The webnovela and immigrants in the United States.

Abstract

Purpose--The purpose of this paper is to focus on the webnovela, a new type of marketing genre and sentimental serial drama which is popular among immigrants, pivotal to the future of the US Spanish-language media and informative about its past. No academic research currently exists on this topic.

Design/methodology/approach--This paper applies cultural studies, management, new media and marketing theory to the study of the first three webnovelas launched from 2006 to 2011. It analyzes how this new genre fits into the history of sentimental serial drama; how it appeals to Hispanics and to immigrants at their home countries and at their host country as well; and how the US Spanish-language television and new media address their $900 billion Hispanic consumer market.

Findings--This study revealed that although webnovelas are likely to continue being popular as romantic fiction for the new media and profitable as a marketing system, they are unlikely--as operationally defined by this analysis--to be produced independently from the Univision media group in the foreseeable future, even when the entry barriers for competitors are low.

Originality/value--This paper should be of value to those interested in the latest developments in ethnic marketing, narrative theory, interactive marketing, and international business and communications.

Keywords United States of America, Hispanics, Spanish language, Marketing strategy, Internet, Visual media, Webnovelas, Serial drama, Narratives, New media

Paper type Research paper

I. Introduction

Webnovelas, or telenovelas for the web [1], emerged as a "new media" format and is now one of the most popular internet fiction genres among the Spanish-speaking immigrants of the USA. What accounts for the success of these web stories with both producers and their audience? In this article, I will attempt to answer these questions.

There are several reasons for this genre's growth. The first is the size, wealth, and special characteristics of the market for which producers create these shows. The Hispanic [2] market in the USA is the world's most affluent and its population is larger than that of most Spanish-speaking countries. In fact, Hispanics have now become the preeminent prime-time audience in the USA: they watch more prime-time network television than the general (Anglophone) market. Further wireless, portable devices have gotten cheaper and easier to use. As a consequence, US Hispanics, like their American counterparts, increasingly use the new media for information and entertainment. Seeing an opportunity in this growing and culturally receptive market, American telenovela producers started to craft content appropriate for this new medium, which allows users to watch drama through cellular telephones, portable computers and tablets.

The second reason for the genre's popularity is the viewing habits of new arrivals and their preferences. Hispanic immigrants like to watch these new kinds of entertainments, because they are very familiar with the genre of sentimental fiction. They grew up with radionovelas, telenovelas and fotonovelas and kindred works back in their home countries. Further they are drawn to this new form, because the content is geared toward their experience as US Hispanics, unlike most telenovelas, which are set in Latin America and deal with Latin American concerns.

The third and most important reason by far for the producers' success in this market has to do with the economics of producing this genre and the enormous marketing advantages this interactive form confers. In the past, the radio and television broadcasting industries were attracted to serial dramas, because they had a predictable return on investment (ROD. They were normally cheap to produce, popular, well targeted and attractive to advertisers. This is no longer the case for the US English-language (open) TV networks--CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox--where producing drama has become too expensive and complicated. It is still the case, however, for the Spanish-language networks, such as Univision, Telefutura, TV Azteca and Telemundo. In addition, new media are attractive to producers and advertisers for their strong marketing potential. They provide marketing advantages such as hit tracking, interactivity and seamless product placement. Webnovelas are also an ideal vehicle through which to capitalize on the Web 2.0 applications such as social media.

Webnovelas, then, have been successful for several reasons. First, because they appeal to a large, solvent, and technologically savvy market that has drawn sophisticated producers, who offer appealing content created especially for this new small screen format. Second, because their audience had already developed a taste for this type of fiction in their countries of origin. Third, because these dramas are inexpensive to produce, create handsome returns, and offer a way to market products and gather intelligence that is more reliable, flexible and versatile than what the traditional media allow. In the rest of the paper, I will explain these reasons in more detail and will also analyze Univision's three webnovelas launched from 2007 to 2011. I will focus, in particular, on the third reason, as it is the most important. Finally, I will conclude with some remarks about the social impact of the new media on producers and new immigrants.

II. Why webnovelas have been so successful

A. Size of the market and immigrants

According to the 2010 census, the Hispanic population in the USA registers at slightly less than 50 million, which is more than the entire populations of Canada, Spain and Argentina. The Pew Research Center reports that, from 2005 to 2050, immigrants will account for 82 percent of the population growth; and that at that point one out of every five Americans will be foreign born (El Nasser, 2008). Given the size of the US economy, the Hispanic consumer market is estimated to be $900 billion, which makes it the most affluent in the Spanish-speaking world.

The huge size of this market makes marketers very interested in the viewing habits of immigrants and their families. Telenovelas are an ideal form for promoting consumer interest in a product, as they are the Spanish-speaking offspring of the format known as "soap operas". This manufacturer-sponsored format is, in essence, a Trojan horse for marketing and advertising. As a result, the Hispanic market is increasingly desirable to the media industries. Despite their size and economic clout, however, the US advertising industry still considers Hispanics, an ethnic or niche market. Actually, as Arlene Davila argues, considering the latest demographic and consumer power data, Hispanics are their own market (Davila, 2008). That is, the 50-million people $900-billion US Hispanic consumer market surpasses the population of most Spanish-speaking nations and tops their purchasing power. Davila argued that, given the size of its population and consumer market, the term "niche market" no longer fits the US Hispanic's but, ironically, it is still considered as such as a whole, rather than as a "general market".

B. Hispanics' pre-eminence as a TV audience

Despite being only the fifth ranked US network, Univision can register even higher prime-time television ratings than its rivals NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox. In 2006, for example, the final episode of Destilando amor, a popular telenovela, broke the record for greatest number of viewers. This came about for several reasons. First, Nielsen began to measure the Spanish television ratings comparatively along with the other networks', instead of monitoring the Spanish networks' separately. Second, because of this new procedure, the ratings revealed that Hispanics watch more prime-time network television than the Anglophone population. The Anglophone population (or general market, to use the ethnic marketing term), consume more cable and online television.

This disparity means that the US Spanish-language television can still follow the traditional business model for commercial broadcasting, which operates on the basis of delivering a mass audience to advertisers on a relatively inexpensive cost-per-reach basis. No wonder that Spanish-language media have registered the greatest growth in sales and purchasing of media outlets and in marketing and advertising investment (Lopez-Pumarejo, 2008). The fact that there are more prime-time viewers in the Hispanic than in the general market gives the former a relevance that it never had in the history of US television.

C. The growing use of wireless, portable devices

Advances in wireless technology have induced greater fiction consumption through cellular telephones, tablets, and other portable devices. It is estimated, in fact, that by 2017 more people will watch fiction on the small screen of portable, wireless devices than on television sets (Technology News, 2010). This should not be seen, however, as a threat to television but rather as an opportunity for the industry to diversify across-platforms. Online news did not kill the newspaper industry; rather it transformed it, by pushing it online, and, arguably, improved it. New media, in fact, never replace the old; rather they reorganize the media ecosystem. Radio did not replace the print media, television did not replace the film or the radio industry, and the latest "new media" developments are not dislodging their predecessors; rather they are forcing all these forms to converge on the internet (Friedman and Friedman, 2008).

Televisa's 2007 hit, La fea mas bella, based on Colombian Ugly Betty, proved that distributing shows across-platforms pays off. Televisa first launched La lea in Mexico. Its success in this country had a ripple effect in the US Young Americans began to download episodes, even before Univision began to broadcast them. This downloading induced double-viewing and fostered audience loyalty. In 2009 Univision renamed its "Univision Online" divison "Univision Interactive Media", in part because of this type of wireless media-related phenomenon. Univision Interactive Media produces online content and supplements the network's television shows with blogging, surveys and webcasting. It even features what they call webnovelas, which is actually fan fiction that can be put together with Web 2.0 applications using real actors, theme songs, and other Univision/Televisa intellectual property.

D. The familiarity of the genre

Until 2004, the only television industries that could significantly compete with the USA in the international arena were from Latin America. Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Peru and Chile each developed their own telenovela styles, star systems and brand equity. Across the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries, these national networks primarily programmed this type of serial, especially when the country was more a producer than buyer of media content. In fact, as the Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries began to buy Latin American shows and to produce their own for their emerging television industries in the late 1980s, telenovelas and soap operas became the world's most ubiquitous genre.

This ubiquity accounts for familiarity Hispanic immigrants have with the genre of sentimental fiction. The Latin American (and US Hispanic) networks begin to broadcast telenovelas around noon with newscasts and talk and game shows in-between. They show the last of these serial dramas around 10 p.m. That means they broadcast six to seven titles a day, about half of them new releases, five to six times a week. For viewers of Spanish-language television, they are inescapable.

E. National content

The US Spanish-language networks reach a more affluent and populous market than any Spanish-speaking country, but until the advent of webnovelas they lacked US Hispanic content in their dramatic offerings. The newscasts, talk shows, game shows and variety shows are US Hispanic in content. But the fiction programs--that is the telenovelas, which ironically take up much, if not most, of the programming--are not. Why? ... It is cheaper to buy than to produce telenovelas, and because these are not "foreign" to their target audiences. Additionally, their stories and stars supply content for the US-produced Spanish-language television fare: talk, game, news and variety shows.

The main provider and partner of Univision, for example, is the Mexican behemoth Televisa. Its marriage with Univision has not always been a happy one. Whenever Televisa feels that it is not getting a fair share of Univision's skyrocketing profits, multi-million dollar lawsuits ensue (Lopez-Pumarejo, 2008). Univision, by far the largest Spanish-language network of the USA, has an unbecoming dependence on Televisa. This is the reason producing its own fiction is an issue, not because they want their fiction to reflect American society.

NBC's Telemundo, on the other hand, does produce its own telenovelas. Its target, however, is global, lest it be drawn into competition with the giant Univision in the US domestic market. This vertical integration approach provides a more comfortable managerial climate, as Telemundo (unlike Univision and Azteca America) does not have to market a foreign networks' product under its own name. But by aiming at the global market, Telemundo's telenovelas are ultimately not all that that different from their Latin American counter-parts, even when Miami and Los Angeles happen to be the cities in which many of the stories unfold. The cast is Latin American and the topics--illegal immigration and the American dream aside--are normally not specifically US Hispanic. Some are filmed totally in Los Angeles or Miami studios, but many are totally or partially outsourced. Indeed, as explained below, the distributors do not care to call attention to the fact that these shows are American.

US telenovelas look and feel Colombian, Venezuelan, Mexican or Brazilian. Media empires from these countries began to establish an international market for their telenovelas in the late 1970s and created strong demand and brand recognition based on their production styles. The US telenovelas cast well-known actors from these countries and combine productions styles from the best-known Latin American producers. Telenovelas are not supposed to be American for the same reason that pineapples are not supposed to be from Alaska. Six years after its prolific rival Telemundo produced its first "national" title, Univision launched Eva Luna (2010-2011). Eva is more of the same: a hybrid Latin American story that happens to take place in Los Angeles.

But it was not with Eva Luna that Univision finally put its foot into the hyper-competitive waters of producing content for the US Spanish-language market. They took the plunge, rather, with their first webnovela, Mi adorada Malena (My Beloved Malena) in 2007. I will explain the economic considerations that led to their decision below.

F. High ROI

In the nineteenth century, many countries had sentimental or domestic fiction industries similar to that found in the USA. But due to this country's economic and cultural hegemony during the twentieth century, the American commercial broadcasting model for this type of commercial fiction industry was the one that became transnational. The food and detergent multinationals, like Procter & Gamble, Lever Brothers and Colgate-Palmolive, disseminated this form around the world, where it merged with compatible local genres.

It is no coincidence that the most transnational of all the commercial radio broadcasting formats is fiction aimed at women. In the nineteenth century, the domestic novel significantly outsold other genres in the American book printing market. Its popularity led women's magazines to publish a chapter of these novels per issue, to induce repeated purchase. Advice columns and advertisements that echoed the domestic novels' virtuous heroines accompanied these chapters. The radio industry inherited this interplay among fiction, advertising and advising. It, in turn, passed these practices on to television (Allen, 1985). Television has now transferred these synergies to the internet through webnovelas.

Women have, in general, always been the most important target market. After the industrial revolution they carried out or influenced about 90 percent of the households' purchases, except for high-ticket items. Isolated from their extended families in nuclear households, women found in the radio a connection to the outside world. Listening to this medium, as a result, became integral to the domestic sphere (Allen, 1985). Advertising, embedded in sentimental radio dramas, helped "educate" women in child rearing, interpersonal communication, health and nutrition and other domestic economy matters. The early US advertisers and commercial radio broadcasters learned indirectly from the success of popular sentimental fiction, like the domestic novel and the turn-of-the century women's magazines, that serialized sentimental entertainment has educational effects. The announcer and the narrator of the Radio Days soap were the same. The same voice of authority, extolling a product, enthusiastically described a heroine, whose virtues included using a product advertised in the show to take good care of her loved ones (Allen, 1985).

Soaps were relatively cheap to produce, as it was just a matter of expanding a story, hopefully with the same cast, and securing sponsors who would benefit from a low-cost, yet extremely efficient advertising system. Indeed, the quintessential sponsor of these shows, Procter & Gamble was, as it is today, also a producer. Sentimental serial drama became the bread and butter of the Radio Days broadcast industry, as it was as easy as it was profitable to fill up daytime time-slots with this type of entertainment. In the 1940s, the Latin American radio networks also built themselves up with serial drama.

Cuba became the epicenter of the Latin American radio and television industries (Cue Sierra, 2005). It sold radio drama scripts to other countries, billing not by the number of pages, but by weight, as told in Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa's 1977 novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Vargas Llosa, 1995). No wonder, then, that when developing countries, like India, began to build up their own television industries in the 1980s, they too produced serial drama (Lutgendorf, 1995) when Spain began daytime broadcasting in the 1980s, it filled up its programming with telenovelas and US prime-time soaps like Dynasty and Falcon Crest (Lopez-Pumarejo, 1987).

The US networks' increasing investment in reality shows, contests and talk shows at the expense of fiction points to the fact that drama is no longer the layer of golden eggs, which it was during Radio Days. Network television fiction has become too expensive and complicated to produce. The star system and the intricacies of labor law deflated the ROI, as advertising migrated to the less expensive new media.

The new media are making the traditional commercial television business model obsolete. Viewership has declined and the technologies to skip over advertisements are popular. Although television fiction is becoming too expensive for US broadcasters to fill their television programming grids, this is not the case for Latin America or the US Hispanic market, particularly when it comes to sentimental serial drama. The US Spanish television networks, in fact, co-produce with Latin American firms and tape a good portion of its shows abroad to lower the cost of production.

G. Webnovela's marketing potential

1. Webnovelas and cultural separatism. Like their predecessors in radio and television, webnovelas constitute a complex marketing system. These stories, in fact, are ideal product placement and survey vehicles. The telenovelas's star system, which they share with webnovelas, brings together actors, music performers, athletes and all sorts of celebrities. They thus strengthen the inter-promotional web through which Televisa/Univision in particular, and the Spanish-language media in general, build up brand equity and recognition.

Today, political strategists conceptualize constituencies as "markets". It is no wonder, therefore, that the politicians woo Hispanic voters so intently and intensely through Spanish-language traditional and new media. Their vote is decisive not only in heavily Hispanic states but also in Presidential elections. For instance, President Obama sang "Mexico lindo y querido" during his 2008 debutante campaign, and adamantly opposes Arizona's policies against illegal immigration.

Ironically, Hispanics are so ethnically, culturally economically and racially diverse that they have little in common among themselves other than the language, the Iberian--Catholic--roots of their countries of origin, the politicians and organizations that claim to represent them, and the Spanish-language media they share. They are an artificial constituency to the extent that they label themselves "Hispanic" under bureaucratic coercion. But this construct is so powerful that it moves billions of dollars in public and private funds. It has indeed, a life of its own and its validity is rarely questioned due to the industrial and political benefits of cultural separatism in the USA.

Celebrities from the mainstream media like Jorge Ramos (Univision news), Maria Celeste Arraras (NBC Telemundo news) and Eddie (Piolin) Sotelo (Univision Radio) openly censor the use of the term "illegal" and promote "undocumented" instead, and demonize conservative figures that oppose illegal immigration. What seems to be human rights advocacy is in effect cultural separatism advocacy, that is, a defense of the markets that sustain the growing US Spanish media.

There are three ways to conceptualize the Spanish-speaking audience of these media. As a market (US Hispanic) refers to people of Latin American origin, illegal, legal or citizens, who live in the USA and identify with the Spanish-language and Latin American culture. These are the constituencies forging the target markets of the 50-million people Hispanic "niche market"--66 percent of Mexican descent--and the ones that the US media and politicians care to address. The Census Bureau estimates that about 23 million of these are citizens. Illegal immigrants are estimated to be from 11 to 20 million, which means that about 15 million Hispanic immigrants are actually legal (Immigration Policy Issues, 2010). The other two Spanish audiences are those who consume US Spanish-language media products in Latin American countries and Spain, and the so-called Diaspora, which refers to those who live geographically apart, yet culturally connected to their countries of origin. Satellite and cable television and the internet provide access to these countries' media in the USA. Although the audience that "counts" is national, the US Spanish media's audience is actually transnational, and that explains the nature of the Spanish-language media organizations of this Anglophone nation.

Hispanic demographic growth and the consequent affluence of its consumer market have been accompanied by a drastic increase in the online presence of this population (Yepez and Valentine, 2010). As previously indicated, this growth has been fueled by the availability of small screen wireless devices, such as smart phones and tablets, and has increased the consumption of (video) fiction. In response to this change and to remedy the scarcity of Hispanic fiction on the US small screen, Univision launched three webnovelas, Mi adorada Malena (My Beloved Malena, 2007), Vidas cruzadas (Crossed Paths, 2009) and No me hallo (I Don't Find Myself, 2011).

2. Clarification: what exactly is a webnovela? I operationally define webnovelas as industrially-produced drama for the internet; that is, as the output of an industrial producer rather than of users or customers[3]. Industrially-produced webnovelas perform marketing and advertising similarly to radio soap operas. Like their radio and television predecessors, their stories are written around a brand or product. In other words, sponsorship, which the radio drama's announcer/narrator made clear but in TV's it migrated to the commercial breaks', is back in full force with the webnovelas for, in these, brands and products are inseparable from the core story.

We can see this inseparability clearly in the first three series that Univision created in this new format. Malena's main character, for instance, was the Caress body wash spokesperson-model, Vidas' heroine modeled for and wrote about (the character was a women magazine journalist) L'Oreal hair color, and No me hallo's, heroine was asked to be the spokesperson-model for Sierra Mist Natural. After the webcasting was over, these shows were broadcast in a one-hour television prime-time slot, editing out the marketing that is only internet-appropriate. It is assumed the audience has already associated the brands with the characters, so the marketing is carried over across-platforms.

3. Univision's first three interactive webnovelas.

a. Mi adorada Malena (2007). forging a new genre. Malena incorporated the drama, intrigue and romance typical of the genre, while also introducing Caress Exotic Oil Infusions body wash as a key element to the plot. The drama focused on "Malena Ferreira," a strong and exotic woman who was also a famous Caress Exotic Oil Infusions spokeswoman. Rising star Cynthia Olavarria, former Miss Puerto Rico and Miss Universe 2005 first runner-up, made her novela debut as the female lead. Julian Gil and Bernie Paz completed the suspenseful love triangle. Gil was "Cristobal Carvajal" and "Mateo," Malena's secret admirer who took on a dangerous job that influenced the outcome of the story. Paz plays "Leonardo Del Castillo," Malena's fiancee and a prominent psychiatrist who had a secret to hide (International Entertainment News, 2007)

Arguably for the first time ever in Univision's novela history, viewers were able to vote on one of two alternate endings and choose what they thought was the best fate for the lead character. "'Mi adorada Malena' is proof of our continued commitment to leveraging all our assets for our advertising partners", said David Lawenda, President of Advertising Sales, Univision Communications, Inc. "We are excited to continue to work with Unilever in finding new ways to connect with our audiences" (International Entertainment News, 2007).

With Malena, Unilever, the makers of Caress body washes and beauty bars, and Univision brought the network's first-ever novela to air online to the TV screen. The six-episode novela, which originally debuted online at Univision.com in July 2007, was created to help launch Caress Exotic Oil Infusions body washes to "celebrate strong and enchanting Latinas". Malena was so successful with online viewers that it premiered on the Univision Television Network in a one-hour special on December 22, 2007 at 1.00 p.m EST.

"As part of Unilever's commitment to reaching the Hispanic consumer, we are thrilled to be a part of a revolutionary novela that has resonated so well with online viewers and will now be brought to national television", said Rob Master, Unilever Media Director North America:

Caress encouraged women to unleash their mysterious sides through passion and romance with this novela [...] and the nationally televised broadcast is the perfect way to extend the excitement even further (Business Wire, 2007).

"There's gotta be something wrong with me because, as a Hispanic woman, I don't seem to know how to unleash my mysterious, enchanting side through passion and romance", said marketing specialist and blogger Laura Martinez, in response to Rob Master, the marketing director from Unilever who stated that the cultural insight behind Malena is that Latinas know how to do that (Martinez, 2007).

To promote the television version of Malena, Caress and Univision leveraged the network's properties and the brand's multiple marketing channels, which included weekly TV promotional spots for each new episode that premiered during Destilando amor (the 2006-2007 telenovela whose finale registered the highest primetime ratings that year in the USA); and across Univision's sister networks, which together reach 97 percent of the US Hispanic households. These are TeleFutura, Galavision and TuTV. The former is the USA's top Spanish cable network and the latter the US outlet for paid television channels of Mexico-based Grupo Televisa. Malena also featured online video advertising, including a dedicated mini-site on Univision.com (Uniclave: Malena) that gave access to full episodes, behind-the-scenes material and weekly prize drawings. Promotional print ads ran in People en Espanol, Mira! and TV y Novelas with a special advertorial partnership with TVNotas to provide weekly storyline updates. Additionally, Univision Radio aired spots across the top 25 Hispanic markets to tease new episodes every week and maximize buzz, grand prize sweepstakes were made available through Univision.com and through radio promotions on Univision Radio stations across the country. Multiple grand prize winners received a trip to a VIP concert experience with Anais, Malena's theme song singer, who had won the Univision-sponsored Hispanic version of American Idol: Objetivo Fama. The marketing effort also included exclusive ringtone giveaways and text message alerts for upcoming episodes and cross promotion via Unilever's Vive Mejor platform (Business Wire, 2007).

Webnovelas also became part of Univision's strategy to reduce its dependency on Televisa. The networks newly appointed president Joe Uva (2007-2011) emphasized the network's positive experience with Caress in his address to the Hispanic Advertising Agencies Association Conference (AHAA), New York on October 31, 2007. He said that, based on the success of this venture, Univision intended to produce, like Telemundo, its own fiction content, which included a miniseries. Uva's administration invigorated the network's online division Univision.com and rebranded it Univision Interactive Media.

A TV Week article on Malena stated that what is unusual about the heavily promoted telenovela is not that it is a digital drama, but that the star plays a spokesperson for Caress, giving the Unilever brand a central role in the story. This statement is, however, historically myopic. The term soap opera originated from the fact that (soap) brands had a central role in commercial radio drama, given that the narrator was also the announcer who extolled the benefit mix of a product, often by associating it to the virtues of a leading, positive character. When soap operas became television material it was no longer possible to keep the announcer/narrator, as the moving image made descriptions unnecessary. Advertisements and fiction thus became discrete.

In Malena the protagonista is a spokesperson for a body wash brand: Caress, for which the body wash itself is a key element to the plot. Laura Martinez described its six episodes as "nothing but a big product pitch by the Unilever brand" (Martinez, 2007). A webnovela is not saddled with the legal restrictions of television regarding advertising. The internet is a relatively unregulated medium that articulates fresh synergies between narrative and advertising. Open-ended and interactive, a webnovela is a typical new media genre with suigeneris marketing capabilities.

b. Vidas cruzadas (2009). leveraging the telenovela star system. In 2007, Mi adorada Malena's six weekly four-six minute episodes generated high user participation and heavy traffic to Univision.com. In 2009, hoping to repeat their success, the producers came back for more with a 15 episodes one: Vidas cruzadas. Vidas cruzadas was about a beautiful and successful journalist (Mariana) who wanted to be a mother but could not find a man at her level. Her best friend (Gloria) worked for an in-vitro-fertilization clinic, so she decided to undergo artificial insemination. Immediately after the procedure, she fell in love with Daniel, the man who happened to be the sperm donor. When he found out she was pregnant, he accused her of dishonesty. She slapped him and walked away with her nose up. At the end, Gloria revealed to Daniel that his sperm impregnated Mariana. At that time she was nine months pregnant and was walking out of the clinic after a check up. He approached her with a mariachi band and, kneeling, offered a ring. As he put the ring on her finger, she went into labor and gave birth in the hallway with the assistance of one of the musicians. As she gave birth, the band played a traditional Mexican birthday morning song: "Las mananitas". In the last sequence of the story, she is shown finishing a lecture on artificial insemination in the presence of her husband and the other children they have conceived.

This webnovela could not be more Mexican. The lead actors--Kate del Castillo and Guy Ecker, who became a popular couple through La mentira (The Lie), a 1998 Televisa telenovela--the music, the production style and the family values in play are Mexican indeed. However, the webnovela is not actually Mexican, but Hispanic; since it is based in what the Spanish-language networks have brought to the USA through decades of partnership with Televisa. But the story unfolds through the most modern medium (the internet), and it is about a Mexican-American (a journalist), who took a most modern decision (to become an artificially inseminated single mother) only to reach a traditional solution (to get married to the father of her child), which is what her American parents (Mexican immigrants) no so secretly desired. This interpretation of Vidas is not meant to suggest that this webnovela successfully reflects what Hispanics are, but certainly that it aims at doing so by appealing to one of the few things that they do have in common--their media culture.

Although Univision and its programming partner and principal supplier Televisa settled their bitter differences over royalty payments (Univision paid Televisa $25 million in disputed royalties + $65 million annually in free advertising for its shows until 2017 (Lopez-Pumarejo, 2008), Univision wasted no time in securing non-Televisa content for several of its media properties in order to plant the seeds of independence. It engaged in an unprecedented partnership with giant TV content producer Endemol and Amistad Productions to produce Vidas cruzadas, which premiered in the second quarter of 2009 on Univision.com.

Since January 12, 2009, Univision Online (which in early 2009 had been renamed Univision Interactive Media) has been under the helm of former AOL Vice President Kevin Conroy. As previously indicated, this 15-episode Webnovela marks Univision's second incursion into the genre, this time with major Televisa stars. But Vidas is Univision's first-ever collaboration with Endemol USA (Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Deal or No Deal, Big Brother), which has been making strides in the scripted genre (Martinez, 2009).

Lead actor Guy Ecker's wife, Estela Sainz, wrote Vidas cruzadas' script. Ecker, Sainz and Del Castillo are partners in Amistad, a company founded two years ago by award-winning telenovela producer Carlos Sotomayor to create, develop and produce original content for digital platforms, as well as for TV and film. Each episode of Vidas cruzadas lasted between three-five minutes and was be available for free to Univision.com users. "This is great talent, great content and a great new way of reaching the US Hispanic audiences", said Endemol USA Latino senior Vice President Laurens Drillich. None of the partners disclosed financial figures for the webnovela, but all involved said it would be developed with extensive product placement and organic integration options (Martinez, 2009).

Vidas cruzadas was supported with a dedicated micro site, featuring behind-the-scenes videos and photos and interactive features such as blogs, live chats and forums. Other interactive features included a sweepstakes in which users were able to act out a scene and upload their video for a chance to win a cameo appearance in the webnovela. Adriana Guzman was the winner of this virtual casting, as announced on a webpage, in which one could see the video that Adriana submitted. (www.univision.com/content/channel.jhtml?chid = 5&schid = 25936). The micro site featured trivia, polls, local tie-ins and exclusive cast interviews. Vidas had generated more than 2.5 million video streams by early 2011, and it was one of the Univision web site's top two most watched properties ever. This led to the launching of the Novelas y Series Channel at this web site, which housed the third Univision webnovela: No me hallo. (PR Newswire, 2011).

c. No me hallo (2011). a full-fledged new media genre. No me hallo was a romantic comedy webnovela about Luchita (Angelica Vale), a working class Hispanic woman (her father was Spanish and her mother Mexican) and former music star who found herself impoverished after her husband, who was also her manager, deserted her. Back with family in Ojai, California, she unsuccessfully tried to find her calling in minimum salary jobs: as a waiter in an Italian restaurant, as a car mechanic and, finally, as a maid, before she was hired to open a show as a singer and, simultaneously, offered a job as the spokesperson-model for a new soft drink: Sierra Mist natural. "No me hallo" means literally "I can't find myself", but in this context it meant "I can't find my calling", as only singing and modeling, and not with the other jobs that she tried, the protagonist found it. Luchita ended up finding herself not only because she ended up singing a new genre (she used to perform traditional Mexican fare) but also because of her budding love affair with Abelardo (Harry Geithner), her music teacher.

Like Vidas, No me hallo was produced by Carlos Sotomayor and featured top stars. Megastar Ange1ica Vale had been a famous actress, singer and comedienne since childhood, being the daughter of another Mexican megastar actress and singer: Angelica Maria. Vale had recently been the protagonist of "La fea mas bella" ("The Most Beautiful Ugly Woman"), which was Televisa's Ugly Betty version. The 15 episodes were made available at: www.NovelasySeries.com site every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for five weeks starting in May 16, 2011, and also accessible on the Univision Smartphone video applications. Following its full run online and on mobile, No me hallo premiered as a prime-time television special on July 28, 2011 and became available at Univision on Demand.

Music was set to play a crucial role in this particular webnovela. Telenovelas and webnovelas always launch new releases as musical themes, but given that No me hallo's protagonist is a music artist, she debuted three new songs, after five years of not recording. She authored one of these: Miento (I lie) along with Wendy Vera and well-known composer Alejandro Jaen. Prince Royce, a bachata [4] singer hit single Corazon sin cara (Faceless Heart) was No me hallo's theme song. Royce had a cameo appearance in the webnovela since it ended as the protagonist opened his show singing her own songs (Hispanic Tips, 2011).

Sierra Mist Natural, Kmart and State Farm were the main brands woven into No me hallo's story. Sierra Mist Natural kicked of its US Hispanic advertising efforts with No me hallo, and prominently featured in (www.NovelasySeries.com), across Univision.com's online and mobile sites and within the Univision video application. It also created a Facebook fan page to promote its product integrations and drive viewers to watch the webnovela at: www.NovelasySeries.com. Kmart featured in No me hallo the Casa Cristina[TM] bed and bath home fashion collection of Univision's talk show host Cristina Saralegui and hosted a custom mobile and online mini-site for users to participate and for a chance to win cash prizes and Kmart gift cards to help them achieve their aspirations in the areas of family, education, home or career. State Farm was the exclusive sponsor of "?Donde esta Luchita?" (Where is Luchita?). This is a spoof of the webnovela characters as they rose and fell from the spotlight. Users had the opportunity to create their own State Farm[R] jingle, which they could download to their mobile telephone and participate for a chance to win a sweepstakes. The special featured trivia, sneak peeks and behind-the-scene content. Additionally, a guest appearance of a State Farm[R] agent was woven into No me hallo.

Univision's president Cesar Conde told Fast Company, referring to No me hallo, that one element that they were testing was if they could bring well-known artists from the TV arena into the world of web and mobile (Zax, 2011). This was part of Univision's broader strategy to experiment with interactive platforms, which evidently ushered the three Univision Interactive webnovelas: Malena, Vidas and No me hallo.

4. The social impact of the "New Media" on producers and immigrants. The new media are transforming business and culture. The concept refers to the Web 2.0, that is, the new generation of online applications that made internet content contingent and collaborative. A web site best exemplifies the previous generation of internet technologies, or Web 1.0. Users visit web sites to retrieve, not to contribute or challenge information (Friedman and Friedman, 2008). Wikipedia, on the other hand, best exemplifies the Web 2.0. Over 30,000 contributors produce and edit content as in a perennial work in progress (ActewAGL, 2011).

The so-called mashup phenomenon refers to the fusion of authored music with the music or sounds of amateurs to the point that these become difficult of impossible to discern (Hayes, 2008). The originality of the resulting piece is based in its non-originality. The music industry is vested in protecting intellectual property to secure its livelihood; but doing so may not apply to the new media content. Webnovelas are, in contrast, a genre that is open enough to welcome user collaboration and use this collaboration as marketing intelligence. This is particularly true with the fan fiction or foronovela that Wikipedia mistakenly refers to as webnovela.

Linda and Hershey Friedman argued that the diverse lot of media technologies (blogs, wilds, mashups, computer-mediated social networking) although seemingly disparate, share a small set of principles that the authors refer to as the five C's: communication, collaboration, community, creativity and convergence (Friedman and Friedman, 2008). According to the Wikipedia definition of fan fiction as webnovela, the telenovela fans collaborate in creating a story as they communicate and forge a community, through converging radio, television, movies and print material. No marketing research seems as effective as webnovelas and the new media to gather intelligence, for users contribute what they like the most: actors, songs, places, types of fiction and situations.

Research shows that business organizations have not been quick to welcome the spontaneous and participatory role of customers in product and service evaluation that the new media has made possible. Indeed, less than 5 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies currently use blogs strategically (Singh et al., 2008). They see blogs and wikis as venting opportunities for people who do not know what they are talking about. Visionary companies have, however, made the best out of this, by monitoring blogs, wikis and podcasts and creating them for their own benefit.

In webnovelas, as well as in similar user-created stories, celebrities and popular genre work in favor of the media industries. The Wikipedia definition of webnovela, which, again, actually refers to fan fiction or foronovelas, depicts how fans incorporate existing actors and music into original stories that follow well-known narrative conventions. For example, Los dias del Colegio de Santa Ana (The Days at Santa Ana School) a Peruvian webnovela written by Alfil features famous actor Diego Bertie and it is about high school girls in a ritzy Lima school, thus articulating a well-known telenovela formula aimed at teenage girls (Alfil, 2010). This foronovela celebrates the genre and the stars, and by doing so, generates not only free marketing and content for the industry but also a site from which to monitor product impact and consumer likes.

YouTube (2008) (which, by the way, features a Univision channel) and the social network sites occasionally produce celebrities that are off the beaten track and base their celebrity on the amount of hits in their portal or site, that is, on becoming "viral". These are maverick celebrities who may fabricate their own biography, and by doing so they produce fiction. As long as maverick celebrities do not compete with those of the establishment or "star system" as webnovela material, a media organization like Univision can assert its hegemony through distribution across-platforms and mashing: sentimental serial drama, new music hits, adventure narrative, game show, etc. That is, it is in the best interest of the television industry to increase their products and formula availability for internet users to collaborate in creation.

Univision is in a position to leverage what seems to be its primary competitive advantage: in the world's capital of television more Hispanics watch prime-time TV than general market Anglophone viewers. For years the industry has worried that what happened to TV in the general market will also happen with the Hispanics, that is, that they will watch less network television and will instead go for cable and the internet. It is known that young people of all ethnicities are heavy internet users. As previously suggested, La fea mas bella, Televisa's Ugly Betty saw an unprecedented downloading of episodes, when it was broadcast in 2007. This "double dipping" suggests that the internet does not necessarily compete with broadcasting but, to the contrary, supports it. Telenovelas create a bridge between the new generation and the old, between immigrants who live in the USA and their friends and relatives at their home countries. Betty, for example, appealed to both demographics. Telenovelas, or--to be more precise, "commercial sentimental serial drama"--is a genre that adapts to generational and media technology evolution (Yates et al., 2008). It is a business genre to the extent that it embodies a recognizable format that stems from the nineteenth century women magazines, i.e. blending fiction and marketing, and it is one of the world's most popular genres as well.

Academics regard the immigrants of today as constituencies that live in a new kind of Diaspora. Communications technologies keep them connected as a community no matter where they live. Culture and geography are separate in this order of things. Mexicans do not have to be in Mexico or Russians in Russia to have access to their country's media or affect what happens there from the US Telenovelas do not have to be produced by Latin Americans to be Latin American or in Latin America to be telenovelas. That is why the USA has been the most prosperous Spanish-language television producer since 2004.

Traditionally, the US immigrant media was transitional. Its purpose was, among other things, to ease assimilation into the melting pot rather than to preserve the immigrants' culture in the host country. But as mass markets fragment into niche markets (such as the ethnic) it is in the interest of the media and marketing organizations to preserve culture and to extol cultural patrimony. In the case of Hispanics, because the market is so vast and economically powerful, their niche marketing creates a cultural separatism that arguably benefits the global media and marketing industries more than the immigrants themselves.

At a conference on the telenovela industry sponsored by the Globo network in Rio de Janiero (Brazil) in 2008, I suggested that scholars to stop using the term telenovela and use, instead, a term like "sentimental serial fiction." The idea was to divorce this type of narrative (telenovela, radionovela, webnovela) from the media that disseminates it and to call attention to its resilience and--cultural and media-adaptability. Webnovelas are evidence that, although the new media empowers users to become producers rather than consumers of fiction, the narrative paradigms and the content that they produce are inspired by the mainstream. What we see in the case of the US Spanish networks and their sentimental serial drama, which is its immigrant-oriented bread and butter staple, is an increase in its domination of the media environment, not a loss of hegemony due to globalization and the new media.

The Hispanic immigrants are no longer transitional consumers of Spanish-language media that undergo a cultural assimilation process into an Anglophone society. That was before the powerful Spanish-language media began to celebrate their cultural heritage, not as something that they must not forget, but rather as a growing, stable force that lives together with, yet apart from, the American social fabric. Legal and illegal Hispanic immigrants are a part of a borderless, transnational audience addressed through the cultural separatism induced in ethnic marketing. As the new media turns them into producers of content, they are being profiled as market segments with unprecedented efficacy.

5. Managerial implications. The barriers of entry to produce webnovelas are low, but in the USA this is not how it plays out, as industry giant Univision is the one that benefits the most from this new media genre. A contributing factor seems to be that the traditional distributors of telenovelas such as Televisa may be losing some bargaining power because the Web format is more amenable to US Hispanics than for Latin Americans, who do not have nearly the same purchasing power. I do not think however, that the size, the purchasing power and the access to new media of its market is ultimately what determined Univision's hegemony. Telenovelas are popular and profitable in economically developed countries such as Spain, Italy and Israel, were consumers are as amenable to Web formats as the US Hispanics, if not more. If US Hispanic's computer literacy and purchasing power were what attracts them to webnovelas, why is it then that NBC-Telemundo and Azteca America, the two other Spanish-language/telenovela-saturated networks of the USA, do not produce these?

Rather than the size, the affluence and the computer friendliness of its consumer market, what determined Univision's hegemony regarding webnovelas is, in my view, primarily a combination of two factors: its assets and its privileged access to an international star system. Univision is at least three times the size of Telemundo in terms of broadcasting affiliates, production facilities and traditional and new media venues. More importantly, its history with Mexico's Televisa has been, albeit highly problematic, very long, and so has its history with Mexican-Americans. This population constitutes the largest segment among the US Hispanics and is hence the most influential, overall, in the Spanish-language media. It could be said that Univision and Televisa constitute together the global Latin American star system celebrity funnel. Argentineans, Colombians, Peruvians, Uruguayans, Cubans and US Hispanics enter the telenovela hall of fame through Televisa stories that Univision broadcasts and promotes across-platforms in its non-fictional fare. Who else in the world but the Univision group would be in the position to, for example, offer Kmart, State Farm and Sierra Mist the cross-platform star-studded promotion embedded in No me hallo?

However, webnovelas carry portability limitations that telenovelas do not have. The freedom of seamlessly integrating brands into a webnovela story implies a compromise not widely seen in television drama. Television industry purchasers buy serials or series knowing that any commercials can be placed between segments and, providing that the story's product placement is not overly evident, their broadcasting would not invite intellectual property or brand licensing controversy. In webnovelas the brands and products are too integral to the core story to be edited out. That inseparability between brands and story curtails webnovelas' licensed distribution, for which their launching is confined to the "channels" of a media organization.

I was in Montreal when I watched No me hallo and, being outside of the USA I was denied access to (www.NovelasySeries.com). However, I watched the 15 episodes in YouTube thanks to this new media outlet's grey areas regarding intellectual property and branding restrictions. Developing stories around brands and products allowed webnovelas to recover some of the radio drama marketing might of the narrator/announcer who associated brands and products to positive characters. But by doing so they lost the portability of television shows. These shows modular fragmentation for commercial breaks separate the fiction from the announcements, for which these stories adapt to a variety of broadcasting contexts. Simply put, a webnovela is too much of a creature of its own habitat to be, unlike telenovelas, readily sold to other media organizations.

Nevertheless, webnovelas share with telenovelas the marketing might of a Latin American global star system. Italian Gaetano Stucci, a Geneva-based European Union audiovisual industries delegate, declared at the 2010 Telenovela Festival and Market in Argentina that the lack of a powerful, globalized star system works against Western Europe's ability to compete with the USA and Latin America in the international media market [5]. The examples cited in this article regarding foronovelas or fan fiction demonstrates how these user-generated stories incorporate real celebrities and in-fashion popular music but their dissemination is potentially curbed by intellectual property law and harnessed in the impossibility of a cross-platform and polyphonic presence. In brief, webnovelas and foronovelas emerge from a same star system, but only the former has what it takes to truly capitalize on it.

Like telenovelas, is not in the nature of webnovelas to exclusively serve giant private media organizations. The Center for Disease Control, as well as a myriad of media institutions around the planet, uses sentimental fiction as a vehicle of public health and development education. Nothing prevents anybody from producing webnovelas without stars for purposes like these, or just for the sake of community building entertainment. The fields of health and development communication are full of cases in which serial fiction in all kinds of media have assisted in the prevention of domestic violence and sexually transmitted diseases, as well as in the promotion of literacy and tolerance toward disadvantaged groups. Any kind of webnovela could perform marketing or de-marketing for the public or the private sectors, for which they are likely to eventually mushroom discreetly. But defined as this article defined them: as industrially-produced commercial fiction promoted across-platforms by a media behemoth serving a powerful consumer market, they can only be, at least for the moment, the offspring of Univision.

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Tomas A. Lopez-Pumarejo

Department of Finance and Business Management, Brooklyn College School of Business, New York, USA

Notes

[1.] Webnovelas are the online version of telenovelas. They consist of fif15 five-minute episodes, and feature interactive fare such as contests, behind-the-scene material and blogging. They share key narrative and thematic conventions and a star system with telenovelas, the wildly popular Latin American version of the American soap opera. Univision, the USA's most important Spanish-language television network, launched three out of the four existing webnovelas. This means that these are primarily aimed at the Hispanic market in the USA, and hence at immigrants. Argentina-Israel's Dori Media produced the other webnovela title: Amanda O (2008), but it does not totally fit this article's webnovela definition, as it was not produced exclusively for the internet and written around brands or products for cross-platform promotion. Instead of 15 five-minute chapters like Univision's webnovelas, Amanda O offered the following breakdown: 120 seven-minutes episodes/or 19 60-minutes episodes /or 240 0.five-three-minutes episodes.

[2.] The term "Hispanic" is a US Census category that is commonly used in the trade press and organizations like the "Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies (AHAA)," whereas "Latino" is a cultural and political term. The term "Hispanic" is thus appropriate for this article written for the American Journal of Business.

[3.] Wikipedia's and Univision Interactive's definition of this term actually refers to what Argentinean scholar Libertad Borda calls "foronovelas,", i.e. fan fiction produced with Web 2.0 applications.

[4.] Bachata is a musical genre from the Dominican Republic.

[5.] Author's notes.

Tomas A. Lopez-Pumarejo teaches International Business and Management, Strategy, and Business and New Media. His two main research areas are serial drama and marketing in the new media, and outdoor advertising and mobility. He is an internationally known expert in commercial serial drama, holds doctorates from the University of Minnesota and the University of Valencia, Spain; and was awarded a Fulbright grant in Brazil and a Fellowship at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Tomas A. Lopez-Pumarejo can be contacted at: [email protected]

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: [email protected] Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints

The author thanks those who made possible the presentation of this research at events that they organized: Federico Subervi-Velez, Director of The Center for the Study of Latino Media and Markets, Texas State University-San Marcos and organizer of Assessing the State of Spanish-Language Media Conference (February 2009); Lorenzo Vilches, Director of the Graduate Program of Film and Television Scriptwriting of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and organizer of the Seminar: New Markets and Fiction Content for the Crisis, UAB School of Communications Sciences (April, 2009); and Nora Mazziotti (Universidad Nacional De la Matanza, Buenos Aires) and coordinator of the academic division of the International Television Festival and Market (fymti.mdp), Mar del Plata, Argentina (September, 2010). The author also thanks Professor Linda and Hershey Friedman (City University of New York's Baruch College and Brooklyn College's Schools of Business, respectively) for their insights on business and the new media, and Charles Edward Oliver, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Pace University, New York, for his editorial assistance.

DOI 10.1108/19355181211217634

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Author:	Lopez-Pumarejo, Tomas A.
Publication:	American Journal of Business
Geographic Code:	1USA
Date:	Mar 22, 2012
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