El Rey Network, the male-centric channel founded by director Robert Rodriguez to reach Latinos and others in the 18-to-49 demo, wants to expand its base by reaching out to working-class men of all backgrounds, a reaction in part to the surprising election of Donald Trump as the next president.

The network’s target group, dubbed “strivers,” represents working- and middleclass male viewers who defy typical age and race metrics to represent more of a sociographic class, network president and general manager Daniel Tibbets said. He pointed to a recent Wall Street Journal report stating that this group of Hispanic, black and Asian workers, ages 18 to 63, with less than a bachelor’s degree level of education, is projected to represent the majority of U.S. workers by 2032.

Tibbets, former chief operating officer of digital content service Machinima, spoke with Multichannel News programming editor R. Thomas Umstead about the 45-million subscriber network’s new brand positioning and its plans to increase original programming by 50%, both on the linear channel and on social media platforms.

MCN:How would you currently define the El Rey Network brand and target audience?

Daniel Tibbets: I would define it as a multiplatform brand that represents the voices, tastes, lifestyle and attitude of culturally diverse people everywhere. It has been, and continues to be, positioned in a very authentic viewpoint as representing America, which is very diverse — something I don’t think entertainment companies have done that authentically right.

Today, you hear a lot about diversity and a lot about companies saying, “Oh we have to go there.” That’s not authentic. When Robert created this network, he created it because he wanted to have people like him represented on the screen in the right way. So when we think about development and programming production, and even our operation as a whole, we’re living, breathing and talking about that point of view in the right way.

What we’re starting to say now is that our audience is working-class America, which is now becoming middleclass America. So that working-class, middle-class America is the social-economic status that we’re seeing.

One of the leading factors of this, which I think is not being addressed in the market today, is that by 2032 the majority of the working class/new middle class of America will be the minorities in this country, and it’s being led by Latinos. We’re calling our audience strivers because when you look at who is ultimately watching our network, that’s who they are.

We’re not going away from our Latino heritage or positioning. It’s the simple fact that our audience, from a social-cultural-economic standpoint, is growing and it’s growing to be more diverse.

MCN:How do you sell the network’s more sociographic focus to advertisers who are predominantly looking to reach viewers by demographic?

DT: What I’m finding is, advertisers are more interested in following the consumer across dayparts and devices. So, if I know I’m going after a particular psychographic consumer — which is more valuable to me as an advertiser, because I know exactly who they are and know their buying habits and what they’re interested in — then the question is, how am I tracking while they’re using mobile or the computer while they’re watching TV?

We’re following that consumer and providing them the information about my brand, and that’s more valuable at the end of the day to advertisers. We know who that consumer is and we know that they skew African-American and Latino, and we know that they’re watching the brand across multiple platforms.

Right now, our total audience viewership is more than 50% minorities — African-American, Latino and Asian. So we made a strategic decision to focus the brand voice on this new working class and middle class we define as diverse people that live by a code and are going to leave their mark. They create their own lane and they’re not following the status quo. They’re looking to achieve independence; they excel at a craft. When you say working class, I think a lot of advertisers identify with that.

MCN:How will El Rey’s content reflect the network’s new brand identity?

DT: I think what the election kind of highlighted is that working-class America goes home. They want to click on the TV and they want to be entertained. El Rey does that very well, whether it’s through kung fu and action movies or original series like [wrestling series] Lucha Underground — it’s escapism.

We’re making a big commitment to do even more original programming in 2017, which we’re going to talk about after the first of the year. But all that development is falling into the lines of our commitment to target strivers and feature diversity in our programming.

We’re going to be moving into non-scripted lifestyle programming that again represents the hobbies and interests of strivers … one can imagine the docuseries that we can move into. Scripted of course will remain a big foundation of the network. We will continue to talk about some new scripted series in 2017.

MCN:Will you look to be aggressive in developing programming in the digital space?

DT: There will also be original content creation that absolutely represents our brand and our audience in digital and social media. We want to develop content that creates interest and excitement for the brand on Facebook Live or Snapchat or YouTube — whatever the digital platform is — but also creates awareness and viewership for the network as a whole. It becomes more of a content brand strategy.

Fans of lucha libre can now enjoy a second season of the Mark Burnett-produced Lucha Underground, El Rey Network’s hour-long weekly reality series about the action and stars of Mexican-style wrestling.

Burnett is teaming with United Artists Media Group, El Rey Network chairman and founder Robert Rodriguez and FactoryMade Ventures, a Los Angeles-based "entertainment and media incubator" and El Rey co-owner, on the second season. Production is underway in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles.

The series will air Wednesdays at 8 p.m. (ET/PT) staring Jan. 27. Leading up to the second-season premiere, El Rey will air five hours of back-to-back episodes from season one on Wednesdays from 8 p.m to 1 a.m., starting Jan. 6. El Rey will then hand over its entire programming grid to Lucha Underground with a 40-hour marathon of the entire first season from Saturday, Jan. 23, at 10 a.m. (ET) to  Sunday, Jan. 24 at 2 a.m. (ET).

“Mark Burnett and his team have delivered a truly compelling series and we are proud to bring the ancient traditions of lucha libre to life in an unexpected and action-packed format that has become a favorite for wrestling fans everywhere," Rodriguez said.

Meanwhile, El Rey has confirmed that its signature offering, From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series, will return for a third season. El Rey Network's lineup also includes a wide range of cult films and TV series.

Nearly two years after launch, El Rey Network is making a name for itself on the cable network landscape. The network — born in 2013 as one of four new minority-owned networks supported by Comcast under the Federal Communications Commission’s conditions for its 2010 acquisition of NBCUniversal — gained about 12 million subscribers year-to-year to hit the 36 millionsubscriber mark in August, the biggest such gain of any national service tracked by Nielsen.

El Rey can point to quality original series, including horror-themed From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series; Latino pro wrestling series Lucha Undergound; and acquisitions of mainstream fare Constantine, Almost Human, The Twilight Zone and Freddy’s Nightmares via a pact with Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution .

The architect of El Rey’s success is filmmaker and network chairman Robert Rodriguez . Rodriguez spoke with Multichannel News programming editor R. Thomas Umstead about the network’s evolution and programming strategy, and about the Hispanic television marketplace.

Multichannel News:Two years after El Rey’s launch, is the network where you want it to be?

Robert Rodriguez: It’s been terrific. We’ve really expanded our distribution — we’re in more homes than ever and we’ve had the opportunity to play with our programming. Every time you move one thing it creates a different result, and it’s very exciting. We have a lot of originals — it’s rare for a new network to have this much original programming right out of the gate, so we’re really proud of that. For me, it was fascinating to figure out how a network works compared to a movie. With a movie I know that if I write a script, we go shoot it and it gets released. Now we can see with the network that if we make these kinds of moves it pays off in a certain amount of time. We can keep being bold and experiment because we can adjust very quickly, unlike a movie where once it’s released, that’s it. The network is a constantly evolving beast.

MCN:When the network was first launched it was focused on reaching English-language Hispanic viewers. Two years in, how would you define the network now?

RR: It’s a visceral content network. We’ve been trying to reach men 18-49. There aren’t a lot of options for men, so we wanted to create a network that appealed to that group, as well as to kick-ass females — we have bad-ass females in most of our shows that draw a lot of female fans — but the focus was to create a real visceral, action-adventure network. We’ve kept with that and expanded what our reach is, and we’re very happy with it.

MCN:You’ve brought some of your signature movie franchises, such asDusk Till Dawn, to the network but you’ve also brought some Hispanic -themed content, includingLucha Undergound, which you produced with Mark Burnett. Were you surprised at the success of the wrestling series?

RR: It’s kind of what we had hoped, but you’re always surprised when it works this well. It felt so fresh, so new and so different that we were hoping people would catch on. This has never been seen before — there are so many things in Latin culture that have never been shown on television. It’s kind of why we’re doing the network — if people had a chance to see our programming done in the right way, they would get turned onto it and love it. [Hispanic-themed content] is popular for a reason in other countries, but I don’t think it’s been translated correctly here.

MCN:You’re now in the second season ofFrom Dusk Till Dawn. How has it evolved from a movie into a television series?

RR: The first season was about retelling the movie in a new way because I wanted to use Quentin [Tarantino’s] characters but I couldn’t do a direct sequel because a lot of the characters died [laughs]. I had to retell it and have different things happen to people. In season two it’s a completely different story … you feel like you’re seeing a sequel to From Dusk Till Dawn because all of the characters are doing completely different things. It’s really interesting and suspenseful, and the season is great.

MCN:You mentioned Latin culture-themed content on television. Are we seeing more of that type of content on television today or is the industry still not doing enough to provide such images to a growing multicultural audience base?

RR: I haven’t paid a lot of attention to other networks. I thought there was more, but I saw numbers recently that there really wasn’t more and a lot lower than I thought. [Latino] representation in front of and behind the camera on other networks in primetime is like 2% to 3% when the country is 17% Hispanic. But on our network it’s crazy … our network is 60% to 70% [Hispanic ] — it can be done if that’s your focus, so there’s really no excuse. It can always be better.