Don Browne

January 2008

Throughout his career in television, Don Browne has always held a strong belief in the business potential of serving the U.S. Hispanic market. This dedication to the fastest-growing portion of the U.S. population reached its culmination in April of 2005 when Browne was appointed president of the Telemundo Communications Group, owned by NBC Universal. Today, Browne oversees a varied portfolio of businesses, including a Spanish-language broadcast network, the cable channel mun2 and online ventures, as well as production and distribution. Since he took over Telemundo, Browne has reorganized the company and renewed its commitment to original programming. He also led the buyout of Telemundo-RTI Productions and the acquisition of Tepuy International to create Telemundo Studios Miami and Telemundo Internacional, respectively. He talks to World Screen about his passion for his work and catering to the Hispanic market.

WS: What has driven the success of Telemundo?

BROWNE: The principle and the vision is that the lifeblood of what we do is the U.S. Hispanic audience we serve. And it’s very complex, very diverse and rapidly evolving and growing. So the more you understand that, and if that is the raw material you use to produce your content, and you create a diversity of platforms—broadcast, digital broadband, Internet, cable and international and you are open to the next form of distribution—and you are populating these distribution platforms with relevant content—you are going to have a good business. That’s our business model: first, really understand the audience. Second, create the talent that has the capacity to understand that and produce content for this evolving audience and make sure that you have all the devices you need to reach them.

And we have been very fortunate to get Patricio Wills, the head of production at Telemundo Studios, to come on board, too. I’ve been around some great people throughout my career, but this is just an extraordinarily talented leader in the world of creating content. And then we had the great luck of being able to convince Marcos Santana, the head of program development at Telemundo Studios, to join. Now you have the beginning of a dream team, and they bring amazing people with them.

WS: How many hours of original programming do you produce each year?

BROWNE: We are producing more than 1,000 hours of scripted programming per year. We are the second-largest provider of Spanish-language content in the world [the first being Televisa]. Our ratings are growing across the board. We don’t have all original content, but overall our original content tends to perform significantly better than acquired programming.

So this business model sort of feeds on itself in the sense that you keep attracting this creative community to you because they are excited about the content, including at our cable network mun2, which is the acculturated, bilingual, bicultural youth market.

WS: That’s another way you’re attracting that evolving Hispanic audience—not all of them want their programming in Spanish?

BROWNE: That’s right, and a lot of them are acculturated, and the youth market is the fastest-growing component of the Hispanic population. We are trying to be in all the key places, and as you keep evolving there is a natural progression to this. You can create a unique selling proposition, which we are doing. We have a pre-upfront meeting where we bring clients and agencies and they get to meet Patricio Wills and Marcos Santana and Peter Blacker, the senior VP of digital media at Telemundo, and our mun2 producers. We make a presentation and clients can literally start designing their product strategies with us as we develop [our programming]. The clients and agencies meet the writers and we begin writing some of their products seamlessly right into the novelas. I think Clorox is one of our best examples. We have a product that will have no commercials. This is the ultimate dream to have a commercial-free [program] where the products are so seamlessly integrated into the production that you are not even aware of them. For instance, with Dame chocolate, Marcos Santana brought the idea to Best Practices and then he brought it to our sales team and worked with Clorox to integrate the product right into the novela. And those products live on forever because they are literally in the novela.

WS: And that doesn’t create a problem in a market where Clorox is known by another name?

BROWNE: Well, actually, what we can do is digitally change [the name] to accommodate the nuance of that particular product.

WS: But when you then sell a show that has, say, Coke in it, don’t you have a problem because if Coke is in the show, the broadcaster can’t sell advertising time to Pepsi, because Pepsi won’t want to be there?

BROWNE: Well, the choreography and the coordination are very critical, and we are pioneering this as much as anyone because we are creating our product from the ground floor up. The other thing that is great about this is that you can sit and listen to the client, you share a philosophy and you have a chance to create a relationship as opposed to just selling numbers. I think one day just selling numbers is going to be a quaint proposition.

WS: In a way, product integration is more evident in Latin America than in the U.S. Do you think that the rest of NBC Universal may eventually make more use of it?

BROWNE: Yes, and to your point, Marcos Santana picked it up as a best practice in Latin America. That’s the beauty of how this business model keeps giving. What Tele�mundo Internacional does is not just sell its product. It’s absorbing market intelligence; it’s able to be plugged in to the most innovative best practices that are going on. It brings a certain intellectual vitality back to the mother ship—NBC Universal. So we can make format decisions.

WS: How does Best Practices work—everyone gets together to talk about what they learned from their respective markets?

BROWNE: Exactly, because you have all these ambassadors out there picking up the best ideas, and of course those ideas come back into the mother ship and the decision-making process, where we are right on the cutting edge of what is going on. We are not a huge organization. We work very closely together, and because we are nimble we can move very quickly to opportunities. The other thing that is interesting—sometimes it’s white-knuckle interesting, but it really is another differentiator because our product is fresh. Our novelas sometimes are produced four or five days before they air. If a novela isn’t tracking the way we want, we can focus group it and fix it on the fly. If you buy a can of 120 episodes and they are not working, there is nothing you can do. We have done this on several novelas, where we can literally adapt them and change them as we go. That’s a real advantage in being able to have a freshness and a vitality to the products that we are introducing.

WS: You and NBC Universal jointly bought a novela from Colombia and you are going to produce a Spanish-language version for Telemundo and NBC will produce an English-language one. What kind of collaboration will there be?

BROWNE: We have expertise that would benefit NBC Universal, and we are already seeing executives tapping into some of our resources, and we’re tapping into their resources. [One example is a] recent episode of My Name Is Earl. I proposed this about a year ago and it went on deaf ears, and now with this new team in place [Jeff Zucker, the president and CEO of NBC Universal, and Jeff Gaspin, the president and COO of the Universal Television Group] the reaction was different. One of our very well-known actors, Miguel Varoni, appeared in a dream of Nadine Velazquez, who is a member of the ensemble cast of My Name Is Earl, and she’s Hispanic. First of all, this gives us a little bit of a peek into the future about the things we are going to do in moving these audiences and giving the Hispanic population the sense that NBC is really in this and they’re responding [to the changing demographics of our business]. And it also continues to open up a backdoor for us in a sense that Hispanic [actors who] have aspirations may be able to cross over one day [from Telemundo to NBC]. And NBC, I believe, wants us to be a development piece for the next generation of writers, producers and actors as they continue to attract this acculturated audience. [In addition], a number of our novela stars appeared in episodes of the Bravo series Top Chef that were shot in Miami, and it worked out great.

WS: As young people come to America from all kinds of cultures in Latin America and they start speaking English, do you lose that audience?

BROWNE: Well, to some degree yes and to some degree no. It’s very counterintuitive—when you look at the statistics, they don’t support that. The Spanish population is growing six times faster than the general population, but it’s not just about language, it’s about cultural identity.

WS: But wouldn’t young people prefer to watch Heroes?

BROWNE: They do, but they also like our novelas, which are more contemporary, of a higher quality, and speak to that audience. They can watch it with abuelita and the extended family or [on their own].

WS: If you look at the big picture of all of NBC Universal, then you are gaining both ways. Even if young Hispanics watch Heroes instead of Telemundo, they are still watching NBC Universal shows.

BROWNE: Exactly. We have all these different platforms, but the beauty of our opportunity is that we still have tremendous upside in our core business because Univision has such a substantial share of audience—clearly we intend to chip away at that. Plus, the general population is growing, so we have two sources of growth in our core business, which will be the substantial driver economically for the next four years as we grow these platforms. Our digital business is growing dramatically and profitably, as is our cable business, and our international business is booming.

So we have at least three major growth platforms, plus as we fine-tune this we’ll be a nice driver as people do become more acculturated [and] they start identifying with our mother ship. If you take a look at the minds that are now in charge of running NBC Universal, there is a receptiveness to this and a real acknowledgement of the demographic revolution that is going on. I think we are getting a convergence here that is really exciting.