What: Liz Saracheck-Blacker leaves Terra as CRO and Emilia Peña is appointed director of sales. Why it matters: Terra is also expanding its programmatic team with new hires.
Terra has announced that Liz Sarachek Blacker, who has served as Chief Revenue Officer for Terra for more than three years is leaving the company “to pursue a new opportunity”. Emilia Peña has been named director of sales and also Luciano Islas joins Terra as Senior Programmatic Sales Manager in the U.S.
Peña has more than 18 years of experience and has previously worked for MTV, A&E, USA Networks and Telemundo. As the new Director of Sales for Terra in the U.S., Peña will be in charge of commercial opportunities for Terra at the pan-regional level, including U.S. Hispanics and Latin America, from Miami.
Expansion of the programmatic team in the U.S. includes Luciano Islas who is taking the role of Senior Programmatic Sales Manager and moving to Miami after managing this unit remotely from Mexico City. Jose Albuquerque is also joining the programmatic team after working at Terra Brazil. Programmatic has become an integral part of Terra’s strategy in the U.S. and Latin America.
“This is an exciting time for us at Terra, in that we welcome with open arms the talented Emilia Peña to our growing team, and look forward to the great initiatives both she and the programmatic team will lead in 2014 and beyond,” said Gerardo Adame, General Manager for Terra in North America. “We thank Liz for her significant contributions to our company, appreciate her assistance in making this a smooth transition and wish her the best in her future endeavor.”
Fernando Rodríguez is the CEO of Terra Networks in the U.S.
In 2012, when Terra.com live broadcast the Summer Olympics, traffic to the site not only soared but threw light over a fast-growing, unstoppable digital trend: Users were increasingly accessing the events from their mobile devices, whether a smartphone or a tablet. In fact, according to Terra’s own research, the number of visits coming to Terra.com from a tablet doubled in 2012 compared to the previous year.
To learn about the latest mobile trends and Terra’s most recent soccer initiative, Jugadores Número 10 / Number 10 Players presented by BlackBerry, Portada caught up with Fernando Rodríguez, CEO of Terra Networks in the United States, who was on his way back from the Hispanic Media Summit in Hollywood.
An edited transcript follows:
Portada: What is Jugadores Número 10?
Fernando Rodríguez, CEO of Terra Networks: “Jugadores Número 10 is a soccer platform inside our sports site featuring some of the greatest soccer players in the world. This is a site presented by BlackBerry and it makes a connection between the Number 10 and the new BlackBerry 10 smartphone. Users can go to the site to vote for their favorite number 10 player; enter to win a trip to see a qualifying match between Mexico and the U.S. and read blog post from some prominent sports journalists and soccer players, including Mexican soccer icon Cuauhtémoc Blanco and other journalists Inés Sainz, Alejandro Farffann, Pedro Pinto and Keyvan Heydari. The first phase of this promotion goes through the first week of June.”
P: How is Terra preparing for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil?
F.R.: “We are really beefing up our soccer coverage, which has long been an important part of Terra, not only in the U.S. but throughout Latin America. We are also aware that our content is being accessed in second –and third- screens, and that users want to interact much more. Our content has to be more ‘social,’ so we are implementing tools for users to interact, vote, create, etc.”
P: How do you leverage your Latin American content with your U.S. site?
F.R.: “We are taking advantage of our strong presence in soccer coverage in both Spain and Latin America, where most of the best soccer action is taking place. We now have a dedicated team working on translating and adapting our Spanish-language content into English. We are beefing up our English content because we want to reach not only second –and third- generation Hispanics but also non-Hispanics who love soccer. The idea is simple: To leverage our presence in Spain and Latin America and bring it to the U.S. soccer fans.”
P: What would you say is the biggest trend right now among your audience?
F.R.: “We have seen a tremendous growth in visitors coming to Terra.com from a mobile device; in fact in 2012 we doubled the audience that came from a tablet. This is an opportunity, but also a challenge, so we have to constantly invest in improving users’ experience in mobiles and tablets. Only last year, during our live coverage of the Summer Olympics in London we had 16 million people visiting the special from a mobile device.”
P: Is mobile the new way to the future?
F.R.: “I think mobile is definitely the way to the future, but it has a long way to go… When it comes to advertising, mobile still lags behind traditional web, and I can tell it’s far from monetization. This is mainly because it is still a relatively recent phenomenon and also because there is still a gap between the reality of usage and the adaptation of the industry.”
In December we introduced the Portada Buzz Barometer for Advertisers. Today we are introducing the Portada Media Buzz Barometer. While there should be more than “buzz”, “buzz generation” can be very important for marketing and PR strategies. In this first release of our monthly analysis, Univision, Telemundo, Azteca America, ImpreMedia and EZ Target belong to the media companies with the most positive change in “Buzz”. ESPN and CBS are the entities with the most negative change. We are not comparing the level of buzz of one company compared to the other companies, but comparing a given media company with its own performance over time.
The figures published below show the monthly change in the amount of searches in Google for each of the media companies names. The scale is from 1% to 100% as measured since 2004 until November 30,2012. 0% means no searches and 100% represents the highest amount of searches for the term throughout the whole period.
strong>Below the Portada Buzz Barometer-Media (USH) representing percentage” buzz” changes from October to November 2012 (see Methodology below)
Below the development of each media company measured during the last 11 months measured against itself. The chart below shows the history of each of the national advertisers during the January-November period of 2012.
Performance during January-November 2012
* Data in %
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Ago
Sep
Oct
Nov
Univision
69
66
67
70
73
74
67
74
68
76
90
Telemundo
52
49
55
48
43
52
75
100
59
59
55
Fox
58
54
53
53
53
53
53
54
61
71
92
ABC
80
78
76
68
73
69
67
61
68
86
78
TeleFutura
78
60
45
37
55
34
39
36
35
30
27
CBS
59
53
83
54
47
37
40
49
82
86
72
NBC
21
23
19
20
20
19
46
54
25
29
29
Azteca America
51
53
58
66
66
42
46
45
45
40
68
ESPN
75
59
77
62
59
66
57
63
98
100
81
People en Espanol
50
46
45
50
59
49
47
51
48
43
45
Meredith
38
43
38
39
40
42
43
39
38
38
36
Televisa
22
21
24
24
26
27
29
33
23
23
27
ImpreMedia
41
39
35
37
23
37
23
20
22
25
43
Entravision
31
29
30
33
33
34
24
25
22
28
22
Google
80
80
81
82
83
79
78
80
85
98
97
Yahoo!
22
22
20
26
23
19
26
21
18
15
17
Terra
48
40
38
34
34
32
32
32
34
31
29
MSN Latino
74
66
61
66
65
67
59
57
59
57
53
AOL Latino
91
84
67
74
66
54
41
36
35
36
34
Orange
93
90
91
91
93
94
100
90
83
81
80
Batanga
35
33
33
33
35
34
29
29
30
26
27
EZ Target Media
53
55
51
41
48
42
42
43
44
43
65
Hola
60
60
60
59
62
66
67
69
68
62
66
Networks
35
37
34
33
34
32
31
32
33
33
31
Audience Science
32
62
47
43
49
47
33
55
52
53
46
Tribal Fusion
32
41
32
33
32
32
32
30
31
25
28
Methodology: How we measure “Buzz”
Our Barometer measures the monthly percentage change in influence (buzz) that the top Hispanic media companies generate on a monthly basis on the Internet. Buzz is measured by the amount of times the name of the media company was used in Google searches during a given month, compared to the amount of searches it generated a month before. The measure does not compare the media companies between them, but a given media company with its own past performance. Again, this is is not a comparison between the companies but of the same company versus its own performance the month before. The study was made with data from Google Trends. The performance of each media company has been tracked since 2004 until November 30, 2012.
Portada Buzz Barometer February 2012 Data to be released in two weeks.
Mobile operators are entering the mobile advertising business in a big way. Telefonica and Sprint have formed a mobile advertising alliance to provide a platform for brands to target the two operators’ 370 million mobile subscribers worldwide. The deal is a tie-up between Telefonica Digital, the Spanish-based operator’s digital arm, and Pinsight Media+, US operator Sprint’s recently-launched advertising arm. Spain’s Telefonica is also the owner of Terra, a web portal and internet access provider in the U.S., Spain, and 16 Latin American countries.
Targeting the U.S. and Latin America
Both companies have said that they will “explore efficient ways of providing global advertisers and agencies with new and easier options to plan multi country mobile campaigns”.
Selling U.S. based advertisers into Europe and Latin America
The initiative will initially target the US (via Sprint) and European and Latin American markets (Telefonica) but plans to grow “further in scale, particularly to include Asia”. “Through this alliance, we are seeking to efficiently expand our capabilities to deliver mobile marketing solutions for US-based advertisers into Europe and Latin America, while Telefonica Digital aims to do the same for their regional customers in the United States,” said Mike Cooley, vice president of New Ventures at Sprint.
Revenue earned from the network will be split among the Sprint and Telefonica based upon how much of each company’s ad inventory is being used for a particular marketing campaign.
Mobile advertising exploded in 2012, with eMarketer projecting in December that U.S. mobile ad spend would nearly triple to $4 billion for the year. Much of this growth is due to Facebook and Google, both experiencing huge growth in revenue from their mobile ad products in 2012.
Terra has announced that Liz Sarachek Blacker, who has served as Chief Revenue Officer for Terra for more than three years is leaving the company “to pursue a new opportunity”. Emilia Peña has been named director of sales and also Luciano Islas joins Terra as Senior Programmatic Sales Manager in the U.S.
