27 THE NEXT... MEDIA LAND GRAB
THE MAGHREB

Ramadan, the Islamic holy month devoted to daylight fasting and religious contemplation, is also the most lucrative season in the Arab television calendar. For 30 days, families across the Muslim world resume eating at dusk and then gather round their small screens to feast on a primetime schedule of period soaps, bio-dramas and talk-show specials that tackle taboo subjects. This is Christmas, the Super Bowl and a royal wedding all rolled into one as both ratings and ad rates go through the roof. Except, that is, in the kingdom of Morocco.

This past Ramadan, which ended on 19 September, Moroccan viewers inundated Twitter and Facebook with comments decrying the laughable series and lamentable comedies on their two poorly resourced state-run TV channels. Viewers either switched off or switched allegiances to the huge banquet of Arab-language channels beamed in from the Middle East. To the chagrin of the authorities, many Moroccans were drawn to the slicker productions on Al-Manar, the indoctrinated station operated out of Beirut by Hezbollah.

The collective fury of Moroccan’s under-nourished audiences only served to highlight the continuing reluctance on the part of the country’s audiovisual watchdog to allow private TV networks to operate there. The programming vacuum also explains why some of the world’s most powerful media players are now actively seizing on Morocco and the rest of North Africa as their next big opportunity.

Known collectively as the Maghreb, the Arab-speaking area stretching west of Egypt has a Berber-inflected self-identity distinct from the rest of the Arabic peoples in the Gulf and Middle East. Made up of Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritania and the disputed territory of western Sahara, the Maghreb has a combined population of around 90 million – a number that exceeds Germany, Europe’s largest media market, whose worth is projected at €60bn for 2010 by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Not that the outer southern reaches of the Mediterranean can expect similar media riches overnight. Even with more than 400 free-to-air stations, the Arab-speaking world as a whole would need to accommodate three times as many networks before boasting the kind of channel-to-population ratio enjoyed in Europe. North Africa, in particular, is woefully underserved. According to a 2008 study by Lebanese media consultants Comtrax Solutions, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Algeria were four of the bottom six countries, along with Syria and Yemen, in terms of both owning and hosting satellite TV stations.

Although observers believe it will be almost a decade before both sides of the Mediterranean enjoy commercial parity in the entertainment arena, the expected bonanza means battle lines are being drawn between local and long-distance players, each with connections to the world’s content silos. From the Middle East, with customised Maghrebi programming, has come the Gulf’s leading broadcast network MBC, as well as Dubai Media Co, and LBC, which has supplemented its regular Lebanese-based programming with a Survivor-like reality show shot in Algeria that pits North African contestants against those from other Arab regions. LBC is allied with Rotana, the entertainment powerhouse controlled by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal that is also eyeing North Africa, possibly in cahoots with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Adding a neo-colonialist dimension to the mix is Canal Plus, the French subscription network that had enjoyed a North African following before scrambling its signal. Earlier this year, the pay-TV giant returned to the region with 25 channels of sports, movies, music and family programming specifically targeted at Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia – plus the 20 million North Africans living in Europe.

For now, the most viable local competitor is Tunis-based Nessma TV, whose shareholders include Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset and Tunisian-born Paris-based media mogul Tarak Ben Ammar. Created in 2008 with €20m in backing, Nessma’s popular shows have included live coverage of this year’s Cannes Film Festival conducted from Ben Ammar’s yacht and also Star Academy Maghreb, a musical talent contest cloned from Mediaset’s Dutch subsidiary Endemol that was seen by seven million homes in the Maghreb and Europe.

Nessma means “gentle breeze” in Arabic, a name that also hints at one of the network’s underlying missions: to use the soft power of entertainment to help moderate those hearts and minds that might otherwise tend towards radicalism. As Berlusconi himself declared in French on a live chat-show alongside Ben Ammar broadcast on Nessma in August: “Nowadays nothing can influence people like TV; the press is so far away from doing it.”

The fact that two thirds of the Maghreb population is aged 25 or younger makes such persuasion all the more urgent in a region where they will help determine the successors to the various autocracies that still control North Africa. Says Ben Ammar: “These are young people who don’t read newspapers, don’t read books and that only now are starting to use the internet, but still marginally. Instead, this generation watches a lot of TV, approximately six hours a day. The young people of the Maghreb do not live in Casablanca, in Algeria, in Tunis and Tripoli, but they live on Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, LBC.” Rather than trust young North Africans to such non-secular imported channels, Ben Ammar “felt as a duty the creation of a television of the Mediterranean, which actually sends another view of the world to the homes of … the Maghreb, allowing them to open their mind towards different cultural horizons from those forwarded by the other 250 stations”.

Ben Ammar is not alone in believing that “TV is the greatest weapon today’s culture has”. Its potency was enough to prompt Saudi Arabia’s top judiciary official to issue a fatwa in September 2008, saying it is permissible to kill the owners of satellite TV networks that broadcast immoral content. On a less murderous note, Dr Abdullah Musaiqir, head of the Arab Centre for Nutrition, warned earlier this year of growing TV-inspired obesity in the Gulf States, particularly Saudi Arabia, citing a Saudi study that stated more than 53% of Saudi males live a “lethargic lifestyle”, prone to laziness, too much junk food and excessive time in front of the TV. It’s a state of affairs Western families are only too familiar with.

28 THE NEXT... LUNCHBOX
ANGEL CAT

WHEN, IN 1973, WHEN, IN 1973, illustrator Yuko Shimizu drew a cat — with an outsized head and, curiously, no mouth — she could not have known that the cartoon character would become a €680ma-year marketing phenomenon for its Japanese owner Sanrio. Last year, the character even became Japan’s ‘tourism ambassador’ to the Far East. With such a hectic schedule, Kitty needs a colleague — enter Shimizu’s latest creation, Angel Cat Sugar. Yes, it’s another big-headed cutesy cat — this time complete with mouth — arriving in the

UK first in a new Nintendo game before spreading, virus-like, to everything from fashion lines to stationery. Watch the money roll in.

29 THE NEXT... PROPERTY BUBBLE
HONG KONG

THE HONG Kong government is getting nervy about residential property market, which it fears is just a few puffs of air away from a price bubble. Indeed, Donald Tsang, the region’s chief executive recently said he may even release more land to deflate prices.

Tsang’s warning came after Henderson Land Development revealed that it sold a duplex apartment for the record price of HK$439m (€38.5m). “The relatively small number of residential units completed and the record prices attained in certain transactions this year have caused concern about the supply of flats, difficulty in purchasing a home, and the possibility of a property bubble,” Tsang told the Legislative Council in mid-October. “The government will closely monitor market changes in the coming months. When necessary, we will fine-tune land supply arrangements with a view to quickening the pace of bringing readily available residential sites to the market.”

Demand for property has surged this year, particularly for luxury units, putting pressure on the government to free up more land, which it tightly controls. The government, Hong Kong’s biggest provider of land, has not held any residential land sales for around 18 months; meanwhile prices, especially for luxury homes, are being driven up by low interest rates and demand from wealthy mainland Chinese buyers, who account for around 11% of sales, according to global investment banks. The danger is that a luxury real estate boom could hike up prices in the affordable housing sector. To alleviate some of the problem Tsang recently announced policies to promote the redevelopment of old industrial buildings that have fallen into disuse as companies use cheaper factories in China instead.