Don’t bother checking your Spanish-English dictionary. Coolisimo isn’t there. It’s an invention of MTV Latino, an offspring of the U.S. group that created music television. Americans know MTV as the nation’s top music-video network, which features the likes of those animated antiheroes, Beavis and Butt-head. Behind that calculated hipness, though, Viacom Inc.’s music network has become the ultimate New Age multinational. It has more viewers in Europe than in the United States, pumps out music videos from Brazil to Japan and, starting this week, will rock in Mandarin Chinese. Its strategy is unique. While McDonald’s serves up the same burgers everywhere, MTV provides a single global brand with a product tailored to each market. “The container’s the same,” says chairman Tom Freston. “The contents are different.” But if MTV’s strategy offers an unusual road map for companies seeking riches abroad, it also reveals some big bumps in the road-in the form of tough local competitors.
Actually, MTV has little choice but to go global. After 14 years of dazzling growth, its American market is topping off. With 60 million viewers, most of those who would watch MTV are already tuned in. Abroad, it’s a different picture. Cable is still a novelty; the music market is wide and largely untapped. Since venturing into Europe eight years ago, MTV has built six international affiliates, producing 28 percent of the network’s revenues. By the end of the century, with new audiences flocking in Asia and Latin America, that could easily double.
MTV produces its worldwide programming in a number of ways. Some shows are conjured up at its six international offices, For example: “MTV’s Most Wanted,” a live music show broadcast from London. Here you can listen as a caller from Bucharest, Romania, asks host Ray Cokes, where could she find someone to install a nose ring? “In my country there are not these possibilities,” she says. MTV Asia will produce its own shows out of Singapore. But MTV also wants to produce shows that appeal to all its markets. The aim: to “leverage” its U.S. videos, getting more bang for the video buck by crafting shows that appeal in Lubeck as well as Los Angeles. “As we develop new programs, the idea is, let’s see how we can make this work around the world,” says program development chief Doug Herzog.
That’s always worked for music; now MTV is trying television. The first fruits of the new push come next fall on “The Real World,” a soap about seven young adults living together in London. (It’s based on “The Real World” series that was launched in the United States.)
An interesting experiment-the stars aren’t American. The housemates speak English, but their appeal is as much European as American. So the question… will U.S. viewers like it or hate it when their favorite pal calls home –and chats up Mom in German.
MTV Europe, headquartered in London, helps produce the new “Real World.” it pulses with an internationalism not felt in New York. The staff is a young and worldly bunch. Its mix of music videos, news briefs and zany promotional spots is instantly recognizable as MTV-but MTV with continental flair. Viewers tend to think of themselves as cosmopolitans, as Europeans rather than as Spaniards or Italians. MTV Europe creates unity by speaking English, both in news and music. Video jockeys like dance show host Simone Angel, a hyperkinetic bottle-blond with a cockney accent, strive to modulate national identities and points of view. Continental bands are welcome-sort of. Such groups as Sweden’s Ace of Base, which MTV Europe helped propel to stardom, would get scant air time if they sang in their native tongue.
That opens MTV to criticism. Brent Hansen, MTV Europe’s creative director, worries: “The audience would say, ‘You’ve taken away the real thing and given us a watered-down product’.” Rivals see that as an opportunity to crack MTV’s market. One such: Viva, a German network outside Cologne. It has little of MTV’s ever-present hipness. While MTV Europe’s studio is boisterous, chaotic and smoke-free, Viva’s is quiet, efficient and filled with the smell of tobacco. Its video jockey, a German-speaking Nigerian named Mola Adebisi, gives American music about a fifth of the air time. But he rejects MTV’s vision of a Europe with one musical taste and one common language. At Viva, German technopop is the rage.
There’s competition in Asia, too. When MTV Mandarin begins broadcasting in Taiwan this week, it will run up against a feisty rival, Channel V, backed by international media baron Rupert Murdoch. Channel VI like Viva, thinks MTV’s bigness is its Achilles’ heel. While MTV will run its studios from Singapore, V is opening up in Bombay, Dubai and Taipei. For its part, Viacom is laying plans for MTV Middle East and MTV Russia. The new markets are huge, but not out of proportion to MTV’s international ambitions. Its biggest challenge isn’t other networks. It’s how to make everything coolisimo.
