Argos Media Group and Population Media Center create an Educational Entertainment center to produce fiction based on social issues

Argos Media Group and Population Media Center (PMC) created an Educational Entertainment Center that aims at the production of entertaining and commercial novels or melodramatic fiction that incorporate social issues that encourage individual changes and, eventually, collective.

Cecilia Orvañanos, director of PMC in Mexico, and Norma Aburto, Director of Marketing, Argos Media Group explained that a first training workshop on the Educational Entertainment methodology already took place. The methodology was created and popularized around the world by the Mexican playwright Miguel Sabido. The workshop was held last September at the Gabriel García Márquez Studios.

“We hope to create this Educational Entertainment Center that serves the community of audiovisual creators, while at the same time generating an ecosystem, a space for creation, that allows the opportunity for activists, creators, NGOs, specialists, writers, producers to meet; and therefore generate these stories, very commercial, but that incorporate social problems, because the audiovisual industry has a role to play in changing society,” said Norma Aburto.

PMC is a US-based organization that in 1998 decided to use Sabido’s methodology to achieve social change. “We want to use the mass media to tell stories and that these stories transform lives,” Orvañanos explained.

Sabido’s methodology incorporates, in addition to a protagonist and an antagonist, a third character who reflects the audience and that goes through a transformation during the story. A very good investigation is required in order to define the topics to be addressed, the goal to be pursued and a matrix of values to which the characters in the story answer. The stories have a 20% educational component, the rest is entertainment. At the end of the program, an epilogue or counseling is offered, as well as references to where to go for help. This methodology is used in Asia, Africa, the US, and some Latin American countries.

Televisa’s Vencer franchise resulted from this methodology. “Vencer el Miedo (Overcoming fear) was the first project that Cecilia Orvañanos oversaw from PMC in Mexico,” explained Norma Aburto.

Aburto commented that they are trying to create a laboratory of ideas, to have a projects pipeline, which includes other formats in addition to novels, and offer them to platforms and channels. The idea is that this meeting space for NGOs, specialists, and creators, becomes an ecosystem of creation.

Between March and April, another workshop will take place, with the participation of Miguel Sabido and Kriss Barker, PMC’s independent consultant, as well as two experts from Haiti and Nepal.