Media · Agency · Wellness
A guide for brands arriving from abroad
How the Spanish media actually work
Not a directory. The shape of the system: who feeds whom, which layer a foreign plan always forgets, and the two months of the year in which nothing you launch will be read.
The structure
Four layers, and they do not work like yours
Every media market has its own physics. These are the four things that behave differently in Spain from the way they behave in Britain, the United States or Germany, and each of them changes what a launch should do.
The layer above everything
The wire agencies
Two agencies feed almost everyone else: EFE, which is state-owned, and Europa Press, which is private. Between them they supply copy to national dailies, regional dailies, radio bulletins, television newsrooms and digital outlets, many of which will publish an agency story with little or no rewriting. Others matter too — Servimedia, Colpisa, and the public Catalan agency ACN — but those two set the weather.
This matters more than it does in Britain or the United States. There, a story tends to belong to the title that broke it. Here, one agency take can appear in dozens of places within hours, credited to the agency. A campaign that ignores the agencies and goes straight for the national dailies is working against the grain of how the system distributes.
The national press
Shorter than you expect, and not only the famous names
The national general dailies are a short list — El País, El Mundo, ABC, La Razón — joined by two Barcelona titles with national reach, La Vanguardia and El Periódico. The business press is its own tier: Expansión, Cinco Días and El Economista, read by a different reader for different reasons.
Two things surprise people arriving from abroad. The first is that the most-read newspaper in the country is a sports daily, Marca, with El País now close behind — a reminder of how much of the national conversation happens outside the general news pages. The second is that a plan built only around the historic mastheads misses where a great deal of the audience now is: the digital natives, El Español, El Confidencial, eldiario.es and OKdiario, which lead the online rankings, and the free daily 20minutos, which prints more copies than any paid title.
Radio
The medium foreigners underestimate
Radio in Spain is not background. The big morning and late-night programmes on Cadena SER, COPE, Onda Cero and RNE are appointment listening, and an interview on one of them reaches an audience a mid-market print piece does not. The list is not only Spanish-language and not only national: RAC1, which broadcasts in Catalan from Barcelona, sits among the most-listened stations in the whole country.
It is also the format that punishes an unprepared spokesperson hardest: live, in Spanish, with a presenter who will interrupt. It is the single strongest argument for rehearsing before saying yes.
Television
Public, private and a broadcaster in every region
Nationally there is the public broadcaster, RTVE, and two private groups: Atresmedia, and Mediaset España, which is now the Spanish arm of the Italian group MFE-MediaForEurope. Each runs several channels. Underneath that sits something with no equivalent in the UK or the US: a full set of regional public broadcasters, each with its own newsroom, its own schedule and its own commissioning — TV3 in Catalonia, under the 3Cat umbrella, EITB in the Basque Country with channels in Basque and in Spanish, Canal Sur in Andalusia, Telemadrid, À Punt in Valencia, Aragón TV, TVG in Galicia and the rest.
For a brand that fits a programme rather than a news bulletin, that regional layer is the most accessible television in the country, and it is almost always the one an international plan forgets.
The layer nobody plans for
The regions, and the other two languages
Spain has a strong regional press, and in several territories the regional daily is the paper that leads locally — ahead of any national title. A campaign built only around Madrid can be perfectly executed and still leave most of the country untouched.
On top of that, two regions have their own working language in the media. In Catalonia a large part of the press, radio and television works in Catalan; in the Basque Country, in Basque. These are not translations of the Spanish outlets. They are separate newsrooms with their own editors and their own agenda, and they are reached by writing for them, not by copying them in on the Spanish release.
This is the layer where a foreign brand most often finds its first real coverage, because it is the layer the competition has not bothered with.
Timing
Two months when nothing you send will be read
The Spanish media calendar has holes deep enough to sink a launch, and they are not the same holes as in the United Kingdom, the United States or Germany. Planning around them is free. Ignoring them is expensive.
What it means for you
Four consequences, if you are arriving from outside
Write in Spanish, not into Spanish
A translated release reads as translated, and a Spanish editor stops at the first sentence that was clearly built in another language. The argument has to be rebuilt, which is a writing job.
Plan for the agencies, not around them
What EFE or Europa Press take, the rest of the system distributes. Build the story so that it can be taken.
Have someone reachable here, in the morning
Spanish newsrooms close in the afternoon. A spokesperson who is only available from another time zone, later in the day, is a spokesperson who does not appear.
Do not buy a promise of a specific outlet
Nobody can guarantee you a named newspaper on a named date. What can be committed to is the work, the sequence and the honest read of whether the story stands up. Anything more than that is advertising with a press invoice attached.
Where to go from here
The same market, read from three different places
For UK brands
Your British cuttings do not travel Why UK coverage carries no weight here, and what a Spanish editor asks instead.For US brands
Spain is not your Latin America strategy Spanish from Spain, claims that do not survive the crossing, and nine hours of difference.For German brands
Everyone helps you set up. Nobody gets you known Where the entry package stops, and why specification is not a story here.