Poles want their MTV in their language with their music
Polish programming in Polish works best in Poland. That's what foreign media companies like MTV Networks Europe and UPCtv are quickly learning about the TV market.
MTV and UPCtv, the programming arm of United Pan-Europe Communications, Europe's No. 2 TV operator, intend to create two 24-hour music channels targeted at a Polish audience. The parties formed a 50/50 partnership to launch two new stations, MTV Polska and VH1 Polska. Under the deal, the MTV's European feed, which is currently available to 1.4 million households, will merge with UPC's Atomic TV to produce Polish-language MTV Polska. Atomic has aired in Polish since 1996.
Throughout Poland, MTV Polska will replace MTV Europe, which is available via cable and satellite. MTV executives said they decided their presence on the Polish market needed to be rejigged if the station was to attract even more viewers.
"To take MTV to the next level, we needed to approach Poland in a different way," said Alex Ogilvie, MTV's managing director for Eastern Europe. "So far, we have had no flexibility to focus on the needs of a Polish audience and that will all change." According to Marek Sowa, managing director of Atomic TV, some programs produced for Atomic TV will find their way to MTV Polska. "Maybe under changed names," he said.
Polish artists have high profiles in their home country and attract substantial crowds; last year they posted record sales.
Phil Jones, programming and channel production director at Wizja TV, the digital television platform offered via satellite and cable, said that the station will mix Polish and international music, artists and videos. "What we want to do is to take the experience at the Polish market and merge it with a strong international brand, which MTV is," he said.
Few connoisseurs
Classical music radio stations have never really made a go of it. One of the first classical stations, Radio Mozart, lasted barely two years before being yanked in the mid-1990s. Another attempt, Radio Classic, targeted connoisseurs when launched in 1997 but has now abandoned the approach.
The station's metamorphosis started at the beginning of this year, when Agora, Poland's leading publishing company and owner of daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, purchased 49% of the station.
On March 1, the station relaunched under a new name and approach. The reworked station is called Radio Klasyka The Most Beautiful Melodies. "I would call it relaxing radio with no artistic values and with no ambition to inform about classical music," said Jacek Marczynski, a journalist covering music at Rzeczpospolita, one of the nation's largest dailies. "It's not a radio (station) you would listen to for the purpose of listening, and you can't learn anything from it."
The new owners of the once overly ambitious radio station said that classical music "in extenso" does not make money, as most Varsovians are neither music connoisseurs nor critics. Radio Klasyka has a much broader reach than the previous station, an Agora executive said.
"It's not a radio station for classical music lovers, it's a station for regular people," said Janusz Janiec, director of the radio department at Agora. "We know what kind of music Varsovians want to listen to most. It's film music." Radio Klasyka mixes classical hits such as Ravel's "Bolero" and Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" with film scores. "If one made a radio station for connoisseurs like that produced by public radio (PR2), one could expect to have at best three listeners and no ad revenue," Janiec said.
One of the country's largest radio broadcasters, RMF FM, runs one niche station: Opera FM. As the name implies, Opera FM plays only opera music. In the first quarter of 1999, the channel reached 0.1% of Krakow's listening market per week, according to estimates put together by Radio Track SMG/KRC. That may explain why commercial stations are so reluctant to invest in classical music.
News drive
Private radio broadcaster Radio Zet is trying to establish its name as a news provider with a month-long TV ad blitz.
The campaign, which launched with a TV spot, is the first phase of the station's news push, said Krzysztof Kouyoumdjian, PR manager at Radio Zet. He said the campaign, which features 20-second long commercials broadcast on five TV stations, will be supplemented with an additional campaign, although he refused to disclose what that second blitz would entail.
Radio Zet's TV commercials, which are airing on national public broadcaster Telewizja Polska's (TVP) channels 1 and 2 as well as on private stations Polsat, tvn and RTL 7, reinforce the station's slogan: "Information guaranteed. Radio Zet... And that's it." Kouyoumdjian said the station plans to air over 100 spots in the first four weeks of the ad campaign. He refused to disclose how much the radio station was spending on the campaign.
Radio Zet had a weekly reach of 18.7% in December, a figure that rose to 19.3% in January, according to SMG/KRC. Weekly reach refers to the percentage of respondents who listened to a radio station at least once a week.
The station ranks No. 3 on the national broadcast scene, following RMF FM and Polskie Radio's (PR) Program 1.
