Soothing the Middle East divide with music
PARIS: Amid another flare-up in Israeli-Palestinian violence, there are plenty of raised, partisan voices on either side. A new ad campaign suggests a different way to address the divide: speak, or even sing, to both sides at once.
The campaign is for a radio station, 93.6 RAM FM, that broadcasts from Jerusalem and Ramallah, reaching Israelis and Palestinians alike - in English rather than Hebrew or Arabic. The station was set up last year by Issie Kirsh, a Jewish South African. The idea came from a similar station, Radio 702, that he set up in the apartheid era of South Africa, allowing blacks and whites to speak on the same call-in and talk shows.
The station, 93.6 RAM FM, underlines its neutrality by avoiding Israeli or Arab songs and featuring the music of American, British and other English-speaking artists.
Some of them, including Bob Marley and the Beatles, feature in the ad campaign, which recently started to appear on billboards, in newspapers and magazines and on buses. The portraits are rendered through a kind of pointillist technique that uses the stamps applied to passports at border crossings, to reinforce the idea that music can surmount such barriers.
Unusually for an ad campaign in the region, the same images were used in Israeli and in Palestinian areas.
“The station views music as being a universal language that can cross all borders and reach all people, all nations and all religions,” said Guy Bar, creative director of Gitam BBDO, the ad agency in Tel Aviv that created the campaign.
The station was spending about $400,000 on the campaign, a spokeswoman said. So far, she said, 93.6 RAM FM has attracted only small audiences, but it hopes those will grow, so that it can start selling ads, too. Getting ahead of themselves
Despite the tremors in world financial markets, advertising executives have been surprisingly upbeat about the outlook for ad spending this year. Forecasts of outlays on television advertising, in particular, have been robust, as analysts cite the stimulative effects of the U.S. presidential election, the Beijing Olympics and the European soccer championships.
Is some of the enthusiasm overblown? Thats what a report from Informa Telecoms Media, a research firm, suggests. While ad agencies have typically predicted that spending on television advertising will rise by over 7 percent this year, Informa says the increase will be 5.8 percent. The discrepancy is partly caused by different ways of tallying ad spending.
Informa says it stripped out advertising production costs and media buyers commissions, which sometimes are included in ad industry spending forecasts. It also took account of discounts that broadcasters and other media owners typically provide in an effort to lure advertisers, rather than quoting so-called rate card figures.
The difference is sizable. Informa says television advertising worldwide will total $123 billion this year - tens of billions less than typical ad industry estimates.
These factors may affect estimates of spending increases, too. Discounts are particularly widespread among pay-TV channels, which have a harder time filling their ad breaks than major networks do, and in emerging markets, said Simon Murray, an analyst at Informa. Among pay-TV channels in emerging markets, discounts can run as high as 70 percent off the published rates, he added.
There has been a lot of enthusiasm in the ad industry about emerging markets, much of it justified. But Informas report suggests that the industry may be overestimating the amount of money that actually changes hands in places like Eastern Europe and Asia, where ad agencies and media owners hope strong growth will compensate for sluggishness elsewhere.
Nonetheless, 5.8 percent is still a pretty respectable rate of increase.
“I thought it would actually be lower,” Murray said. “I thought we would get a much more gloomy picture. Its not exactly ecstatic, but its not all gloom and doom.”
