Univision Names Stephen McGowan Research SVP

Univision Communications Inc. (UCI) on Wednesday appointed Stephen J. McGowan senior vice president, corporate research, effective immediately.

McGowan, who most recently was VP, research at the Public Broadcasting Service, will be based at UCI’s corporate headquarters in New York and will report to Jed Meyer, EVP of Corporate Research.

In this role, McGowan will help oversee UCI’s research efforts, providing leadership, strategic analysis and support for network management, programming and ad sales. To this end, he will work closely with industry groups such as the Media Rating Council and leading research partners like Nielsen and comScore to ensure that methodologies are sound and UCI audiences are adequately represented.

Additionally, McGowan will support thought leadership efforts and partner with company stakeholders to execute initiatives and identify custom research opportunities. 

In his most recent role at PBS, McGowan directed all of the syndicated and custom research efforts for the company’s headquarters, collaborating with more than 300 local affiliates nationwide. His team worked with Nielsen to measure cross-platform viewership for shows like Downton Abbey, Sherlock and PBS’s daytime children’s programming. McGowan also helped relaunch PBS’s viewer community, which continually engages the network’s audience through an online research forum.

Before joining PBS, McGowan was managing director of Monocacy Media Partners, providing direction to media companies regarding consumer research design, as well as project-level planning on new technologies, consumer adoption and usage.

Prior to that, McGowan was SVP of research at Discovery Communications, where he directed all corporate, programming and ad sales research efforts for Discovery’s U.S. television portfolio.

Previously, McGowan spent six years at Nielsen, where he assisted in preliminary efforts to measure DVR use and video on demand behavior. In his role as SVP, client research at Nielsen, he was the project manager for Nielsen’s efforts to track video usage on portable media devices.

McGowan has served on various subcommittees for the Advertising Research Foundation and Cable Television Association of Marketing, and served two terms as a board member for American Public Television. He is a member of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and is a frequent speaker at annual national conferences for these organizations.

McGowan earned his bachelor’s and master’s in telecommunication at Michigan State University and a master’s in business administration from The George Washington University in Washington DC.