Marhaba. Read about Saudi radio, for the first time only in Communicate.
Communicate, you can see, has decided to advertise its contents in its own pages. It’s genius. After all, what better target audience than Communicate readers themselves? Every now and then we’ll simply break from an article, mention a completely different one, then return to the first as though nothing happened. It’s brilliant.
Unfortunately, we can’t really take credit for this marketing leap. The truth is, television companies have been doing it forever; TV channels routinely advertise their own shows during their own shows in a bid to drum up audience numbers. It’s all part of the game: audience bang means advertising buck.
But to our well (s)trained eyes, MBC has taken this to the next level lately. Every one of their new imported US shows has not only acquired a trailer advertising the next episode (fair enough), but each of these is followed by a slick promo ad featuring a character from the show. “Marhaba,” they say, before confirming their show is on MBC.
Communicate doesn’t object to these extra ads in principle, or the practice of promoting shows, but must they occur in every single break? They’re almost as prevalent as the “behind the scenes” movie fillers used to a criminally high degree by UAE channel Dubai One, among others. These several-minute-long trailer-cum-promo programs feature clips of a current cinema hit and brief interviews with the stars and director.
They’re cut to fill those awkward minutes between one show ending and another beginning. And yes, the first time you see one it can be mildly interesting. The second time it’s tolerable; but from the third viewing onward you begin to think you know more about James Cameron’s vision of Pandora than you’d really like.
We know the use of these fillers and ads for shows has always been fairly common, but they seem more frequent than ever. We suppose the tough financial times have reduced the amount of airtime occupied by old-fashioned commercials, and the broadcasters need to fill the space.
Marhaba. The Dish. Read it first, only in Communicate.
Thanks also to those tough financial times, another imperative for the TV broadcaster of today seems to be maximizing the use of its content. In a given week, channels will show the same programs multiple times. Communicate knows this because we watched one episode of The Vampire Diaries four times. All we’ll say is, Damon is definitely up to no good, and the sulky main girl Elena really doesn’t pass for fifteen (or whatever age she’s supposed to be).
The Vampire Diaries is one of MBC’s imports, and yes, it boasts its own Marhaba ads. It’s a show that has a strange attraction for Communicate, because it seems to have been commissioned purely on the back of the Twilight saga’s success. After all, the popular books on which it is based have been around since 1991. You can almost picture the studio executives’ creative meeting: “This Twilight thing is huge. I want teens, I want vampires, I want high school, and I want it by tomorrow morning.” Credit to them, the result is pretty slick, though we’re not convinced it’s slick enough that people need to see it four times in a week.
We’ll give the TV companies the benefit of the doubt for their policy of multiple showings, though; not everyone is confined to their homes 24-7. And those of us who are are certainly not obliged to watch the same shows over and over (we just have a weird obsession with vampires).
Besides, we’re hardly in a position to criticize broadcasters for using repeats, or for un-original ideas – this is the second post-accident article we’ve handed our editor in as many months.
Alas, it’s time to go; the latest episode of Vampire Diaries is about to start, and after today there will only be three more chances to see it.