Leader in the placing of brands, media and services in the Hispanic market, the executive started her professional career in the cable operator industry working for Cablevisión Continental, and she was responsible for increasing the penetration of basic and premium services and the creation of the first national advertising campaign in Spanish for the U.S. cable industry aimed at the U.S. Hispanic community.

During her tenure at Playboy TV Latin America she was responsible for all  marketing and communication, maximizing the efforts to achieve market penetration of the Playboy branded networks in Latin America, Spain and Portugal, as well as in the U.S. Hispanic market.

With a long career in advertising, specially in the development of sales strategies and planning aimed at the Hispanic market, Lucia Rodríguez joined Comcast in 2006 as Hispanic Marketing Manager, being responsible for managing Hispanic product, package and pricing, and for developing marketing and sales strategies to reach the Hispanic audience. She has recently become the Multicultural Marketing Manager for the South Florida Region and has headed the increase in the offer of programming targeting the U.S. Hispanic audience.

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Born in Puerto Rico, the entrepreneur is responsible for overseeing across all the station’s operations ­ engineering, production, sales and marketing ­ toward worldwide expansion and growth.  Mr. Rios’s career spans more than 24 years of business leadership experience where he focused on developing broadcast television, audio and video production.

He also oversaw other television projects from companies targeting Latin America and the Caribbean such as Telemundo, Univision and La Cadena del Milagro. Mr. Rios also made incursions into the advertising business when he served as Executive Producer for a variety of commercial productions with noteworthy brands such as American Airlines, AT&T, Heineken, Carnival Cruise Lines and the Walt Disney Company.

TV Vision Network Channel 30 is the first bilingual broadcast channel to launch a Spanish and English program format in the Tampa Bay area targeting the U.S. Latino market. A few years ago he joined David Barille and a group of visionaries in order to deliver a diverse mix of bilingual programming and a growing slate of original productions from music and sports, to comedy and reality-based series. "With live entertainment, we have carved out a niche of Hispanics that includes youngsters of Hispanic origin born in the United States because we knew we had to be an alternative. That’s why we don’t offer telenovelas," he explains, and adds that the expansion of the Hispanic community in Tampa, in the state of Florida, made the local TV market grow at a high rate. "First of all Mexicans, secondly Puerto Ricans and hundreds of Cubans and people from the rest of Central America make up a prosperous community that is increasing advertising investments," he emphasizes, and tells us they will continue with the strategy involving music band shows and live productions. "We brought the Mexican band Maná and we’ll go on bringing Latin artists. Now we’re betting on the production of the worldwide reality show La batalla de las bandas, which focuses on the Mexican-Montana regional music," and he remarks that they will attend the Hispanic TV event in Miami next May in order not only to share experiences, but to favor business deals and initiatives.

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The author of Dame chocolate (2007) served as VP of the Telenovela Development Division at Telemundo from 2003 to 2005. During her tenure, she carried out productions like Pasión de gavilanes (2003), Anita no te rajes (2004), La mujer en el espejo (2004-05), El cuerpo del deseo (2005-06) and Amores de mercado (2006), among others. As dialogist for well­known productions, Farías has worked for TV stations like Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), VC Televisión, Marte Televisión, Venevisión and Telemundo. Her telenovelas have received international awards such as the Meridiano de Oro, the Guaicaipuro de Oro and the Ace Award for Best Telenovela of the Year. She is currently writing exclusively for Telemundo and she is working in a new telenovela on which she cannot disclose any details. However, she speaks openly about the situation of the U.S. Hispanic television. "In a developing market and with the prospect of continuing in this trend line, the locally­produced productions that are currently being done are totally competitive at a global level, showing that they have achieved a quality level which allows them to be easily marketed and with good response anywhere in the world," she emphasizes. The speech of this renowned Venezuelan author will be given on the first day of the event, which is focused on writers and directors. It is called Writing telenovelas for the U.S. Hispanic market.

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This New Yorker of Colombian heritage lives in Miami, where he holds the position of Senior Consultant for Media Development and Digital Platforms. He leads projects for companies requiring mobile solutions and other areas related to the entertainment industry. Having a passion for business development in the telecommunications industry, he has over 18 years’ experience in all facets of traditional and digital media entertainment. Today, he rises to the challenge of assisting the development and the expansion of mDialog Corp., a service provider to broadcasters and independent producers through their innovative, state-of-the-art, online video distribution platform. "This is a pioneering system that enables distribution (encoding/uploading) of broadcast-quality video faster and easier ­ in high definition (HD) and sound, with unlimited duration or file size," he explains, and remarks that his job is to provide clients with the opportunity to monetize their content through their innovative pay­per­channel subscription revenue model. He was related to Bright Content LLC (a Brightstar company), where he worked on bringing telenovelas closer to the audience. Due to his great business sense, in 1995 he joined Discovery Latin America / Iberia as Director of the Sales Group to Members and Labor Unions, having achieved an exceptional distribution of all its channels and taking Discovery Channel to number 1 in penetration among paid channels (13.4 million subscribers in 1999). He was also the creator of Discovery en la escuela, a pilot program launched in Costa Rica, as a consequence of which similar initiatives were taken in Venezuela, Panama, Peru, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil. He later became New Business Executive Director at Discovery Networks International, setting opportunities for all the channels of the company. He led projects which generated excellent incomes for companies related to applications for interactive TV, digital networks, broadband platforms, digital land TV, pay­per­view/video on demand, and contents for mobile phones. Bernal has served in the business development areas of major companies for the Latin American and U.S. markets, such as NBC Universal, Brightstar Corp. and IDT Telecom.

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Recognized as one of the most distinguished researchers in the industry, Doug Darfield joined Nielsen Media Research as Senior Vice President for Hispanic Services in February 2001, reporting to Susan Whiting from the Global Technology and Information Center in Oldsmar, Florida. He leads the Hispanic Services group and works closely with the general managers of the national and local business units. He greatly contributes by leading the company’s Hispanic research functions and serves as Nielsen Media Research’s industry representative. Doug gained great experience spending over 10 years as Vice President/Director of Research for Univision network, where he was involved in a number of important advances in the understanding of the U.S. Hispanic market, including the development of Nielsen Hispanic Television Index (NHTI) and Nielsen Hispanic Station Index (NHSI) services, the DRI/McGraw-Hill reports on the U.S. Hispanic consumer market, and the Simmons Hispanic Study, among others. Then he served as Research Consultant for Televisa in Mexico City and was Director of Network Research for Hispanic Broadcasting Corp.. His intensive work on research led him to the position of Chief Strategic Officer for EMC3, an on­line media exchange in Mexico City. Doug began his career in broadcasting as a Research Analyst at Petry Television, and subsequently served as Research Manager and then as Vice President⁄Director for Research at Seltel before joining Univision.

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