In the two months since its Feb. 22 launch, Televisa’s Blim, a subscription video on demand (SVOD) service, has grown to a 13,000-hour catalog of original and exclusive content in Spanish targeted at the Latin American market.

Most recently, the service added 18 new series, equalling some 300 hours, of content from Spain’s Corporación de Radiotelevisión Española (RTVE). These titles include Carlos, Rey Emperador, Los Misterios de Laura (The Mysteries of Laura), Cuéntame Cómo Pasó, as well as movies, documentaries and content for children and families.

Mario Huertero, Blim’s marketing director, says the SVOD service represents “a new stage for Televisa,” in line with what he says is one of the company’s strong points: “communication.”

Blim’s launch supports “the many years of efforts by Televisa” that have enabled the company to be “one of the world’s leading producers of content in Spanish,” says Huertero.

To that end, Blim has devised a three-word tagline: “My thing is.” (“Lo mío es”) Huertero says this concept “seeks to emphasize what constitutes the Latin American culture.”

“Blim is my thing. It’s the place where you can find the world’s most successful content in Spanish or produced in Spanish,” he says.

Several marketing pieces have been created around that tagline. A series of quick animated spots, for example, asks “what’s my thing?”

“My thing is to stay up all night watching my favorite series,” for example, hence the poor animated figure (above), who is now too tired to work and is in trouble with his boss.

All of these pieces offer an animated representation of what “my thing” is, starting with the stacked logo that says “lo mio, lo mio” (my thing, my thing) and kicking off with a sound that sounds like a noisy projector queuing up a film. The spots close with the phrase “series, movies, telenovelas, cartoons and much more at blim.com.”

These promos represent “the viewer’s points of view and [are intended to] appeal to … [our] users. [Responding to a point of view with which you agree] is a natural tendency,” says Huertero.

Other teasers also include the concept “my thing is” and then take those conversations to different places.

“In the animated pieces, we tried to introduce people’s experiences when they see a telenovela, in the filmed pieces we deal with genres,” says Huertero.

Here’s a playlist of all of the animated spots:

In the live-action pieces (the video up top and below), two people run through several genres—romance, thrill, adventure, horror—in the course of one short but dramatic conversation.

Huertero says all of the campaigns are focused on Mexican and Latin American audiences, and that “each series we release will be communicated differently, with a different look and feel, and will be advertised on different channels.”

Having several marketing campaigns “will not be a problem because everything is encompassed on the same focus: content in Spanish,” Huertero continues.

Blim’s series 40 y 20, a story for young viewers aged 25 to 35, is the service’s first exclusive original. 40 y 20 launched in early April.

For this campaign “we immediately turned to the digital networks, because it’s a series targeted to young adults,” says Huertero. The pieces focus on the series’ characters rather than on the Blim brand, including interviews with the protagonists.

The campaign also includes an online blog at Bla Bla Blim, which features lots of extra content.

Burócratas is another exclusive series for the platform, and this one is targeted to families.

In this case, “we did not treat the series as a release, but as exclusive content within the platform,” says Huertero. “We didn’t want to present two original series at the same time, but we didn’t want to lose time either, we wanted people see an attractive platform all at once.”

To promote Burócratas, Blim subscribers received an email from the service encouraging them to check out the series.

The same thing happened in the case of Blim’s release of the Fox series Wayward Pines, although, in addition to e-mail marketing, Blim ran spots for the series around Easter.

Other exclusive releases include the telenovela El Chivo, and the Spanish science fiction series El Ministerio del Tiempo.

Blim’s portfolio also includes the telenovela Ruta 35, the series Yago and the second season of La Viuda Negra. These last two will be available in late April and early May, respectively.

Huertero says in the case of La Viuda Negra 2, “we will use a similar approach to that of 40 y 20 to grab viewers’ attention.”

The campaign will run both on- and off-air so that it has more impact. Since the series has a renowned cast, “it can serve as a catapult to increase the number of platform subscribers,” he says.

Another exclusive launch is El Adiós de un Grande, the broadcast of recorded concert Un Azteca en el Azteca, in which Mexican artist Vicente Fernández says his last goodbye to his fans.

As to whether Blim will eventually produce its own originals, Huertero says “that’s where we are heading.”

However, the first objective is to “ensure that the platform stabilizes, that we understand the metrics of market supply and demand, and that we reinforce that with these exclusive series.”

He adds that “the content team also is focused on finding exclusive and renowned international content, as is the case of Spectre,” the latest James Bond film for which Blim created its own campaign.

Blim seeks to educate Latin American audiences so that “they understand that they now have the control to see whatever they want to see whenever they want to see it.,” Huertero says.

So their “thing” can be watching whatever they want, whenever they want it, on Blim.

To read the Spanish version of this story, click here.

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