Elizabeth Guider Reports from NAB: Talking Telenovelas

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LAS VEGAS: TV Globo’s Ricardo Scalamandré, Azteca’s Marcel Vinay, Venevision International’s Cesar Diaz and Univision’s Jessica Rodriguez discussed their efforts to make novelas part of young people’s social-media experiences in a session at NAB.

Refreshing that at least one thing in the media firmament is not feeling the urge to reinvent itself. Telenovelas, those soapy Latin sizzlers, it turns out, are, with a few tweaks here and a few twists there, sticking to what they’ve been all along—addictive, emotion-driven, and given their ubiquity, almost inescapable.

Not even production costs have risen that much: High-end primetime fare could run $500,000 an episode but generally the episodes come in for $250,000—or less.

What has changed is the effort by all the major purveyors—TV Globo, Univision, Venevisión, Azteca, among them—to make these sizzlers front and center with younger demos, and that means making them a part of their social media experience.

That’s the view of a quartet of top telenovela producer-distributors—Cesar Diaz, the VP of sales at Venevision International, Jessica Rodriguez, senior VP of Univision Cable Networks, Marcel Vinay Hill, the VP of international sales of Azteca and Ricardo Scalamandré, the head of international business at Globo—who elaborated at NAB on the strides being made to make their shows part of the new-media landscape.

"I don’t think there’s a new telenovela—love, betrayal, mystery. That’s what 60 to 80 million people watch every night in Brazil. They’ve traveled so well around the world that some of these foreign broadcasters are producing their own—Russia, Turkey, and Asians among them," said TV Globo’s Scalamandré.

"But what we are trying to do now is relate to this new social-media world," Venevision’s Diaz added. "When we brainstorm projects now, we always include a new media maven in our midst," he explained.

The biggest challenge going forward is turning each telenovela into "the talk of the town," is how Scalamandré put it.

As for how the genre works Stateside, Univision Cable Networks’ Rodriguez emphasized just how compelling they’ve become with American Hispanics, pointing out that novelas now outrate drama series on the other U.S. broadcasters one out of two nights in the key 18-49 demo.

"It’s a new American reality," Rodriguez said, adding that most of the viewing (an impressive 90 percent) is live, DVR-proof.

Univision is also growing its novela brand with episodes on mobile and online—and with a 24/7 classic novela channel on the satcaster Dish.

In other countries these Latin shows have gone through several phases since their major assault in the early 1980s.

Comarex’s Vinay described how Moscow’s water pipes burst back in the late ’80’s because so many people there were glued to their screens watching one sudser they didn’t use the kitchen or the bathroom: And thus, too much pressure built up in the pipes!

Asked how well international sales of Latin novelas were going nowadays—what with major broadcasters now able to produce their own local prime-time fare, and even in some cases make their own novelas for daytime—the panelists put the accent on volume compensating for the loss of key slots (and revenue) on major broadcasters.

Vinay and Diaz both said there are other ways, on secondary stations and with newer platforms, that they make money from foreign licensing. "Volume is making up for whatever falloff in license fees from major broadcasters abroad," Vinay suggested.