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Brazil’s winning game-plan
By Jonathan Wheatley - Published: June 5 2008 19:15
From 6pm to 10pm, Monday to Friday, viewers get the following: a soap opera; local news; a soap opera; national news; another soap opera. Thereafter they get football on at least one evening a week and a Hollywood film on another. A mix of sitcoms and popular-interest current affairs fills up the rest. Weekends and daytime weekdays are dominated by another staple: auditorium shows, in which household-name presenters serve up celebrity interviews, live acts, competitions and real-life dramas.
This, says Octávio Florisbal, Globo’s director-general, is one secret of the network’s success: a rigid, “horizontal” schedule – unlike the varied, “vertical” schedules common in the US and Europe – that is best suited to capturing viewers and making them loyal. Another secret is the fact that Globo produces almost all its own programming, using writers, actors, journalists and technicians who are all tied to the network and create programmes in an instantly recognisable house style.
And what a style it is. Globo’s space-age logo, which goes “bling, bling”, says it all. Its soap operas, or novelas, feature recognisably Brazilian types from around the country (a heavy bias towards the Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo axis notwithstanding) in recognisably Brazilian settings behaving in recognisably Brazilian ways. They deal with issues of daily concern to viewers, such as crime, under-age sex and drug-taking – except that this is not quite Brazil, because everybody and everything is just a bit, often a lot, better-looking and less alarming than in real life. The poor, especially, do rather better in Globo’s world than they do in the real one: they are better fed and clothed, get on better with their middle-class employers and live in favelas – Brazil’s ubiquitous urban shanty-towns – that leave the real thing literally in the dust. “The Brazilian people face enough difficulties in their everyday lives,” Florisbal says. “They don’t want to see more suffering. That’s not what they want from Globo’s novelas.”
But if Globo is not changing, its viewers are. The economy has been picking up and earnings have been rising for some time. In the past two years alone, 20m people have entered the middle-income bracket, which now comprises 46 per cent of Brazil’s almost 190m people. That means more people should have more time and money to do other things than sit loyally through Globo’s horizontal schedule.
Bars, restaurants and cinemas are obvious threats, although middle-income Brazilians are not rich enough yet for these to make too much of an impact. The internet and pay-TV have caused concern, although their effect is marginal; pay-TV is present in just 6 or 7 per cent of Brazil’s 50m households.
Competition for people’s leisure time, it seems, does not come primarily from these sources – the bugbears of American and European schedulers. What rising incomes have produced is fierce competition for television audiences and the advertising they attract.
Figures on audience and advertising share are hard to come by. Ibope, a market research company, supplies them to broadcasters, who only release what they please. Daniel Castro, a television columnist at Folha de S. Paulo, says Globo’s share of television advertising is holding steady at about 70 per cent. But this share has come under threat. Globo says its average audience from 7am to midnight has fallen but it does not reveal its prime-time evening audience, which Castro says has declined over the past three years.
Who is eating into Globo’s share? Not, apparently, its traditional rival channels, SBT and Bandeirantes, but a relative newcomer, Rede Record, with a new winning formula that has been in place since 2004. And that formula is: copy Globo. Alexandre Raposo, Record’s head of television, says that after a lot of research it came up with a new horizontal schedule consisting of novelas, news, football and auditorium shows. Its weekday prime-time schedule differs from Globo’s only in the order of the novelas and news programmes. The result is unsurprising yet still striking: Record’s novelas look just the same as Globo’s, down to the actors, the sets and even the opening credits and graphics.
“Of course, this is our strategy,” Raposo says. “We are using the conditioning that is already present in the viewer. And 80 per cent of our professionals are from Globo.” Record has poached so many of Globo’s people in the past couple of years that it is a wonder Globo has any left.
Yet Record’s novelas differ from Globo’s. Vidas Opostas (Opposite Lives), which ran for 240 episodes in 2006 and 2007, was a novela set in a favela that actually looked like a favela, complete with drug-dealers and corrupt policemen. It picked up a string of awards and healthy audiences. Record followed that success with Caminhos do Coração (Ways of the Heart), in which middle-class characters leading ordinary lives are beset by mutants shooting death-rays from their eyes, an allegory for the evils – from petty crime to corrupt politicians – that plague Brazilian life.
In ultra-realism and the surreal, Record has found ways of adding to Globo’s winning formula. Earlier this year, Caminhos did for Record what no Brazilian network has managed before: it notched up a prime-time audience more than half the size of Globo’s.
Globo is not panicking yet. Its strategy remains the same: no change. “As the market leader, with the audience we have, we can only change very slowly,” says Florisbal. Meanwhile, it seems that Globo runs the risk of being eaten by its own clone. Sounds like a novela for Record.
Comentário: O debate chegou à esfera internacional. O Televise compartilha com as observações e previsões do Financial Times, conforme vem apontando ao longo de todos esses meses em que abordou a luta pela audiência travada pela TV Globo e TV Record. E reforça a necessidade de as outras emissoras abertas entrarem nessa briga. Quem ganha com isso é o telespectador.
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