Canela Media: The goal is to cover all LatAm by 2024

Eric Tourtel, president for LatAm of Canela Media, the priority is to make the platform well known in the region. Although Canela is already present in Mexico and Colombia, Tourtel intends to rapidly increase its reach in both markets before the end of the year and, for 2024, extend its presence to the rest of the countries to “offer agencies and their clients regional planning.”

“We want to offer fairly easy regional planning with something new, both in terms of content and the formats that we are going to evolve, and we are going to bring many pure and hard digital metrics to TV, the great strength that CTV (connected TV) has,” he said.

Tourtel, who left Teads to change his line of work, reconsidered after several people wanted him to continue in the market. One was Isabel Rafferty, CEO and founder of Canela Media, whom Tourtel admired. “I have loved the energy of Canela and everything it has done; I have been impressed by the positioning Canela achieved in the US in a very short time. I met Isabel Rafferty four years ago when I was explaining to her the media in Latin America when she had just launched Canela in the US; since that day, I have been following her trajectory,” he commented.

Tourtel also wants to expand the team serving Latin America. “I have begun to get to know many of the people at Canela, so I am less surprised by its success because it is a high-performance people. I believe in bringing in people like me with fresh eyes from a different market. I sold pure technology with a lot of energy and knowledge of the market, which can be a good mix with the quality and innovation that Canela already brings, both technically and in terms of content. Canela made the first interactive campaign for CTV in Latin America.”

“The original content of Canela is groundbreaking, concepts absent from other channels; it provides exclusive content; it allows it to attract a large audience; it provides new formats and ways of measuring, buying, optimizing, and delivering long-format video advertising, which can attract advertisers quite quickly,” he pointed out.

FAST OVERVIEW
Asked about the evolution of FAST, Tourtel said it has grown faster in the US than in LatAm, especially in terms of connected TV. “Above all, because the upgrade of TV sets in the US has been faster than in Latin America. But unlike the US, LatAm has people spending hours on public transport, which is why they will increasingly watch more connected TV on their mobile phones”, he explained.

He said FAST channels are expected to contribute significantly more between 2023-2029. He referred to a study by Digital TV Research reporting that, between 2023-2029, LatAm AVOD and FAST will contribute US$3.5 billion and SVOD US$2.8 billion. “We are talking about very relevant numbers.”

He added that revenue from TV episodes and movies on OTT will increase for the 19 Latin American countries by US$7 billion between 2023 and 2029, reaching US$17 billion, with FAST and SVOD being the most important.