You’ve sold out your ad inventory for Copa América. What does that mean for TelevisaUnivision’s sports coverage historically, and how did you get there?
We’ve been selling this for a year, and now we’re sold out. It’s nice to say because this has been the highest-grossing revenue tournament ever for Univision, excluding the World Cup. We’ve seen tremendous success, and we’ve seen blue chip brands coming in from Verizon, who bought out the complete category for us, and then Constellation, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Samsung … all leaning into soccer, and there’s a lot of momentum.
When did you know Copa América was going to sell out, and what helped push it over the line?
The big sponsors—even Verizon buying out the wireless category—happened a while ago, right in last year’s upfront. Then what we’ve seen is, as the tournament has gone on and the matchups and the fanático around Argentina, Messi and Colombia [grew]—and, by the way, the U.S. and Mexico didn’t fare so well, and it didn’t hurt us at all—this is the tournament that U.S. Hispanics care about because every single team has fans [here]. We had a very good base laid in with sponsors across all of our platforms.
As the tournament went on, the ratings success we had and how we’ve been able to evangelize it in the market, we literally sold out this week because of these dream matchups.
With Copa América sponsors, including Mastercard and Lowe’s using Lionel Messi’s presence, and Verizon and Degree engaging with fans and players from around the tournament—rather than just the U.S. or Mexican national teams—do you feel that helped increase TelevisaUnivision’s value as a platform?
Yes. We’ve known this for years, but soccer is exploding in the U.S., and we might be very close to that tipping point. Copa América is just one thing that is going to help, and having it in the United States was very smart by [governing body Conmebol], and there’s no doubt it helped our sales.
