85% of Hispanic Americans live near a Walgreens, and now the products they buy will be there too

Walgreens and Televisa Consumer Products announced an expansion of their distribution across Walgreens with the inclination to share additional insights into the Hispanic community. Televisa's product portfolio spans from beauty items in haircare and skincare to OTC solutions in the cough/cold and pain relief categories. 

Did you ever wonder what would happen if a broadcaster dabbled in the consumer packaged goods world? Would they be able to drive trial at an exponentially cheaper rate because they could flood their own airwaves with in-house commercials and product placements? Maybe. In the U.S. market it'd be difficult and becoming ever more so given the continued fracturing of media outlets. Network television operations today have to contend with hundreds of cable/satellite channels that are each creating their own content, not to mention relatively new primetime competitors like the Internet or mobile apps. In other words, it'd be difficult to reach a critical mass of viewers and at the same time substitute paid product placements with in-house (in other words not paid) product placements in the U.S. media marketplace. 

But that's not necessarily the case with the media juggernaut Grupo Televisa — a Spanish-language broadcaster and content producer that's larger than ABC, NBC and CBS combined. Grupo Televisa, which owns roughly half of Televisa, develops 65,000 hours of content each year, much of that telenovelas, and has an agreement with U.S. Spanish-language broadcaster to broadcast that content to U.S. viewers over the next 15 years. And together Grupo Televisa and Univision likely have a much deeper penetration into the Hispanic market than a U.S. broadcaster would have reaching the entire U.S. market. "We have believed that the Spanish-speaking market in the U.S. is a very important market," Grupo Televisa Azcarraga Jean chairman and CEO told CNBC on "Squawk Box" this fall. "When you see a population of more than 55 million and growing at the rate it's growing" there's room for Univision to expand its business. 

So it really might not cost all that much to promote those Televisa products heavily against the fast-growing U.S. Hispanic population and sharing with those consumers that those products can be found at a local Walgreens. 

As Greg Wasson noted in his recent address to shareholders, 85% of Hispanic Americans live within 5 miles of a Walgreens. And now those Americans are going to learn that some of the products with which they're already familiar through the programming they're already watching is available at the drug store they'll soon be patronizing.

It seems that Walgreens and Televisa have already tested the waters and are now looking to make a slightly bigger splash. But it also seems that if this partnership continues to go well, coupling initiatives like Walgreens' Balance Rewards loyalty program and the chain's proximity to the Spanish market with a CPG manufacturer who also happens to have a pretty extensive reach into that Spanish market may become a pretty powerful combination.