Ad Age is marking Hispanic Heritage Month 2024 with our Honoring Creative Excellence package, in which members of the Hispanic community revisit pivotal projects or turning points in their careers. (Read the introduction and all the essays here.) Today, guest editor Daisy Exposito turns the spotlight to Javier Saralegui, a longtime TV exec who writes about his journey to starting DangerTV.
Javier Saralegui on his journey from Univision to DangerTV
A few months ago at a celebration at Dex, a renowned advertising agency with a primary focus on the U.S. Hispanic market, one of the partners at the agency, Gloria Constanza, asked me, “Where have you been the last 15 years, and why did you ever leave the Hispanic market?”
I replied: “I was on the Journey.”
She looked at me quizzically, silently asking me with her eyes to please explain, and so I did.
In 2007, my longtime media home, Univision, was sold to private equity. I had joined the company in 1995 and rose through the ranks—first at their one and only magazine, Mas Magazine, then taking on a turnaround as president of Galavision, their cable channel, and finally as president and founder of Univision.com.
And then, it was over. The sale of the company inevitably led to changes that the new management and I both knew were needed, and I left. I had always been opinionated and had little problem with risk, so here was my opportunity to do my own thing.
A technology called QR codes was gaining momentum around 2013 (pre-COVID, when QR codes were not as ubiquitous as they are today). Scott Falconer, a colleague—and future DangerTV partner and CTO—had patented the ability to reimagine QR codes from squares to whatever your brand logo looked like and deliver short-form video when activated. We consequently launched JAGTAG, and while not a monster success, did successfully sell the company.
Well, that was easy. My confidence in mobile as the next big thing grew, and I was also beginning to play on an international playing field.
It didn’t take long to come up with a new idea, but it took a lot longer to pull it off. Reach young men with adrenaline-laden clips and take advantage of the mobile boom. While Hispanic would continue to be a target, I liked the idea of going global as a goal and thought the only thing that we—my brother Alvaro Saralegui and Scott Falconer, both partners—were missing was a brand name that would instantly resonate around the world.
We settled on DangerTV. The Journey continued.
There was a new platform called Snapchat, with a product called Snap channels, that would stream short stories to its young user base. Perfect! ... we thought. There was only one problem: We didn’t own any content. Well, that was an easy fix—we would license clips and tap user-generated content, all on a revenue-share basis. Seemed easy enough, until we realized many syndication services, short- or long-form, had no interest in rev shares, and user-generated content, while ubiquitous, required significant curation and heavy editing (read: expensive).
Oh, and there was one more challenge: Short-form CPMs were very low. We somehow managed to produce a product that earned us Snap channel status and 500,000 followers, but we were also quickly realizing our business model was unsustainable. The Journey was in trouble.
Right around then, circa 2018, I received a short text message via LinkedIn from Samsung. In effect, they asked whether we were interested in reimagining our business as a long-form hub for our adrenaline-meets-adventure mix. That’s when we learned two new words: FAST (free ad-supported TV) and pivot! We jammed on the breaks and went long-form.
Next thing we knew, our creaky business model, the rev share, was having a moment. Hard work and serendipity were beginning to pay off. Cord-cutters and cord-nevers were affecting advertisers’ ability to reach the awareness levels required for marketing success and needed a replacement for a disappearing cable category and its reach.
Voila, the emergence of the FAST channel category ... and the advent of programmatic—and the addition of Sara Sinclair, our programmatic guru, to sell its digital (read: trackable) inventory. In effect, it was a perfect replacement for the linear cable inventory that had all but disappeared, compounded by the efficiency of programmatic ad buying and negating the need for national sales teams and offices. The combination was a dream come true for an emerging FAST channel called DangerTV. The Journey had been resuscitated.
The final chapter (to date!) came about when Samsung TV Plus and YouTube both confirmed that we were reaching a young (18-34), multicultural (51%+ U.S. Hispanic/African American) audience, which placed us in rarefied territory: minority-owned and reaching a multicultural audience. We called it Multi-Culti+, providing DangerTV with unique positioning that put it in lockstep with Marc Pritchard of Procter & Gamble’s marketing axiom: “Multicultural marketing is mainstream marketing.” Next thing we knew, we had over 200 national advertisers buying our programmatic inventory.
And so, the Journey continued, launching DangerTV Latino, our Spanish-language iteration in the U.S., on Sling Free while also launching abroad, beginning with Mexico via Samsung TV Plus. Breaking the 1 million subscriber mark on YouTube. The first-ever DangerTV Games. What else could be out there? Well, there are affinity-based membership clubs, virtual reality on Oculus-like devices, transactional VOD and then, of course, the potential of generative AI overall on the business.
And the Journey? Well, it’s been the most satisfying business achievement of my life ... and it’s still only the beginning!
*Special thanks to John Harvey, chief content officer, for aggregating thousands of hours of Danger.