amanda@tvmasmagazine.com

Telenovelas, adaptations and formats

The telenovelas in Latin America, the soap operas in the United States and the fiction teleseries in Europe were the first products entering globalization in the 20th century. Nowadays, in the beginnings of the 21st century, when we speak about this genre –not only in Latin America– we are not speaking of a byproduct anymore, we are referring to a key content in the everyday life of millions of people.
Therefore, the Telenovela and Fiction Industry reacted quickly and has just taken a huge step to lessen this big communication gap between connected sectors and also among European and Latin American countries to get a better understanding of these fiction products.
“Tools have already been created and now we have to use them.” That was the final conclusion of the Second World Summit of the Telenovela and Fiction Industry, held by this magazine together with TVMAS magazine on September 30th and October 1st and 2nd, in Barcelona.
This sort of approximations between sectors and regions should have been considered since about the mid 90’s with the quick development of telecommunications. But as the proverb says, better late than never, and the viewer –who is the final consumer– had to gain importance to be worth being taken into account. “The research work is very important,” warned the writer and scriptwriter Dago García from Caracol Channel in Colombia, and said that social groups and individuals also sent out messages that we have to pay attention to.
Thus, this Summit was called in order not no avoid the enormous consumer audience in all continents. In Barcelona we concluded that there is a clear need to communicate the concept of telenovelas better, to change the wrong impression that many European countries have of them. We also need to work on related business such as music and merchandizing. It is very important to join the marketing with the literary and produced work as the main part of the business, because even if the telenovela is a literary work of the media, culture and entertainment, it is also a marketing product.
The participants in the Summit were anxious to the renewal of the industrial structures and an efficient, responsible and sensitive work on today’s products and reality. They urged the people connected to this business to advance with co-productions, bilateral agreements and adaptations. They stressed the need to facilitate the synergies between creators, producers, programmers, marketers, broadcasting channels, researchers, scholars, advertisers and investors. And there also arose the need to interpret the international markets to prevent saturation and make new different and successful products.
Another main conclusion was the importance of including local features in the contents, because it strengthens the local characteristics of the products and shapes the universal aspects of them, since identity is a patrimony and a plus factor. We must work on ethnic contents and focus on the segmentation and satisfaction of niches, seeing fiction products as excellent for carrying on innovative developments that favor other industries in order to use social pedagogy in most diversified aspects and fields.
With the Summit we could also notice that the telenovela is a social repairing vehicle of great impact for any social and advertisement campaign. It was clear that it is a profitable business to explore and exploit.
So, the Telenovelas and Fiction Industry made promises for the meeting to be held this year, preparing to take the projects to success using scientific schemes and real bases that will make it possible for the companies to make progress in their production, prospects and diffusion.