Matthias A Merzhäuser

In The Malta Independent of 11 September, Nationalist MP Robert Arrigo took a critical look at the Isle of MTV. It is good that, finally, somebody stepped forward on the subject of the return on investment question.

Reading about the broadcast in The Malta Independent, and on Maltastar.com on 4 September, I tried to check out the situation for Germany. I ended up making notes for research records and, after reading the column, decided that I had to write about it.

What advertising does MTV deliver for Germany, the most populous EU country (plus Austria and part of Switzerland as further Germanophone areas) and a key teenage tourism market?

Website finds

When you dig up the German MTV Isle of MTV website, it still shows as one of the performers Enrique Iglesias who appeared in the 2008 event. So up to early September this year, they apparently did not deem it worth updating anything since last year on their main website. If one puts “Malta” into the search, there are a few clips of some singers, but nothing about “destination Malta”, and it is just about the 2008 event.

And there is nothing about the special Isle of MTV German website on the central MTV website.

There is no information about screening dates.

Air Berlin is quoted as flying to Malta – when it does not. Why should Malta indirectly sponsor the link – to help people find flights elsewhere?

Balluta is declared a nightlife hotspot with, quote, a wide choice of clubs and bars on site.

All the tour operators linked, apart from two, specialise in teenage travel, none of them specialise in concert/event travel, so they are aimed at school kids, not the yuppies talked about in 2007 and 2008.

As far as comments are concerned, there are very few interactions, hardly any obviously Maltese, and the latest date was 13 July, so maybe there has been no great interaction since then.

Generally, as far as screening is concerned, there is no information on leading German online TV guides or MTV itself.

Timing

As Robert Arrigo rightly pointed out, if teenagers do see something on the website, will they still remember it when the booking period opens next year and persuade their parents to decide against Ireland or Britain and for Malta? And screening during school hours or at night is no help, either.

In any case, the event is a good way of showing tourists that something is going on in Malta. Just imagine that we in Malta could see XYZ for nothing!

There should indeed have been some people choosing Malta for a short holiday. But the facts/data showed no extra flights or exploding load factors.

And how many tourists actually came here specifically because they had heard about it? Were most of the tourists who went to the show here anyway, and decided it was a nice alternative to spending time and money elsewhere? Did any of them time their visit for that particular week instead of another week?

Generally speaking, the MTV of today is not the music station it was in its earlier years, now showing many ‘docu-soaps’ such as Scarred, with people breaking their bones badly and with dangling limbs, or Jackass, which shows something very similar to the behaviour of not a few ‘language tourists’, or cartoons like Happy Tree Friends – all hardly emphasising the idea of premium destination Malta.

Anyway, would anybody be persuaded to visit Malta simply for the prospect of viewing a stage where the stars perform on screen for an hour, and not much more? Will viewers remember the location – or the stars?

Would a better form of advertising not be longer travel features on TV (as this year in the case of Italy), documentaries showing people what Malta is about, or films (partly) shot in Malta (and where Malta is portrayed as a location!), or photos/articles in relevant media (such as the Malta series in the Lufthansa in-flight magazine), web-ads (as pushed for by Mario Demarco), or public transport ads (Newcastle)?

If the mass selling of products aimed at teenagers, such as MP3 players, mobile phones, sportswear, alco-pop drinks and mobile phone ringtones is the aim, then MTV is a superb marketing channel. Young adults are not the prime target group and this is reflected by the advertising.

We read that MTV is available to whatever the number is of households, but never how many actually watched the event.

Brand Malta? Or Brand Gaga?

Then there was the Lady Gaga mask stunt, the reporting of which in the global yellow press was celebrated by some of the local media as a brilliant promotion of destination Malta.

But if one were to ask some Lady Gaga fans one, two or three months later where it took place, would they remember? So, a star goes around wearing a leather half mask at a press conference in, say, Fort Lauderdale, Boston or Lisbon – are fans going to flock there? What is the core of the news item: the stunt itself or the location?

The brand that a star represents in him or herself, in this case ‘Brand Lady Gaga’, profits, but does the place really matter?

Round-up

The holding/encouraging of top events is good and makes people feel good. However, when it comes to paying e1 million per evening for a free event, the aim of which is international advertising, it is a different matter.

Just imagine that if even as few as 5,000 tourists came solely because of the event, this would have cost Malta e200 per tourist.

To illustrate what I mean, with Air Malta’s present load factors, 5,000 tourists would have meant 55 extra Airbus A319 return flights. A check of the schedules for the days around the event shows no trace of extra flights. This is generally speaking, because long load factors show the need for a fleet structure made up of economical 90/120-seater jets (Embraer 175/195), keeping A320s for trunk and full charter routes.

There would be a greater yield from, for example, helping Easyjet to run a route from Belfast, or Ryanair from Shannon (but clearly: no unfairly subsidised parallels a la Hamburg-Bremen and London), or – why not, for a change – also Air Malta, say for Southampton, or Tel Aviv or, for the latter, maybe Arkia, Israir, ElAl/Sun d’Or, maybe including a marketing campaign, or helping Efly start up a genuinely new Italian route, say Naples for summer.

For one MTV evening, it is also possible at present to lease a modern and economical aircraft for five or six months.

For four MTV evenings (e4m/$6m) one could buy a 1994-built MD-83 jet with 160 seats and many years of life left (total time 40,000hrs, 20,000 flight cycles) or a 2000-built Embraer 135LR 37-seat jet (total time 18,000hrs). Neither is ideal for Air Malta, but illustrate assets that could carry many people to Malta for many years – for four MTV evenings. Or one could improve Malta Tourism Authority’s heavily reduced resources/infrastructure (every observer will recall the cutting and outsourcing-for-the-sake-of-it-never-mind-the-quality sagas of not so long ago), carry out upgrading work (helped by high percentages of EU funds) or web advertising.

But it is also a fact that the signing of the contract for the three MTV concerts (2008, 2009, 2010), following the first one in 2007, was not done during the current administration. It saw a huge local media fuss around 1 March 2008, when it was officially announced – and there had already been a bit before. Why was the locally highly-publicised agreement made only then, obviously way too late to begin to start thinking about organising sales abroad (already the busiest period for school holiday bookings), and not in, say, August or September 2007 in order to have the right headway and be all ready for when people started thinking about booking?

Certainly, the intention may have been to put Malta on the map for big pop concerts and illustrate Malta’s capability of holding such events. But as for advertising – does anybody know that the Isle of MTV took place in The Bahamas 10 years ago or, some year in between, in Trieste? Does anybody, because of this, choose The Bahamas over Florida, Cuba, or Jamaica, or Trieste over Venice?

Moving forward

I am confident that, after 2010, if there is a market, the private sector is capable of organising such events. If the private sector can deliver, must the state move in as a new competitor? Other, less attractive, locations have successfully established themselves as festival venues without MTV.

Maybe one could ask for a very modest admission fee that most local and tourist visitors would afford (say e15 – the minimum charge in the better St Julian’s restaurants). So with 40-50,000 visitors attending, this would already mean a revenue of e600,000-750,000.

With a good share of the cost recovered through a small admission fee, if one then wants to sponsor the event, it will cost less. The stars’ own international marketing should definitely be no worse than the marketing that MTV delivers. And teaming up with specialist international tour/event operators must take place sufficiently early. In this way, more of the money would remain in Malta rather than with MTV/Viacom’s shareholders.