DOES THE LATINO MARKET AGREE THEY HAVE RECEIVED SPECIAL TREATMENT

I've noticed over the past year or so (since the immigration debate became a big media topic) a SLIGHT increase in negative email directed at Latinos via Help! Change TV.

The emails range from people who don't bother to check out what Help! Change TV is really about (we don't hold a position in the immigration debate) to just plain ignorance about Latinos in general.

I am happy to say that some who've emailed negative comments but included legitimate email addresses, we were able to have a constructive dialogue with. In a couple of cases it was very refreshing to have an honest exchange of ideas that I THINK resulted in a better understanding of what Help! Change TV's goals are. Everyone, regardless of their ethnicity, at some point in their life, has felt marginalized, misunderstood or just plain left out, I promise you. And I think most people, especially in today's environment, can sense when a multi-billion dollar corporation is unwilling to "build a better mousetrap" when there is a lack of incentive (or in this case competition).

Alas, but there are others, who hide behind the anonymity of the Internet with fake email addresses and seem to be happy to spew their opinion, right or wrong without sticking around long enough to hear the other side or consider the consequences of their beliefs.

Irregardless, I am happy to say that 95% or more of the thousands of emails we've received have been positive, supportive and for that we thank you.

It really helps to hear the encouraging words and that is why we continue the fight for change. We hope to be releasing these comments very soon as we near our third year of no change from Nielsen Media Research in counting U.S. born Latinos fairly in their surveys.

In the meantime, in the interest of full disclosure and maybe to "out" those who have some very strong opinions about the subject of diversity in the U.S. but don't seem to want us to know who they are, I will be posting these "anonymous" emails, for everyone to see.

The following email was sent by someone this past weekend. I sent two email responses but got nothing back, so I'm assuming it was a fake email address.

Here for your viewing pleasure is an email from SOMEONE from SOMEWHERE who believes that because Latinos would simply like to be depicted honestly and accurately on TV, they are asking for special treatment. Life is not fair and yes, all immigrants had to put up with their fair amount of negativity in their day and age.

But that doesn't make it right... and that doesn't mean that Nielsen Media Research can ignore a better research method just because they don't have competition.

The email from this weekend is below:

Via Email
TO: Help! Change TV
FROM: Anonymous

DOES THE LATINO MARKET AGREE THEY HAVE RECEIVED SPECIAL TREATMENT?

compared to any other immigrant group to ever come to America?

Is it fair that just about everything in this country is written in Spanish as well as English? Why not the two languages of China, or Arabic, or any of the languages in Africa, or Japanese? Why not have everything in this country written in English and every other language on earth besides Spanish.

To disagree that Latinos receive special treatment is absolutely ignorant.

Help Change TV? You are joking right?

HELP! CHANGE TV SETS RECORD STRAIGHT ON

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

HELP! CHANGE TV SETS RECORD STRAIGHT ON
NIELSEN’S HISPANIC RATINGS MOVE
Nielsen’s Much Touted Move Leaves U.S. Born Latinos Out of the Mix... Again!

New York, September 4th, 2007 – Help! Change TV responded to Nielsen Media
Research’s recent announcement that it will produce its Hispanic TV ratings through its National People Meter “general market” panel exclusively while abandoning the National Hispanic People it has used since 1992 to track Hispanic television viewing.

“This move still does not address the Nativity issue (Hispanic sampling represented by census data for U.S. born & non U.S. born) in Nielsen’s methodology which unfortunately remains the biggest obstacle to obtaining more accurate TV ratings for all U.S. Latinos,” stated Robert G. Rose, founder of the initiative Help! Change TV (formerly “Change the Sample”).

“With all the hype over Latinos being compared to ‘side by side’ next to the ‘general market,’ the fact remains that TV ratings for U.S. Hispanics will remain inaccurate until Nielsen adjusts their sample based on Nativity, the proven and single most important factor that determines whether Latinos watch TV in Spanish or English,” Rose continues.

Help! Change TV contends that the impact of Nielsen’s erroneous Hispanic ratings on the media and marketing industry is that many advertisers and marketers overspend media budgets on Spanish language television under the assumption they are reaching the majority of U.S. Latinos. In reality these marketers are missing the largest, youngest and fastest growing segment of the U.S. Latino population (U.S. born Latinos), who currently comprise over 65% of all U.S. Latinos and are projected to be over 75% of all U.S. Latinos by 2020 yet rarely if ever watch Spanish language TV.

The impact on viewers’ lives includes an under-representation of Latinos on English- language television resulting in skewed stereotypes that tend to mislead many non-Latinos that Latinos are either recent or “illegal” immigrants who do not speak English and are not a valuable part of mainstream society or are one dimensional stereotypes that have remained prevalent in the media for years (gang-bangers, Latin lovers, drug dealers, prostitutes, maids, gardeners, etc.).

Help! Change TV’s grassroots initiative for change includes www.HelpChangeTV.com
where concerned viewers and those in the industry can go for more information and sign
the petition for change.
# # #
CONTACT:
Margarita Cheng / Tel (212) 627-3192 x18
Email: HCTV@AIMtvgroup.com

New York Times - Too Many Latinos On Primetime TV???

A New York Times Arts and Entertainment Blog recently featured a bit of coverage on our Help! Change TV (HCTV) street team campaign at the television network upfronts.

The writer received a flyer while attending the ABC Upfront and she assumed the campaign was simply protesting the cancellation of The George Lopez Show. It looked like she didn’t bother to visit the web site, or if she did, only on a cursory, surface level.

Had the writer taken the time to go to the site and properly research the issue, she would have seen that Help! Change TV’s specific purpose at the upfront was not simply as protesting the cancellation of one show on English language TV.

HCTV attacks the root and cause of the cancellation, which of course, is money and which is directly tied to ratings and Nielsen Media Research’s role in the under-representation and stereotyping of Latinos on English TV (due to their under sampling of young, U.S. born Latinos or those most likely to watch “The George Lopez Show”).

George Lopez spoke out pretty strongly against the circumstances surrounding the cancellation of his show. I agree with him on many points.

The show was moved several times and was repeatedly up against the American Idol juggernaut. Just as it was headed to syndication, ABC pulled the plug on one of the first shows featuring a mostly Latino cast and crew (since they didn’t produce the show, they don’t get the lucrative dollars that the production studio will from syndication).

Puzzling that no one seems to be mentioning the outrageousness of the recent low ratings of The George Lopez Show, which Nielsen, defying all logic, reported attracts more African American viewers than Hispanic viewers? Preposterous!

If Nielsen were correctly counting U.S. born Latino viewers (those most likely to watch Latino shows in English according to mounds of research), who knows what the George Lopez Show’s ratings would be?

Would it be enough to beat American Idol in head to head competition? Probably not.

Enough to save the show for another season? Possibly.

But the point is “who knows”? Since Nielsen Media Research does not track nativity, they can not tell you how many U.S. born Latinos are watching anything (ah, but they can tell you how many Latinos of Peruvian or Bolivian heritage are watching).

The New York Times reaction came across like so many in today’s corporate media world; simplistic, a bit lazy and elitist (some may argue, a bit like Nielsen Media Research). The writer pointed to the one remaining successful Latino show on network TV (Ugly Betty, also on ABC) and hinted that George Lopez is jealous or “disappointed” at this success. The blog suggested that since Latinos have Spanish language TV, one Latin show on English language, prime-time network TV is fine; as if two or three would simply be too many (despite that fact that in many major markets like Los Angeles, young Latinos are 50% of key demographics).

The writer further suggested that Latinos clamored for Spanish language TV and got it because there “was gold in them there barrios”, clearly ignorant of the fact that Spanish TV has been around for well over 30 years and appeals almost exclusively to immigrant Latinos (and just 17 million or so of the nation’s 42 million documented U.S. Latinos).

The writer doesn’t acknowledge (or know) the fact that U.S. born Latinos make up over 60% of all U.S. Latinos and represent a market that is 25 million strong making up a much larger percentage of the network and advertiser coveted youth demographics (persons aged 18-34 and persons 12-34). This information and more is on the www.HelpChangeTV.com site.

The writer does refer back to the couple or three recent failures by the English language networks to woo Hispanic audiences, suggesting, I suppose that since the networks tried and failed once, they shouldn’t try it again.

Never mind the fact that approximately 80% of all new TV series fail. Are Latin themed shows on English TV somehow supposed to be held to a higher standard of success? The suggestions is that if the networks are generous enough to try a Latin themed show and are not blessed with an immediate, surefire hit (as in the case of “Ugly Betty”), then there is no need to try again for another five or six seasons.

Latinos have “Sabado Gigante” (Big Saturday) or wall to wall nightly novellas and soccer on Spanish language TV! What else can they possibly want?

The writer for the times needs to spend a weekend with AIM Events, promoting our shows. If we could coax her into El Barrio or East LA she’d witness a very different picture.

She’d see many Latinos (not all of them U.S. born by the way) fed up with the limited choices on Spanish TV’s imported (and inexpensive) programming that they eagerly sign the Help! Change TV petition. She’d also see fatigue with the tired, old gardener-maid-drug dealer-prostitute stereotypes and the persistent lack of representation on English language TV.

When we announced the Help! Change TV initiative to pressure Nielsen to change their ratings methodology last fall, I received an urgent call from the New York Times business section, very excited about writing about the effort on this issue. This writer requested an urgent interview with me so he could meet a quick deadline. I dropped everything I was doing to accommodate their deadline.

The following week, when the story never ran, I called the writer back to ask what happened. He was kind enough to return my message but sheepishly admitted the article didn’t run because Nielsen Media Research never called him back to give their side of the story.

How many times have you read a news story where one side of the issue never calls back by deadline and you see the story run anyway? Read your paper today (if you still get your news from the paper); see how many stories fit that description.
After reading the unfortunate New York Times blog after the upfront, I can’t help but wonder if the old “Nielsen didn’t respond by my deadline” excuse really holds water.
I think it just might be another case of an elitist, out of touch newspaper not understanding the very issues they purport to write about or the REAL world around them. The NY Times blog writer said that Help! Change TV was “confusing” yet the Toronto Globe Mail wrote a wonderful piece about it (as did scores of other publications in the U.S.). More recently a student run, neighborhood newspaper “The Bronx Journal” did an excellent job of telling the Help! Change TV story (and they got a call back from Nielsen for comment within one day). The message was not “confusing” to them.

So let me get this straight: One New York Times writer was “confused” and yet another New York Times writer couldn’t get a call back from Nielsen for comment? Howver college students in the Bronx easily grasped the issue and wrote about it and were able to get a call back from Nielsen within a day?

I wonder if the New York Times writers would be happy with just a single network show that didn’t make fun of or misrepresent them in some way. If all TV network shows but that one presented New York Times writers as intellectually lazy, out of touch, media elites. Do you think then they might understand and empathize a little more with U.S. born Latinos?

Then again, maybe that wouldn’t be such an inaccurate stereotype after all.

Link to the NY Times blog below:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/39/
Link to the Bronx News Journal Story Below:
http://aimtvgroup.com/hctv/press/TBJMayEdition2007ENG_11.pdf

http://www.helpchangetv.com/
Robert Rose is CEO of AIM Tell-A-Vision Group (a division of Artist and Idea Management, Ltd.) and American Latino TV, LLC and founder of Help! Change TV as well as Executive Producer of American Latino TV and LatiNation (http://www.aimtvgroup.com/). The opinions expressed are those of the author alone, and not of the companies with which he is affiliated.

Robert Rose Responds to Nielsen’s Comments on Hispanic TV Ratings Issue

NIELSEN’S DARFIELD CONTINUES DISTURBING PATTERN WITH COMMENTS ON HISPANIC RATINGS ISSUE

Nielsen Media Research’s Senior VP of Hispanic Services, Doug Darfield (former Univision executive) was recently quoted in a trade publication responding to why Nielsen doesn’t match census data for Nativity (U.S. born / non U.S. born Latinos) in their Hispanic samples despite overwhelming evidence that Nativity is the major factor determining media consumption among U.S. Hispanics.

The following quote from Darfield was published in MultiChannel News’ Hispanic TV Update, April 4th, 2007:
“It is amusing. The poor fellow [Robert Rose] really does believe there is some sort of conspiracy there. Getting the information from the old sample will show that this in fact is not what was going on and never was going on,” he continues “My own personal belief is that what we’re going to find out is that by controlling on language we are going to have the born inside/born outside number exactly where it needs to be because they are surrogates on some level.”

How is Darfield so sure that Nielsen is not over-sampling foreign born Latinos? The company has gone on record numerous times stating they don’t ask that information. How can a research company, which makes its living on providing cold, hard and supposedly objective research, allow a key executive to make public assumptions without evidence or predict an outcome and still claim objectivity?How does a multibillion dollar company like Nielsen allow a key spokesperson to make such broad, sweeping and irresponsible comments and still claim any credibility?

This, I’m afraid is modus operandi for this “objective” research company. When we first went public with concerns related to Nielsen’s erroneous sampling of U.S. Latinos in November 2005, Nielsen’s “spokesperson” Jack Loftus responded with public comments that bordered on hysterics that amounted to personal attacks rather than addressing the issue. His unprofessional and undignified comments were surprising. To see comments in full context go to www.HelpChangeTV.com/press

In August 2006, Darfield and I along with other marketing and research professionals familiar with the issue were invited to participate in a debate at the Texas Association of Broadcasters (TAB) meeting in Austin.

The behind the scenes at that encounter proved to be very telling.

THE REST OF THE STORY

Having known of Darfield from my Univision days, I held on to the belief that despite Nielsen’s misguided methodology and Darfield’s Univision connection, the company probably employed good, professional people who, if given the chance, would support a more accurate TV ratings service. Darfield, Ed Rincón and the other participants of the debate team had a good, civil, pre-debate rapport. All in good spirit, nothing personal, just people who were on different sides of an important, if complicated, issue.

A THREAT OR A FAVOR?

I was seated next to Darfield on the panel and just as the introductions began, he whispers over to me something to the effect “don’t worry I won’t mention how low your ratings are.” I was a little taken aback at what seemed like a not too veiled threat. Then I thought “why do I care?”

At AIM TV, our ratings are a source of pride for us, with over 1 million viewers weekly (according to Nielsen’s own studies), our broadcast syndicated shows provide, by far, the largest reach of any show in English targeted to U.S. born Latinos and we gladly use these ratings, just like the big media companies, to sell our advertising and to track our success. Our reach and ratings success is a big reason we do so well among Fortune 500 advertisers and have grown from 27 cities to over 100 the past five seasons. So disclose away! He’d be doing me a big favor.

I told Darfield as much, but realized right then and there that Nielsen Media Research was not just a company with misguided methodology and good people who wanted to do the right thing. It is a company bent on protecting its current financial situation at all costs, regardless of the outcome or tactics.

Darfield never followed through with his “threat” during his time at the podium, perhaps now realizing that what he had thought was a weakness (our ratings) was actually our strength. We were and are proud of our ratings (underreported though we believe, we make a very nice living off of them, thank you very much) and if Darfield knew anything about the TV business he’d know that, but he is in his own little “Nielsen” world, I suppose.

Darfield did manage to put at least one man in the sparse audience asleep with a presentation that seemed to fulfill a mission of “bore them to tears and maybe they’ll forget about the reason for the debate in the first place” going well over his time limit and expressing how “satisfied” Nielsen was with their current methodology. If I were making billions, uncontested, I’d be “satisfied” too. Over the past 7 years, I’ve traveled all over the U.S. in meetings with several hundred TV executives and I have yet to see anyone of their clients “satisfied” with Nielsen’s ratings (with the exception of Univision perhaps?).

When it was my turn at the podium, I used information in Darfield’s own presentation to prove the point that Nielsen does not properly sample U.S. born Hispanics. After the debate, he accused me of “intellectual dishonesty,” got very agitated and was led away. Video coverage of the debate can be found at www.helpchangetv.com/video

Over the past two years, Nielsen Media Research has spent untold sums sponsoring Latino and minority media and not-for-profit organizations such as the Annual Imagen Foundation Awards (where Nielsen CEO Susan Whiting was honored for her “contribution” to the image of Latinos on Television, something akin to a victim throwing a dinner party in honor of their assailant), the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s Annual Conference (that should keep lawmakers at bay), the 4th Annual Hispanic Television Summit, The Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies, and the list goes on and on.

WHY FIX A PROBLEM WHEN IT’S CHEAPER TO PAY THE CRITICS OFF?

To me, their mission is clear. Why should Nielsen admit they are wrong and spend millions fixing something when they can spend much less on hush money keeping others who should be their harshest critics at bay? I’m surprised Nielsen hasn’t called me to head up one of their divisions with a nice, fat salary complete with benefits (I hear they have a great Healthcare plan).

As for me, Nielsen has accused me of acting in my own commercial self interest on this issue. This issue has costs our very small, very busy, independent company, tens of thousands of dollars in precious money and man hour resources (the websites don’t update themselves). Furthermore, we are not sure that a change in methodology would impact our business dramatically or even benefit our shows at all. But we are sure it would be a better, more accurate ratings service and in the end that should be the objective of everyone in the Television, advertising, research and marketing field.

Taking on an issue of this magnitude is NOT fun and I don’t enjoy it. It is financially, physically and emotionally draining and distracts us from our core business and creative missions. But right is right and this serious issue won’t get fixed unless Nielsen is forced to change, so I’ve vowed to not stop fighting until it’s fixed, completely and without bias.

INAPPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO A SERIOUS ISSUE:

Later in the same trade article Darfield goes on to say about our efforts: “It is not going to change anything. [Laughter.] This is one of history’s greatest tempests in a teapot, and I give kudos to old what’s-his-name there for stewing up the industry about absolutely nothing.”

“Old what’s-his-name”? Ouch, that stings and as tempting as it is to sink to a level of name-calling, I prefer to stick to the facts.

THE FACT STILL REMAINS:

Why aren’t U.S. born Latinos represented in the Hispanic sample matching U.S. census data like every other demographic consideration (sex, age, etc)? Why has Nielsen dodged the issue by first protesting vehemently then switching game plans and pretending “Nativity” has no impact on TV viewing (which flies in the face of almost every other piece of research done on the subject).

Why did Nielsen commit to study the issue in January of 2006, yet has not reported any results in well over a year? Then they said they had a study from 2003, where is that study? Why isn’t it publicly available?

Is it because they are waiting until they get the results they need so they can then say “nativity” is a non-issue and was really just a “tempest in a teapot”?

Judging by Darfield’s comments, I’d bet on it. I now believe after reading Darfield’s comments that if we see the results of a study at all from Nielsen, it will be for the sole reason of proving that their current methodology was not erroneous after all. They are just waiting on the “right” results before releasing them.

DARFIELD’S COMMENTS FIT THE NIELSEN PATTERN

The fact that Darfield resorts to personal attacks isn’t surprising or as disturbing as the fact that in the article he laughs and makes light of a very serious situation (the potential under-sampling of U.S. born Latinos, which means there are few TV programs for U.S. born Latinos and contributes to larger, very serious social issues).

Maybe he lacks the empathy gene or more likely he’s just doing his job, carrying out orders for his multibillion dollar, monopolistic employer who doesn’t give a damn about accuracy or the social implications of their mistakes, just their bottom line.

Hey, we all have to make a living, I understand. But we also all have to look at ourselves in the mirror everyday, and somehow, stomach what we see staring back at us and be able to sleep at night. Darfield and a few other folks at Nielsen may have a tough time doing that. As for me, I’m happy to report that I’ve been sleeping just fine.

MORE INFO:

http://www.HelpChangeTV.com

Rob@aimtvgroup.com

Robert G. Rose’s opinions are entirely his own and do not necessarily

reflect those of Artist and Idea Management, Ltd. or

American Latino TV, LLC.