The Spanish umbrella will host companies such as Onza Distribución, Mediapro, and Wild Stories.
The Dubai International Content Market (DICM) is already a preferred destination when it comes to establishing contacts in the MENA region for marketing television content. To promote the role of the Spanish audiovisual industry in the area, ICEX España Exportación e Inversiones is organizing the first Spanish participation with a Spanish Pavilion in the next edition of the DICM.
The Dubai International Content Market, now in its fourth edition, offers an ideal opportunity to position the Spanish product in the territory. With more than fifty exhibitors, the market gathered around 600 buyers in its most recent on-site edition, executives from the main television channels and digital platforms from more than 30 countries. Audiovisual From Spain, as the umbrella brand of the sector, will host companies such as Onza Distribución, Mediapro, and Wild Stories.
Carlos Garde, general manager of Madrid-based Onza Distribución, said: “Increasingly, the MENA territory is becoming a key market for us. Thanks to the international success of Spanish shows around the world, clients in this region are showing greater interest in including our content in their programming or on their platforms…It is a growing region where there are some countries with great purchasing power and at the same time great interest in the productions we have in our catalog.”
According to Garde, “telenovelas have always worked very well in the territory, as have documentaries. The audience strongly identifies culturally with our products and that is what has made MENA a key territory for our distributor.”
Onza will offer at the next edition of the Dubai market the documentary series Al Ándalus. The Legacy, a production of six one-hour episodes that shows the footprint that Arab civilization has left around the world, in many cases unknown.
Among other powerful productions of great interest for the territory that Onza will present at the DICM is the documentary series Real Madrid. La Leyenda Blanca, a production of six 45-minute episodes on the club’s best moments, with never-before-seen images and testimonials and the collaboration of the most popular players and coaches, as well as fans from all over the world, communicators and experts, and well-known personalities from different fields such as actors, tennis players, singers, etc.
Additionally, Onza will be presenting TVI’s telenovela Forever, which just successfully premiered in Portugal and will continue with the pre-sale of the police thriller “Valkirias Motel,” a co-production of the Galician company CTV with the Portuguese company SPi, which will be available in 2022.
For the documentary distributor Wild Stories, led by Pablo Alemán, given that its penetration in the MENA territory is not yet considerable, its desire to be at the DCIM is due to the search for greater knowledge of a market in which, he believes, “nature documentaries have great potential, since it is generic content that for cultural reasons should work well in these countries.”
Although the MENA territory does not yet represent a significant weight for Wild Stories’ sales compared to other regions such as Europe and Asia, the distributor is confident that this situation will change and that it will be able to start growing in a region it is looking at with interest.
“So far our most important sale in MENA has been the series Jungle Planet (26×26′) to Qatar’s Al Jazeera TV, a leader in the Arab world. The rest of the sales in the area are part of global or regional agreements with outside television operators, not national or regional television stations in the territory,” Alemán explained.
At DICM, Wild Stories will offer buyers two high-potential series: Wild Fighters (6×52′), an action-packed production about the motivations of fighting in the animal world (territory, food, reproduction, hierarchy, and clan protection), and Wild Latam (10×52′), about the wildlife and natural icons of Latin America from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego.
Dubai International Content Market, MENA’s biggest gathering of media professionals will be held on the 24TH & 25TH of November 2021 at Jumeirah Beach Hotel Conference Centre. The Audiovisual from Spain stands is A1, B2, B4.
