New York -- Capitalizing on the ratings success of nightly telenovela Sin Senos no Hay Paraiso and its unexpected popularity with the younger crowd, Telemundo will re-air the show in the first quarter, replete with English subtitles on the Mun2 cable network.
“It’s a changing world,” said Jacqueline Hernandez, COO of Telemundo Communications Group, delivering a keynote at the sixth annual Broadcasting & Cable/Multichannel News Hispanic Television Summit here Thursday.
Sin Senos, which tells the story of women who undergo breast surgery to attract rich drug lords, averaged nearly 1.2 million 18-to-49 viewers in October, a 162% audience increase compared to the same month the previous year. (For more coverage of the Hispanic Television Summit, click here.)
According to Telemundo, the novela has reported steady month-over-month growth across all key demos since its June 16 premiere. But perhaps more significant, the telenovela managed to attract an unexpected group of young, more acculturated followers, something that prompted the broadcaster to encore the program on its English-language sister cable net, which targets the English-dominant Latinos.
“Once upon a time, reaching the Latino consumer was very easy but this is no longer the case,” she said.
Hernandez told the audience how the viewer 10 years ago was simply watching a telenovela on the TV screen, today she is also logging onto the Internet to learn more about her favorite artists, while text-messaging her friends about the night’s episode and perhaps even TiVo’ing an installment of Saturday Night Live at the same time.
Within this increasingly complex media environment, Hernandez said, the key question to ask ourselves is: “How do I reach this consumer?” The answer, said Hernandez, a former publisher of People en Espanol, is not always easy. However, she encouraged marketers to seek -- and address -- the so-called passion points of Hispanics when delivering a message, whether in English, Spanish or perhaps even in Spanglish.
Hernandez used a simple but powerful presentation to introduce Summit attendees to Telemundo’s five guidelines: Understand your consumer; be ubiquitous; have borderless points of view; connect with the passion points; and be aspirational.
To stress the point, she referenced Barack Obama’s campaign team as an example of a marketing work well executed, which took into account the aforementioned five points. (The Democratic presidential nominee’s team this year was presented with the Marketer of the Year award by the Association of National Advertisers.)
Hernandez closed her presentation with a short video using Bob Dylan’s Times are Changin’ as background, indicating that more changes are on the way for the once monolithic Hispanic market and concluding with a powerful, one-line text over a black background that read: “2010 Census. Expect more change.”
