2022’s Super Bowl Sunday was the first time in history that the big game was televised on a Spanish-language broadcast network in the United States. How will outlets using sports to drive Hispanic audiences keep this momentum, and what does this mean for overall brand marketing?
Ray Warren, president of Telemundo Deportes, and the NFL’s Amanda Herald, vp of marketing strategy, insights and planning, sat down at Adweek’s Elevate: Hispanic TV Summit to discuss what marketing techniques were used to attract the Hispanic audience to tune in and what this means for the future of football.
The crossroads of football y fútbol
Warren oversaw the recent coverage of his network’s first Super Bowl telecast. He said Telemundo Deportes helped draw viewers in through the similarities between American football and the Hispanic audience’s beloved soccer, or fútbol.
“You can’t just put a game on and hope,” he said. “You really have to create the demand. So, the World Cup inside of the Super Bowl blended the two together and showed all of the assets we have at NBCUniversal and how we can use all of those assets inside the Super Bowl inside the World Cup and connect those two audiences. Wherever the Hispanic audience is, we want to be there for them, and they are involved in it.”
Lessons learned from a new arena
Herald said through their deep partnership, the NFL and NBCUniversal are mutually incentivized to continue growing the sport of football.
“And that means growing our fanbase as well as deepening the engagement of our very passionate set of football fans — and that includes a large set of Latino fans,” she said. “We have 31 million NFL Latino fans in the U.S., the biggest of any major sport. So, we’ve been working together to figure out how to tap into and super-serve that passionate fanbase while growing the footprint of access to games in Spanish over time.”
After an impressive kickoff, the future of football at Telemundo is bright.
“The other thing we really want to work on is speaking to the fans with our fútbol,” Warren said. “We have Chivas de Guadalajara and Premier League every week. We’re trying harder to integrate those two sports on game day. We believe that more people who watch it on Telemundo will come watch it on Universo. We’re going to work to make the Universo games bigger, continue to add NFL games on Telemundo, and hope we can find that point where we can put a lot more NFL games on Telemundo.”
Acting on the growth now
The duo agrees that it’s time for brands to push their organizations not just to think about Latinos as “future growth” but act with urgency now by tapping into clear, massive points of passion.
“We often talk about the Latino opportunity as important because of the growth — and it is. But, it’s important to know that it’s already grown,” Herald said. “The size and scale are already here. So, it’s not just about starting to invest today or tomorrow. It’s about finding opportunities to have that real reach, scale, and relevancy with the audience today. So, we think about our partners and making sure we’re aligned with the right partners to do that. While we are big, and that’s great, we want to keep growing and grow now.”
