Chile’s Mega is encouraging viewers to rethink fatherhood with its fresh, approachable take on Telefe’s Señores Papis (Mr. Daddies), which first aired in Argentina in 2014.

Sres. Papis is the story of three fathers – a young widower in his 20s, a successful businessman in his 30s and a 40-something-year-old on his second marriage – who meet every day while dropping their kids off at kindergarten where they start out sharing their difficulties and end up finding themselves close friends.

The TV series, directed by Patricio González, premieres Tuesday, June 28 at 10:30 p.m. ET on Mega, a Chilean national network that targets the whole family, but predominantly young women aged 25 to 34. Mega reaches all Chilean households—in 2016, it has been watched by 98.4% of the country’s population.

With Sres. Papis, Mega is betting on seducing not only prime-time female viewers, but also men already used to watching fiction-based formats.

Marcelo Bravo, marketing and communications manager at Mega, says the telenovela includes various themes that “are currently recognizable and perfectly empathize with Mega’s audience.”

These themes come to life via the show’s three fathers, each of whom face different issues. These themes “relate not only to fathers, but also to women and mothers,” says Bravo.

The on-air marketing campaign is designed to “grab the interest both of our audience and of new audiences,” adds Bravo.

The campaign is based on two concepts: On the one hand, “the empathy and appeal triggered by the fathers’ flaws and weaknesses when it comes to raising children,” and on the other, “the attraction women feel when they see these three heartthrobs from three different generations with their children, which generates a mixture of tenderness and sex appeal.”

The campaign began with a series of teasers that capitalized on the series’ main theme of fathers raising children and presented the TV series’ tagline: “Madre hay una sola… y papá, también!” (“There’s only one mother…and one father, too!”). The tagline is presented in a series of voiceovers—in turn childlike, rhythmic, hasty and demanding—in which children ask their parents uncomfortable questions. These often awkward situations are illustrated in the campaign by questions on the screen. Questions directed toward the father take on a pink hue, while those aimed at the mother are gray. With the questions for their dads in the brighter color, the spots aim the spotlight on the show’s male protagonists. At the end of these spots, a mustache forms part of the logo, suggesting that being a father, while often challenging, can also be fun.

“We have not based our campaign on [Telefe’s] original campaign since the differences in the scripts called for our own particular communicative vision,” says Bravo.

In Telefe’s original campaign, the logo was made out of Legos, using that common toy to connect dads to their kids.

The plot, which has been adapted by Mega’s drama team with Rodrigo Cuevas and María Eugenia Rencoret writing the screenplay, introduces some changes to the Argentine version, such as the number of main characters: three fathers instead of four.

In its pre-premiere campaign, Mega created spots with which it hoped parents would identify. “We expect [these spots] will resonate [with parents] and trigger participation in social media,” says Bravo.

Other early promotional pieces showed the main characters interacting with their children and the women in their lives (above video).

The on-air campaign is supported by outdoor print media, radio spots, print ads and a parallel campaign on social networks and the internet, says Bravo.

“Our goal at Mega is to become a multi-platform content producer and in this sense, communication in the digital world is vital,” he says.

To this aim, the channel is developing content exclusively for social networks—including interactive pieces such as contests—that’s intended to connect TV viewers to digital communities “in a virtuous, wonderful and complementary circle,” he says.

In fact, Bravo hopes to tap into that social-media audience to create the show’s next round of promos: “We will encourage our audiences to share tender, entertaining, funny and eye-catching moments with the aim of generating new promotional material from these videos.”

To read this story in Spanish, click here.

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