Thinking Young With Novela Replay
by Laura Martínez -- Multichannel News, 10/26/2008 8:00:00 PM
New York — Capitalizing on the ratings success of nightly telenovela Sin Senos no Hay Paraiso and its unexpected popularity with the younger crowd, Telemundo will re-air the show in the first quarter, replete with English subtitles, on cable network Mun2.
“It's a changing world,” Telemundo Communications Group chief operating officer Jacqueline Hernandez said in a keynote at last week's Broadcasting & Cable/Multichannel News Hispanic Television Summit.
Sin Senos, which tells the story of women who undergo breast-enhancement surgery to attract rich drug lords, averaged nearly 1.2 million 18-to-49-year-old viewers in October, a 162% audience increase compared to the same month the previous year.
According to Telemundo, the novela has reported steady month-over-month growth across all key demos since its June 16 premiere. But perhaps more significant, the telenovela managed to attract an unexpected group of young, more acculturated followers, something that prompted the broadcaster to repeat the program on its English-language sister cable channel, which targets English-dominant Latinos.
“Once upon a time, reaching the Latino consumer was very easy, but this is no longer the case,” she said.
According to Hernandez, 10 years ago, a viewer was simply watching a telenovela on the screen. Today, she may be logging onto the Internet to learn more about her favorite artists while simultaneously text-messaging her friends about the night's episode and perhaps even TiVo-ing an installment of Saturday Night Live, she said.
Within this increasingly complex media environment, Hernandez said, the key question to ask is: “How do I reach this consumer?” The answer, said Hernandez, a former publisher of People en Español, is not always easy. However, she encouraged marketers to seek — and to address — the so-called passion points of Hispanics when delivering a message, whether in English, Spanish or perhaps even in Spanglish.
Hernandez used a simple but powerful presentation to introduce Summit attendees to Telemundo's five guidelines: Understand your consumer; be ubiquitous; have borderless points of view; connect with the passion points; and be aspirational.
To stress the point, she referenced Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's campaign team as an example of a well-executed work of marketing that took into account the aforementioned five points. (Obama's campaign this year was presented with the Marketer of the Year award by the Association of National Advertisers.)
Hernandez closed her presentation with a short video using Bob Dylan's “The Times They Are A-Changin' ” as background music, indicating that more changes are on the way for the once monolithic Hispanic market and concluding with a powerful, one-line text over a black background that read: “2010 Census. Expect more change.”
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