U.S. HISPANIC
Kevin Narcia of TelevisaUnivision: I’ve mastered building a concept to attract non-sports-fan audiences
Maribel Ramos-Weiner| 3 de agosto de 2022
Kevin Narcia de TelevisaUnivision
One of Kevin Narcia, coordinator and producer, Sports Content at TelevisaUnivision, concerns “has always been entertainment, so I began to make notes off the pitch”. He has four years working at Univision Miami, previously he was based in Mexico for five years.
Narcia has mastered creating a concept to attract non-sports-fan audiences
“My bosses knew that my strength is the off-field entertainment content. In 2020, trying to find content to win audiences during a time without matches, and to attract people that don’t usually watch us on open TV; I began looking for how to distinguish ourselves, not within the company, but also in the industry. I wanted to do something I had never seen before. So I had the idea to put together entertainment and sports. I thought: ‘it’s so easy and simple that no one had thought about it before, because it was there, so let’s do it,’” he said.
The project that launched Narcia’s idea was Unidos Por Los Nuestros. “The idea was to create content that stirred our audience in order to raise funds and trigger social impact. I was in charge of it and we developed all the stories,” he explained. Then the concept of “sports entertainment” was coined, and the first content directly connected to this new concept was the story of Carole Baskin, CEO of Big Cat Rescue, who became very famous in the midst of the pandemic through Netflix’s Tiger King docuseries.
“I decided to contact and interview her about the name of her organization, which is so common in the world of sports, where many teams are named after big cats. What better person to share with us her thoughts about sports teams’ names inspired by these animals? And additionally, she had become a celebrity in the midst of a pandemic. We were the first media outlet to be part of the rescue, after the Tiger King docuseries,” he said. He added that the relevance was to bring together a celebrity of the moment and sports.
“It was an enriching story that became a turning point because from that moment on we began to develop more of that type of content. It really made an impact and the company began to include capsules of this style in shows like, for example, Fútbol Central, which is an only-sports content. I gave them the formula of how to make a different sports entertainment. And that is something I am very proud of,” Narcia said.
These capsules do not exceed three and a half minutes and run in several shows on the network.
The Mexican national classic between Chivas and America was also a story that Narcia did under this combination of sports entertainment. Rather than addressing the rivalry between both teams, they compared the cultures of Mexico City and Guadalajara, “putting on the table what they have and that enriches them.”
He also developed this type of content for the Gold Cup, the match between Mexico and the US. The network liked the strategy of showing the rivalry in a positive way. So they went to Las Vegas to document cowboys participating in bull riding, and to Jalisco to record charros in a charrería display.
Before the Gold Cup, they did La Ruta Oro by generating content that made people remember their roots and watch the game. “We went to Central America and recorded stories from different cultures, in order to learn more about Honduras, Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Mexico. This allowed us to get closer to our audience, to empathize with them and have a different type of content,” he concluded.
