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MTV

MTV Networks has become a global brand by expanding its music television network outside of North America since 1987. Initially, MTV piped a single American feed to other countries but found local tastes varied significantly. MTV changed to regional feeds tailored to individual markets, with significant local programming and content. This localization strategy helped MTV regain viewers and advertising share from local competitors.

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17 views

MTV

MTV Networks has become a global brand by expanding its music television network outside of North America since 1987. Initially, MTV piped a single American feed to other countries but found local tastes varied significantly. MTV changed to regional feeds tailored to individual markets, with significant local programming and content. This localization strategy helped MTV regain viewers and advertising share from local competitors.

Uploaded by

Uyen Dang
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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MTV's Global Strategy

opening case

MTV Networks has become a symbol of globalization. Established in 1981, the U.S.-based music TV
network has been expanding outside of its North American base since 1987 when it opened MTV
Europe. Now owned by media conglomerate Viacom, MTV Networks, which includes siblings
Nickelodeon and VH1, the music station for the aging baby boomers, generates more than $2 billion in
revenues outside the United States. Since 1987, MTV has become the most ubiquitous cable
programmer in the world. By 2005 the network reached a combined total of 443 million households in
140 countries outside of the United States.

While the United States still leads in number of households, with more than 85 million, the most rapid
growth is elsewhere, particularly in Asia, where nearly two-thirds of the region's 3 bilion people are
under 35, the middle class is expanding quickly, and TV ownership is spreading rapidly. MTV Networks
figures that every second of every day more than 2 milion people are watching MTV around the world,
the majority outside the United States.

Despite its international success, MTV's global expansion got off to a weak start. In 1987, it piped a
single feed across Europe almost entirely composed of American programming with English-speaking
veejays. Naively, the network's U.S. managers thought Europeans would flock to the American
programming. But while viewers in Europe shared a common interest in a handful of global superstars,
who at the time included Madonna and Michael Jackson, their tastes turned out to be surprisingly local.
What was popular in Germany might not be popular in Great Britain. Many staples of the American
music scene left Europeans cold. MTV suffered as a result. Soon local copycat stations were springing up
in Europe that focused on the music scene in individual countries. They took viewers and advertisers
away from MTV. As Tom Freston, chairman of MTV Networks, explained, “ We are going for the most
shallow layer of what united viewers and brought them together. It didn't go over too well."

In 1995, MTV changed its strategy and broke Europe into regional feeds, of which there are now more
than a dozen, including feeds for the United Kingdom and Ireland; another for Germany, Austria, and
Switzerland; one for Scandinavia; one for Italy: one for France; one for Spain; one for Holland; and a
feed for other European nations including Belgium and Greece. The network adopted the same
localization strategy elsewhere in the world. For example, in Asia it has an English-Hindi channel for
India, separate Mandarin feeds for China and Taiwan, a Korean feed for South Korea, a Bahasa-language
feed for Indonesia, Japanese feed for Japan, and so on. Digital and satellite technology have made the
localization of programming cheaper and easier. MTV Networks can now beam half a dozen feeds off
one satellite transponder.

While MTV Networks exercises creative control over these different feeds, and all the channels have the
same familiar frenetic look and feel of MTV in the United States, a significant share of the programming
and content is now local. When MTV opens a local station now, it begins with expatriates from
elsewhere in the world to do a "gene transfer" of company culture and operating principles. Once these
are established, however, the network switches to local employees and the expatriates move on. The
idea is to "get inside the heads" of the local population and produce programming that matches their
tastes.

Although as much as 60 percent of programming ideas still originates in the


United States, with staples such as The Real World having equivalents in different countries, an
increasing share of programming is local in conception.

In Italy, MTV Kitchen combines cooking with a music countdown. Erotica airs in Brazil and features a
panel of youngsters discussing sex. The Indian channel produces 21 homegrown shows hosted by local
veejays who speak "Hinglish," a city-bred mix of Hindi and English. Hit shows include MTV Cricket in
Control, appropriate for a land where cricket is a national obsession, MTV Houseful, which hones in on
Hindi film stars (India has the biggest film industry outside

of Hollywood), and MTV Bakra, which is modeled after Candid Camera.

This localization push reaped big benefits for MTV, allowing the network to capture viewers back from
local imitators. In India, for example, ratings increased by more than 700 percent between 1996, when
the localization push began, and 2000. In turn, localization helps MTV to capture more of those all-
important advertising revenues, even from other multinationals such as Coca-Cola, whose own
advertising budgets are often locally determined.

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