Michal Nashiv

Dori Media Group

Before Michal Nashiv joined the Dori Media Group (DMG) three years ago, she had worked in the advertising business for nearly a decade. She recalls a boss she had at McCann-Erickson in Israel who told his staff that there had to be a way to consistently produce extremely effective commercials—in the same manner machines in a factory constantly put out reliable products—and he charged them with finding the system. “Not all of them were mega-hit commercials, but we found the right elements that would increase our chances of having hits,” explains Nashiv. “And this is what we are trying to do here at Dori Media, we try to find the right elements to include in our productions in order to increase the chances of having a success.”

After nine years working for top advertising agencies, Nashiv was drawn to work on the client side of the business, one of which was DMG. “I didn’t know anything about telenovelas, I had never watched one before!” she admits. “But there was something magical in the company. It was smaller than what it is today. The energy, the drive of Nadav [Palti, DMG’s president and CEO] drove me to Dori Media.”

Today, DMG has offices in Israel, the U.S., Switzerland, Argentina and the Philippines. It produces and distributes telenovelas, it operates channels in Asia and Israel and runs a telenovela Internet community site.

Nashiv, as president and CEO of Dori Media Contenidos, oversees DMG’s production operation in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which has produced the hit telenovela Lalola, and she has been able to take that penchant for finding the keys to a successful product and apply it to TV programming. She is charged with deciding which productions the Buenos Aires operations should undertake, with much more than just the Argentine audience in mind.

“As opposed to other producers in the Latin American market, we produce for the world instead of for one territory. So the way we decide what we will produce is a little bit different from other companies, because we involve our sales people right from the idea stage. They judge whether a project can be sold internationally or not. I can produce the best telenovela in the world, but if they believe they cannot sell it worldwide, we will not produce it. We send the salespeople the scripts so they can make comments, if it’s too local or not international enough.”

DMG’s salespeople have a say in the cast and point out if a story line or a look of a novela might present a problem in a certain region—Asia, for example. The greenlighting decision-making process also involves the executives from the channels DMG operates, because, as Nashiv explains, they have first-hand understanding of what buyers want and need.

“We showed Lalola to the salespeople and to the channel executives and everybody thought there was something there,” explains Nashiv. “But it was presented to us as a weekly and not everybody was convinced that we could make it as a telenovela. At the end of the day, we decided to produce Lalola."

The decision paid off, as Lalola has been sold to 70 countries around the world. Another novela, Sos mi vida (You Are the One), a co-production between DMG and Pol-ka Producciones, has been sold to 53 countries. DMG’s Buenos Aires unit is currently producing Champs 12 and is about to start co-production on another novela—an updated romantic comedy.

DMG is known for exploring new forms of storytelling in the novela genre, first with Lalola, produced more as a sitcom than a traditional novela—it’s pace is faster and shooting techniques more sophisticated. It has also created Amanda O, the first multiplatform novela.

Nashiv agrees entirely with branching out novelas beyond the TV screen to reach viewers in as many ways as possible. “Since I come from advertising agencies, I believe in the 360-degree approach,” she explains. “When viewers watch a TV series and then see something related to it off screen, they get more involved and everything about the show becomes more real to them. Every time we produce for TV, we try to come out with complementary products so it can be everywhere.”

Given the worldwide success of DMG’s novelas, the strategy is working.