-By John Consoli, Mediaweek

NEW YORK Univision Communications today unveiled a new research tool, developed in conjunction with Nielsen, that it plans to use in this year's upfront to sell sponsors on the benefits of advertising on its Hispanic broadcast network, Univision.

Called the Nielsen Homescan Fusion Project, data from the new service, which will be made available to all clients, is particularly beneficial in showing how spending ad dollars on Hispanic TV can improve an advertiser's return on investment.

"We are hoping this will be a tool to bring new advertisers in," said David Lawenda, president of advertising sales and marketing at Univision Communications. "For any brand sitting on the fence or on the sidelines, this is the silver bullet. There is a misperception that if advertisers want to reach younger American-born Hispanics, they can do it best through English-language television. This research tool can prove that this is not true -- that the best way to reach the Hispanics they want to target is through Hispanic television."

This fusion service was developed when Ceril Shagrin, evp, corporate research, Univision Communications, talked to Jon Mandel, CEO of NielsenConnect, about merging the data gathered by Nielsen Homescan and Nielsen Media Research. Homescan's panels of consumers in various cities log in each purchase they make via the bar codes on a home scanner. This product-specific purchasing data can then be broken out by person and demographics. Nielsen Media Research people meter TV viewing data in that same market can also be gathered by demographics. Under the fusion service, it can then be matched with people of similar demographics in that market based on their TV viewing patterns. Advertisers can then see what TV audience can best be used to reach the viewers they want their product to target, and if their current marketing plan is getting a good or bad return on investment.

For the coming upfront, Univision will use fusion data only from Los Angeles, because it is the only market in which Nielsen Homescan has a representative number of Hispanics on its panel. But Shagrin said the Los Angeles market data could be used to sell advertising nationally because the panel's sample reflects the Hispanic population nationally.

She said Nielsen is expanding Hispanic representation on its Homescan panels in other markets, and that data from the top 20 markets will be available for use by January.

In one example of fusion data that Univision released, an unidentified cola targeting heavy users of its product found 39 percent of those consumers were Spanish-speaking-dominant Hispanics, but only a fraction of the brand's ad budget was being spent targeting that audience.

"Nielsen Connect and Univision have developed a tool that brings marketers and video content providers to the intersection of advertising and product sales," Mandel said. "I am very excited that with our mutual commitment Univision and Nielsen will continue to move further away from using the mere proxies for consumers and viewers that have been used in the past to using real-world measures of making the cash register ring."

Nielsen is also working on fusing its American Moviegoing Study with its national TV ratings sample. Shagrin said this would show that Hispanics are prime targets for movie studios because they see movies sooner, attend movies as an entire family and are less likely to complain about price.

Adweek, like NielsenConnect, is part of the Nielsen Co.