The best brands in the business: with 17 pan-regional magazines, and 4.9 million combined paid subscribers, Miami-based Editorial Televisa is the largest publisher of Spanish-language magazines in the world - Editorial Televisa

South Florida CEO, Oct, 2003 by Rochelle Broder-Singer

For decades, Editorial Televisa's dominance of Spanish language consumer magazines in Latin America and the US was so complete that the Miami-based publisher, a unit of Mexican entertainment giant Grupo Televisa (which had US$2.6 billion in sales in 2002), never gave competition a second thought. But the recent US census, which identified Hispanics as the country's largest minority, along with greater attention from the rest of the world to Latin America's consumers, have brought other companies into the publishing business. Combine that with a global recession in advertising, and the publisher of such well-known Spanish titles as Vanidades and Cristina suddenly finds itself thinking about the other players. A lot.

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To face that competition, the company recently brought in David Taggert, an American "gringo" coming off of a long career as commercial director with Dow Jones. His focus: to spearhead a restructuring of the publisher, growing the company's US Hispanic segment. "The US has become more important to any Latin American multinational," Taggert says. "In media, you've got this huge, growing Spanish-language or Hispanic population, and any media player is going to want to follow that population in the US."

Taggert says nothing is off the table as far as changes go, from the way advertising and circulation is handled, to considering publishing English-language titles for US Hispanics. One key opportunity, he says, lies with the diversity of the US Hispanic population, which has generally been treated as homogenous. He sees a market that can be divided between the eastern US and everything west of Chicago, with separate editions or new local publications to serve the varying markets.

Editorial Televisa's long history in the US--Vanidades was launched in Miami in 1961, and Televisa bought the empire it spawned in 1992--helps it tremendously in the market. "In order to grow in a foreign market, you've got to be there," Taggert says. While the company has offices in six countries, the Miami office handles operations, circulation for the "Zona Norte," advertising sales for nearly 20 US Hispanic magazines, a share of international advertising sales for the company's hemispheric-wide and local Latin American magazines, and editorial for several of the titles.

One thing Editorial Televisa probably won't be doing is looking for publications outside its core of entertainment and lifestyle. "The great thing about this publishing division of Televisa is that we are totally aligned with what Televisa is--entertainment," says Taggert. "Hispanics love entertainment. They are big TV watchers, they are big moviegoers, they love their stars, they love their paparazzi, they love their lifestyle."