Adriana Cisneros de Griffin

June 27, 2011 World Screen

 

This interview originally appeared in the MIPTV 2011 issue of World Screen.
 
The Cisneros Group of Companies (CGC) is one of the largest privately held media, entertainment, telecommunications and consumer-products organizations in the world. Among its holdings are Venevisión, the leading television network in Venezuela and one of the top producers of Spanish-language programming in the world; and the distribution arm, Venevision International, which sells content around the world and is a main supplier of programming to Univision, the leading Spanish-language network in the U.S.
 
Adriana Cisneros de Griffin, the vice chairman and director of strategy, is poised to become CEO of the Cisneros Group. In this exclusive interview, she talks about the group’s plans for the U.S. Hispanic market and adapting content to today’s multiplatform world.
 
WS:What is the strategic focus of the CGC in today’s digital world?
CISNEROS:It’s a very interesting time for media companies. About two years ago we sat down to really think about what, at its core, a media company should look like today. The formula that we came up with is that a media company like ours, which comes from the traditional side, should really protect the traditional assets, but should look to grow aggressively when it comes to the digital platforms and the alternative ways of getting extra content out there. Our mission is to help viewers be better viewers, to help them be better fans, to help them want to watch the TV screen even more. We found that the formula that works, while keeping the sanctity of the TV screen, is to produce very good material for TV, and also produce enough alternative material online, video that you can watch on your phone, become a member of a virtual community, so that you want to watch what’s on TV even more. We’ve been implementing that for two years very successfully.
 
WS:How is online content enhancing the programming you offer on television?
CISNEROS:I’ll give you two really interesting examples, one in Venezuela and one in the U.S. In Venezuela, we launched a telenovela, a Venezuelan production called La mujer perfecta (The Perfect Woman). It follows women and plastic surgeons that are obsessed with beauty, as we in Latin America tend to be. And for the first time in the Venezuelan market, we actually developed, from the beginning, a very strong digital strategy. So in Venezuela, the day after you’ve watched the telenovela at night, in the morning you can actually download the entire episode and watch it on your computer. We have about 15,000 downloads a day, which is impressive, and we have about 44,000 fans on Facebook. All of the Facebook community is geared towards enhancing the experience of La mujer perfecta on TV. For Venezuela this is very new. Those numbers in Venezuela are very impressive. It started being an experiment that has now proven to be the way we have to do things in Venezuela, because Latin Americans are ready to have access to that sort of entertainment as well.
 
In the U.S. we launched on Univision the soap opera Eva Luna. It’s a classic prime-time telenovela that has got extremely good ratings; about five and a half million viewers every night. And this time around we worked very closely with Univision Interactive Media to develop a digital strategy from day one of Eva Luna’s production in our studios in Miami. It has also proven to be a very successful way of doing things because we are helping viewers be better viewers. We are helping them be even more excited about tuning in to watch an episode on TV. We’re giving them behind the scenes, we’re giving them access to the lives of the actors, we’re giving them scenes they can download on their computers, which are side stories to what they see on TV.
 
This is a very exciting time because it’s giving us new opportunities to do product placement. The whole gamut of advertising is very different. When you can offer advertisers several ways to advertise beyond the TV screen, you are giving all the other screens they can make use of as well the social media part that you are offering.
 
WS: What plans do you have for the U.S. Hispanic market?
CISNEROS: The U.S. Hispanic market has been core to our company for about 30 years. Thirty years ago we thought Hispanics had great potential in the U.S. It has been proven that we do have great potential. We have the greatest purchasing power of any minority in the U.S. It’s also a very interesting group when you think about it from a media perspective, because Hispanics are actually very early adopters when it comes to technologies and formats and so forth. We have found, pleasantly, that Hispanics have always been quicker to adapt to new formats that we are launching. They are totally predisposed to wanting to watch interactive stuff on their phones or on their computers, not just on the TV screen, and it’s made for a very dynamic and interesting market to understand and to work with.
 
Today Univision gets 45 percent of its content from us, which is a big number. It’s a great relationship. Our content does extremely well. And it’s a relationship that we love having and we enjoy working for them very much. 

 

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