• by Wayne Friedman , February 2, 2021

Univision has joined Project OAR, the media consortium focused on addressable advertising for TV.

Univision will serve as a member of the group’s steering committee, which includes: AMC Networks, Comcast NBCUniversal, Disney, Discovery, Comcast's FreeWheel, Fox, Hearst Television, E.W. Scripps, WarnerMedia, ViacomCBS, Xandr and U.S. smart TV manufacturer Vizio -- the company that created the group.

This comes after Univision recently hired WarnerMedia senior advertising executive Donna Speciale last month as president of advertising sales and marketing.

In 2017, while at Turner TV networks -- now a WarnerMedia unit -- Speciale, along with Fox and Viacom, help start another advanced advertising group, OpenAP. At that time, she said: “The holy grail will be to provide business outcomes and attribution models.”

Project OAR’s goal is to target specific ad messages to consumers with increasing effectiveness and efficiencies for marketers, when it comes to their overall media plans. OAR -- Open Addressable Ready -- says the group's intention is to optimize unsold, under-performing ad inventory.

It looks to help new ad products across the company's Spanish-language networks: broadcast networks Univision and UniMás, and cable networks TUDN and Galavisión.

Last year, members of the consortium began testing measurement and technical specifications for the management and delivery of addressable ads. In the second half of the year, it started some market trials for addressable advertising on linear and on-demand platforms on smart TVs.