Deniz Şaşmaz Oflaz, who has spearheaded numerous successful projects within Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), has announced a significant milestone in her career.
Having managed the transformation process of BluTV into Max Türkiye and made a distinct impact with her local content strategies, Oflaz is now expanding her area of responsibility in local productions to take over the Spanish and Italian markets.
In her announcement shared via LinkedIn, Oflaz stated:
“Excited to share that my role in local productions at HBO Max is expanding. In addition to Türkiye, I will now be working across Spain and Italy, focusing on developing and scaling local content with the very experienced local team. Bringing culturally authentic stories with the right creative vision is something I’m deeply passionate about. Looking forward to this chapter.”
A Vision Extending from Local to Global
In an exclusive interview with Episode last year, Deniz Şaşmaz Oflaz emphasized Türkiye’s global strength in content exports and noted that the primary motivation behind WBD’s investment in Türkiye was its status as a “hyper-local” market. The vision she outlined back then gains strategic integrity today with her expanded role.
In our interview, Oflaz summarized the new content strategy under the Max Originals brand with the following words:
“A regional Max Original in this new phase is not merely a local success; it’s a narrative that can cross borders. It conveys universal emotions through a local perspective, boasts production quality comparable to global titles, and is grounded in authenticity.”
Click here to read our full interview with Deniz Şaşmaz Oflaz.
2026 Projects and New Goals
Having managed highly anticipated projects in Türkiye such as İlk Göktürk, Prince, and The Hammer & The Rose: A Behzat Ç. Story, Oflaz will now work with creative teams in Spain and Italy (alongside names like Elettra Canovi and José María Caro Patiño) to bring the authentic stories of these markets to the Max platform.
As she highlighted in the interview, Oflaz, who combined BluTV’s tradition of supporting independent creators and focusing on “underdog” stories with Max standards, is expected to establish a similar “creative hub” in the Spanish and Italian markets.
This new appointment of Deniz Şaşmaz Oflaz proves once again the increasing influence of Turkish media professionals within the global content ecosystem. We congratulate her on this new journey.
