to rise.

During the first two weeks of the tournament, the highest ratings for Univision were generated by games involving Mexico. Ratings for the four games in which Mexico competed averaged 17.7 not bad considering that most were played on weekdays, with one starting at 7 a.m.

The bad news for Univision is that Mexico was eliminated from the tournament in a closely fought game with Germany on June 29, a game that generated a rating of 19.5 nationally for Univision, and a whopping 44 rating for Univision’s Los Angeles station KMEX-TV Channel 34. By comparison, the Super Bowl typically wins a mainstream Nielsen rating of around 40.

“We can only grimace when we think that if they had won that game, Mexico would have played their next game on the Fourth of July,” said Univision’s Cisneros.

Univision has a distinct advantage when it comes to generating strong ratings from the World Cup in that its core audience, Spanish-speaking Americans with ties to Latin and South America, already are dedicated soccer fans.

The English-language channels, on the other hand, have the difficult job of trying to sell the World Cup to a general U.S. population that for decades has shown little interest in the sport.

And while ESPN and ABC are broadcasting to a huge national audience, the stations that Univision owns and operates target specific Spanish-speaking audiences in select cities.

“When you advertise on Univision, you get a very hard-core ethnic market,” said Croasdale. “It’s that ethnicity that attracts advertisers. That’s why Univision has done so well.”

Univision’s ability to pinpoint the Latino community has not been ignored by advertisers, with major corporations such as Anheuser-Busch Cos., Honda Motor Co. and McDonald’s Corp. running ads throughout the tournament.

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