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Tatxo Benet, president and CEO of Mediapro, features in a new Matins Esade session

Benet surveyed the history of Mediapro, from its beginnings as a small company in Barcelona to becoming a multinational
Matins Mediapro

During his introduction of the speaker, Àngel Castiñeira (ADE 95), director of the Esade Chair in Leadership and Sustainability, stressed that Tatxo Benet has veered between journalism and direction and management, always leading communicative spaces in contexts of temporal, economic, legal, and political risk.

Transversality as a hallmark

Mediapro was founded with four people in Barcelona thirty years ago, and it has become a global company with branches in 52 cities in 29 countries and more than 7,000 professionals. The hallmarks behind this growth are the talent of its employees, teamwork, and innovation. Plus, the focus on creating a highly transversal organization, which gives everyone in the group plenty of autonomy and responsibility, has also been crucial. Likewise, internationalization has been a key factor since day one, with branches in Argentina and the United States for 25 years, followed by Portugal, Mexico, Colombia, Canada and others, making the company a global benchmark in the audiovisual sector. Mediopro’s main shareholder is now the Chinese investment group Southwind Media, but Benet claims that “the fact that the majority shareholder is a Chinese company is not so important.”

“After thirty years, we’re known as a multinational that has not lost the essence of the way we are and the way we do things. We spearhead projects that have positive effects on society, and we want to do so sustainably by innovating and defending the values that we represent as a group: responsibility, leadership, diversity, and independence,” Tatxo Benet said in his speech.

Tatxo Benet

During his talk, Benet recounted some of the milestones in his career, like when he had the vision of becoming an El País correspondent in Lleida or his later stint in TV, starting at TV3 and later becoming the head of sports and working in management. “That management required creativity and even aggressiveness,” he acknowledged, and he reaped many successes from it thanks to the fact that TV3 got exclusive rights to many sporting events. “I plunged into the issue of audiovisual rights,” he recalls, and he soon teamed up with Gerard Romy and Jaume Roures for a business venture parallel to his experiences in TV.

Mediapro is characterized by its transversal approach, encompassing a broad range of services within the audiovisual sector, which has been a key to its success. “Why are we so big and successful? Because of our transversality; because we view audiovisual content broadly, not restrictively. When Mediapro was launched, outsourcing in TV was just beginning. At that time, people who served content put too much value on specialization, but we offered a wide range of services that gave us a competitive edge and enabled us to grow,” Tatxo said.

A solid team: The key to success

Three decades later, Tatxo Benet believes that the team is the most important part of Mediapro’s success. “We didn’t seek outside help but thought that we knew the people who worked in this field and sought them out one by one. This created a very solid team that understood how we wanted to work from the very start, giving people the initiative.”

Tatxo Benet

The company currently has five different divisions. The first is audiovisual rights; they were pioneers in creating an industry without middlemen. The second is audiovisual services, which produces third-party contents. After that comes its audiovisual studio, which creates content with their own copyright, and the company also produces channels and platforms for third parties.

“We’re a project-oriented company. We live on the contracts we secure every day. And this means working really hard from project to project. We have to be truly innovative, and in this sense, the tech revolution we’re experiencing is really exciting,” Benet added.

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