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Top 10 Innovative Brands 2013: #8 Univision

The media company built a new event team in its 50th year.

Last year Univision made a splash with its presentation to media buyers during Upfront Week.
Last year Univision made a splash with its presentation to media buyers during Upfront Week.
Photo: Courtesy of Univision Communications

Univision is a 50-year-old company whose top three channels—Univision Network, UniMas, and Galavisión—together nab a 73 percent market share among the adult 18 to 49 Spanish-language primetime TV audience, making it the most-watched Spanish-language broadcast TV network in the United States. But until 2012, it had no dedicated event department.

Last spring, C.E.O. Randy Falco hired Rachel Gross as senior vice president of event marketing to head up the new team of four. By the end of the year,  six dedicated staffers were managing a budget of $10 million. “There was no centralized budget, no way for people to request a meeting,” Gross says. “We came in like Men in Black with a lot of excitement about contributing to this awesome brand with incredible brand equity.”

It’s an important time for a ­strategic event program; Univision owns the Spanish-language media rights to cover the 2014 World Cup from Rio de Janeiro.

So Gross’s group created the “Road to the World Cup,” a program to educate marketers and advertising professionals on the tournament. An event in New York brought together marketers, agency pros, sports league executives, and journalists, as well as former soccer players, to discuss the games and players to watch, plus the opportunities the World Cup brings to marketers looking to reach Hispanics.

Video used at the event was given to the sales team to use on sales calls. “An event doesn’t just end at 9 p.m.,” Gross says. “[In this case, we’re continuing to use the content] to educate people on making those buys and why they’re important to brands.”

Further, 2012 marked the 50th year of popular variety show Sabado ­Gigante, and the event team rolled out a program to honor the milestone, timed with Hispanic Heritage Month in the fall. In addition to the live show taped with a studio audience and red carpet out front, the initiative included a month of other events, such as a Q&A with host Mario Kreutzberger (aka “Don Francisco”) at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, as well as a gala in Miami.

“Of course we wanted to make sure we have great advertisers and sponsors, but we were looking at opportunities to be very experiential, to interact with fans, to have great content,” Gross says. “U.S. Hispanics really over-index on sports, news, and music—these are passion points, and we deliver on those hand over fist. We’re taking events into people’s worlds. You can no longer offer advertisers one solution only.”

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