Emilio Azcárraga Jean

This interview originally appeared in the MIPTV 2014 issue of World Screen.

Emilio Azcárraga Jean is the president, CEO and chairman of the board of Grupo Televisa and oversees a media conglomerate that is the largest producer of Spanish-language content in the world. This programming feeds market-leading broadcast stations in Mexico; a bouquet of pay-TV channels under the Televisa Networks banner; a healthy international-sales business to countries around the world; and distribution on digital platforms. Televisa is involved in several other businesses as well, including radio broadcasting, cable television, publishing, telecommunications, professional sports and live events.

The group also owns a stake in Univision Communications, the leading Spanish-language broadcaster in the U.S., and is a partner with Lionsgate in Pantelion Films, a producer and distributor of feature films for Hispanic audiences. In fact, partnerships are important to Azcárraga, as he believes Televisa has content and production know-how that can be easily adapted to numerous markets around the world.

Under Azcárraga’s leadership, Televisa has more than doubled its operating margin and consolidated its leadership position in the Mexican broadcast market. Televisa’s accomplishments in and outside Mexico have been recognized by a number of international organizations. Azcárraga was honored as MIPCOM’s Personality of the Year in 2012 and earlier this year at NATPE, he was one of four recipients of the Brandon Tartikoff Legacy Awards, which are given each year to a select group of television professionals “who exhibit extraordinary passion, leadership, independence and vision in the process of creating television programming and in evoking the spirit of Tartikoff’s generosity,” as the award states. Following the award ceremony, Azcárraga was interviewed by Anna Carugati, World Screen’s group editorial director, in front of a live audience.

WS: When you took the reins of Televisa, what was the scope of the company, and how much bigger is it today?
AZCÁRRAGA: A lot has changed since 1997. Our company has been in content production since we started in radio, in the 1930s. But if you look at the development that has taken place from 1997 to 2014 just in technology and devices and the different distribution platforms that exist and the different businesses that we have, we have grown a lot in all of these new venues. Since 1930, Televisa has been in the production and distribution of content. We have been able to have an incredible group of people who have been talented enough to take advantage of all these new platforms and produce content not only for what we did before, which is television over the air, but also pay tele­vision and international, as well as taking advantage of all these new distribution platforms and trying to get to the audiences whenever they want and wherever they are.

WS: Storytelling is the engine that drives all your businesses. How many hours does Televisa produce every year?
AZCÁRRAGA: We produce 90,000-plus hours. I remember when we used to say we produced 60,000 and thought it was a lot of hours, and now we produce 30 to 40 percent more. We have been growing organically. We have looked at taking advantage of these platforms. We understand that producing for linear channels is different from producing for pay-tele­vision channels, which is different from movies, and different from producing for the Internet. When we start to build a program, we always think about all these distribution platforms. We don’t develop only for one window, but we try to develop for any window, while taking advantage of music and live shows and pay television and Internet. I believe that Televisa’s important achievement has been not just producing a program but producing a concept that can travel through different windows.

WS: Televisa’s sale of programming to broadcasters around the world is also a huge business, and that also continues to grow because of all these new platforms?
AZCÁRRAGA: Yes. What we have seen is that Televisa has become the Latin major not just because we can produce a lot of hours, but the trick is to produce a lot of hours with good quality and great ratings. Televisa has achieved that, not only because we produce in the native language in Latin America but also because we have started selling to 60-plus countries and in a lot of languages.

WS: You made that sound easy—so a lot of content of high quality and high ratings! Is there an easy formula for that?
AZCÁRRAGA: There’s an easy [formula] whenever you have the good-quality people who work with me in Televisa, because at the end of the day, the key to the success I have had as CEO of Televisa is really having a great group of people working together to achieve these goals.

We produce some really bad programs just like anybody else, and what is very interesting is that the ones that turn out the worst are the ones you thought would be the best and vice versa. But the incredible talent and the number of hours worked by these executives, producers, writers and actors at Televisa make it—not easy, because it’s a lot of work—but [make it possible] because we have this model that works very well and has been working forever.

WS: I wouldn’t want the headline tomorrow to be “Emilio Azcárraga: We Produce Really Bad Programs!” So please talk about some of the good shows.
AZCÁRRAGA: [Laughs] Every person who has come to NATPE for a long time has at some point produced very bad programs, and that is why packages exist, and we understand how the market works!

When a program is not performing as well as we want, we have the capacity to react very fast. The production system and the creative ideas of the producers [allow us to] react quickly and substitute a program, or substitute a producer, or substitute something to make the show work. You see this not only in the number of hours we produce for prime time in Mexico but also in the United States. All of Univision’s prime-time schedule is produced by Televisa. And we don’t measure Univision against the Spanish-speaking channels in the U.S., we measure it against the general market broadcast networks [ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX]. We are number four and were number two during the summer. That speaks to the very good quality programming that we produce, which not only works in native-language markets like Mexico and Latin America. There are around 50 million Latinos in the U.S. and 250 million more people who don’t speak fluent Spanish. So if you are the number two- or three- or four-ranked network—with that disadvantage it means that our programs are very well produced. We have an example of our level of quality not only in the things that we export but also the things that we import. The Voice in Mexico is produced by Televisa, and in a country that has a population of 120 million, it has more people watching it than The Voice in the U.S., with 300 million people.

WS: You are also a partner with Lionsgate in Pantelion Films, which had a huge theatrical success this year, Instructions Not Included. How is Pantelion doing?
AZCÁRRAGA: After earning more than $40 million at the box office, Pantelion is doing great! The business plan that we had for five years evidently has changed! This movie was an example of the fact that there are people in America who want to watch good-quality movies no matter what the language is. This movie is 80 percent Spanish and only 20 percent in English, so Americans have to watch it with subtitles. In Latin America we are used to watching movies with subtitles; in the U.S. it’s difficult for people to do this. The movie tells a great story. It’s not a violent movie. It’s not a sexual movie. It’s really a movie for the entire family, and I believe that what Televisa has demonstrated over time about producing family-oriented programming [is also evident] in Instructions Not Included. Pantelion has produced other movies that have done fairly well, [but] not as well as this one. We have learned this market is eager to go to the movies and see quality programming. We have been developing new ideas not only with movies but also for television. We started the first season of Devious Maids and we are producing the second one. And we have another series, Chasing Life, which was adapted from the Televisa series Terminales. I definitely see new opportunities for Televisa through Pantelion to produce for the English-speaking market.

WS: How do you feel about the future of linear channels?
AZCÁRRAGA: It’s still a good business now, and I believe it will be in the future. But I believe that those programs made for the linear channels need to be made available afterwards on any device. What technology gives us is that you don’t need to be home watching television, you can take your television in the car or on a trip. What we need to work on is producing exclusive content for this audience, but also making programs available to all the people on any device at any time they want to see them. There is the opportunity to capture a greater audience if you make your content available and easier to get access to than what we do on the linear channel. So I see linear channels like radio and the movies—everybody thought radio would die, and then movies would die, and then television would die. But I believe everything can work and everything has its own ecosystem. And the whole ecosystem changes because of the new opportunities that we have.

WS: The growth of online and mobile viewing in America is very high. How do you see it in Mexico and the rest of Latin America?
AZCÁRRAGA: There is still a lot to go in broadband penetration in Mexico, but it grew by 27 percent in 2013. There is still a long way to go, but at 27-percent growth every year I believe we are going to achieve very high penetration in a short period of time. Pay-television penetration was at 14 percent 12 years ago and now it’s close to 50 percent. As penetration in broadband, cable and mobile increases, the ecosystem is going to change. Now that competition is going to open up in telecommunications in Mexico, it will be an opportunity to lower the cost of Internet [access]. When we started providing Internet through cable operators we achieved not only the growth of Internet penetration but we also benefited subscribers by lowering the price, so they get a better connection at a lower price. This has been important not only for improving connectivity, but better and less expensive Internet connections are important for the development of the country.

WS: As you look to expand your business internationally, what are you looking at, acquisitions or joint ventures?
AZCÁRRAGA: It’s more joint ventures. Obviously, our focus has been the United States, with Univision and now Pantelion. The U.S. is the biggest and the most secure market in the world. We have done a lot of joint ventures around the world that have worked pretty well. We are starting to look at and make a move in Brazil. We are very open to look at any market. We believe that our content and our ideas can be successful in any market. [Our main] focus is on who is going to be the right partner. We don’t believe in doing one-year partnerships. We try to develop long-lasting relationships. So choosing the right partner makes it more difficult, but whenever we have one we have worked together very well. And obviously Latin America is a buoyant place to invest. You see the economies in most Latin American countries are [performing well], and I believe that Latin America will be a highlight in the next decade.

WS: Are you looking opportunistically at Europe?
AZCÁRRAGA: I am not an expert on the European economy, but yes, a lot of mistakes were made and they had to make corrections on the path that they were taking. Europe is definitely going to come back. We have our venture in Spain with laSexta and Antena 3 and we have done co-productions. Being from Mexico and having been able to navigate many crises, and having the credibility of investors who have navigated with us through rough waters—not necessarily because the company made mistakes, but because of the economic situation in Mexico back then—I believe that any country like Spain that gets into trouble deserves a chance. They were a great economy and we did great business and they will come back. You cannot say, “I’m going to forget about Spain and come back in five years.” I believe there is a lot to do, and when there is crisis there is very big opportunity.

WS: Televisa also has a school, Centro de Educación Artística, which trains a lot of talent.
AZCÁRRAGA: Ninety percent of the actors in Televisa programs went to school at Televisa. It’s a three-year program and these young kids study from seven o’clock in the morning to ten o’clock at night. They can see that it is a very difficult career to be an actor, but also for writers and producers. That’s why I believe that [the production] system that we have can react very quickly; we have been able to not only control the end product but also to control [the process] from the very start, from the school and the teaching, from the capabilities of the people who are working in technology, from our partners Sony or Panasonic who come up with new equipment and take it to Televisa to see if it’s going to work.

WS: Tell us about Fundación Televisa’s mission.
AZCÁRRAGA: In 1997, we had to close the foundation because of all the restructuring that was going on at Televisa. We opened it in 2000 as a social foundation but we didn’t have a lot of money to put into it because we were in the middle of the transition and the economic situation at Televisa wasn’t as good as it is today. So we started leveraging the content and the media that we had available. We started working with other foundations that were doing things right. There were a lot of people in Mexico doing incredible things and what they really needed was just for somebody to shed light on them. And now, all of the telenovelas we do have a cause attached to them. Any goal scored in any soccer game in Mexico also has a cause—that goes from transplants to computers. The foundation is very important and at the core, we work for the audience. The audience chooses us before anybody else, so we definitely believe we need to give something back more than just entertainment.