• by Wayne Friedman , October 3, 2023

Compared to the larger English-language TV business, Spanish-language TV keeps getting better news on two important fronts: Higher viewer impressions and more importantly, growth of national TV advertising dollars.

National TV advertising dollars were up 13% for the first nine months of the year to $1.32 billion. The total was $1.17 billion over the same period the year before, according to iSpot.tv.

Quick-service restaurants rose the most -- up 52% versus the same period a year before.

Four of the top 10 Spanish-language TV brands scored the best impressions results over the period: Sonic Drive-In, with 1.3% share of all brands, followed by Burger King (1.25%), Wendy’s (1.09%) and Domino’s (1.00%).

Burger King grew 154% over the period, while Sonic Drive-In was up 84%, Wendy’s increased 52% and McDonald’s rose 35%.

This comes as total TV household ad impressions climbed 26% year-over-year to 279.97 billion.

Univision still commands the bulk of Spanish-language viewing with a 47.2% share, up 38% year-over-year. NBCU’s Telemundo is next at 26.1% share, rising 37%.

These are followed by Unimas with a 14% share, Galavision with 2.6% and TUDN also with 2.6%, and other networks collectively at 7.5%.

For its TV ad impression metric, iSpot TV gets data from 52 million smart TV sets and set-top boxes that provide linear TV networks.

For its media measurement, iSpot says it uses a well-known survey technique called "iterative proportional fitting" or "raking" to “de-bias” the panel. It says raking effectively lowers the weight of overrepresented households and increases the weight of underrepresented households. Its panel is balanced relative to the U.S. census.