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events. Ideally shows should have an exciting ¤rst segment to keep the viewer
watching. The programmer has to balance between keeping the viewers inter-
ested in the station’s own programming and distributing advertising time to
sponsors.
Although Egyptian television sells advertising time, the pattern of structur-
ing ®ow in Egyptian television differs markedly from American or European
television. Some of the difference is attributable to the fact that Egyptian tele-
vision is a state monopoly. Hegemonic discourse that seeks to make political
agendas invisible alternates with direct state messages presented more explicitly
than would be the case in the United States or Britain. The insertion of adver-
tising is connected to the state’s free-market economic policies, but the televi-
sion system itself is a hybrid. Much of the programming is privately produced,
but all programming is ultimately controlled by the state.
The analysis below of the pattern of advertising leading up to the Fawazir
Ramadan is based on a recorded segment. Ideally one would examine the process
from the perspective of the programmers, but thus far I have been unable to do
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so. However, I have been told by an Egyptian acquaintance in the advertising
industry that certain assumptions one might make about American television
advertising might not pertain to advertising in Egypt. My informant is the
owner of an audio recording studio, which I happened to be visiting during
the making of a television advertisement for chocolate-covered croissants. The
creative process began with the studio owner playing various tunes on his syn-
thesizer until the advertising agent heard one that he liked. This was the melody
to “The Twist” by Chubby Checker. Then a singer was brought in and words
were made up on the spot, having to do with a sad man dragging himself
through his morning until eating a delicious chocolate-covered croissant, at
which point the “Twist” music kicked in. It took about an hour and a half for
the studio owner, in consultation with the advertising agent, to ¤ne-tune the
lyrics, and for the singer to perform it to everyone’s satisfaction. The tape was
made and sent on to the television studio, where someone else would have the
responsibility of creating visuals to go with the music.
My studio-owner informant insisted that the process of making advertise-
ments such as this one was as haphazard as it appeared. According to him, one
of the main reasons for operating in this way is that the state does not permit
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marketing research. It is true that advertisements were by no means my in-
formant’s true love; he only worked on them because piracy in the music busi-
ness had made it dif¤cult to make a living purely as a performer. His lack of
commitment to advertising as a business may therefore have contributed to his
disdain for it. Nonetheless his opinion that the advertising executives had abso-
lutely no idea if the advertisements really worked was striking. He believed that
for many of the companies who produced advertisements for television the ad-
vertisements were entirely a product of vanity. By the logic of capitalist enter-
prise this sounds counterintuitive. Television advertising time in the U.S., for
example, is an expensive high-stakes business. Why invest in advertising if the
effectiveness of such publicity is dubious? 14
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