Omni: Presence then silence then absence.

/
0 Comments
-->
This post is a slightly expanded version of the opinion piece I wrote for New Canadian Media in May 2015.




There are inherent dangers and risks in launching an ethnic channel or publication. In recent times we have seen both new players and well established ones ride into the sunset.

Mehndi TV made a comet-like appearance, flashed across our airwaves for a year, only to fade to black. That was a couple of years ago. It has since appeared in another constellation – on the website for Channel Zero.

Multimedia Nova, a publishing group whose newspapers included the 59-year-old Corriere Canadese shut its presses in 2013.

The 53-year-old Canadian Jewish News shut down its print edition and went all-digital in 2013.

But the Omni announcement makes me wonder if something else is at play here.

I wonder, for instance, if Omni was “too ethnic”? In other words, did Omni take an oversimplified content strategy with the ethnic consumer?

Allow me to explain. There is too often a rush to dumb down our understanding of Canada’s multicultural markets. Too often, ethnic consumer targets are rendered into shapeless homogenized blobs that bear no resemblance to what is actually a much more finely nuanced, multi-faceted cultural reality. A content or advertising strategy created for these fictional language-centric monoliths produces fuzzy, undefined work that has little appeal or relevance.

It is tempting to limit or define foreign cultures by language just because it makes it more convenient to sell airtime or diapers or haircuts or oranges but this is both facile and dangerous. After all, there are cultures united by language and separated by geography and, equally, cultures separated by language and united by geography. Add religion and history and we start to see an incredibly complex mosaic. There is rich irony in the mental visual of senior Omni TV executives closing their eyes to this.

Worse, this oversimplification is often combined with an attempt to keep new Canadians in their ethnic boxes. To do this is to deny the powerful narrative contained in the immigrant journey and to forget the impact that becoming Canadian has on the immigrant life. A Chinese citizen in China is not the same person as a Chinese Canadian citizen in Canada.

The words over the Queen Street viaduct remind us “the river I step in is not the river I stand in.” As we make our way in Canada, Canada changes us. And we change Canada. This is powerful stuff that is rich territory for original content.

In fact I think Omni could have significantly helped its cause by taking a leaf out of CBC’s book by using original Canadian content in the official languages to target the multicultural Canadian viewer. And, by that, I mean the Canadian viewer.

I look at CBC’s HNIC play-by-play sportscasts in Punjabi and Mandarin and shows like Little Mosque – very diverse programming that reflects a very diverse reality – and I ask, why couldn’t we see more of that?

We have an amazing talent pool in multicultural Canada. There’s a multicultural renaissance going on. Right now, the Tarragon Theatre is staging an Indo-Canadian version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado and it’s been getting rave reviews. We have writers like MG Vassanji, Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, Vincent Lam. We have  comics like Russell Peters, Mikey Bustos, Ron Josol and Sugar Sammy. Bands like Delhi 2 Dublin, artists like Ritesh Das. This is not a country with a shortage of multicultural content.

Rogers is a sophisticated media-and-message convergence advocate and a successful player in that game, so I find it difficult to accept that it is allowing its investment to fail so easily. 

I feel Omni really had a good thing going with its newscasts, but was shocked when they dropped the South Asian news in English a couple of years ago. Almost every South Asian I knew watched it.

I felt then, that it had stepped off an edge and was suspended momentarily in mid-air. Now it plummets.


You may also like

About Post Author

Gavin Barrett is Owner/Founding Partner + Creative Director, of award-winning Toronto agency Barrett and Welsh.

No comments :

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Copyright Gavin Barrett. Powered by Blogger.

Plagiarism Watch!

Protected by Copyscape DMCA Copyright Protection

About the ideawallah

Gavin Barrett is Owner/Founding Partner + Chief Creative Officer, of award-winning Toronto multicultural advertising agency Barrett and Welsh. In pursuit of big ideas he has: nibbled on pigs' ears (not on a live pig at the time); gone elephant-back in the Thai jungle (no elephants were hurt); gambled in a Macau casino (was utterly destroyed). His ads: have run in 35 countries, helped elect prime ministers, attracted the ire of the lawyers for Dolly the clone sheep, drawn an angry crowd in Lagos, have been studied in business texts in Canada and India and received derisive mention in a John Irving novel. His poems: can be found in Penguin’s anthology of 14 contemporary Indian poets, Reasons for Belonging.

He cannot: sing.

Barrett and Welsh

Barrett and Welsh
We're not in the ad business. We're in the moving business. We move product. Perceptions. Behaviour. Market share. But most of all, we move people. We are the only mainstream-multicultural agency in Canada, capable of handling mainstream or multicultural advertising needs with equal ease, in global and North American markets. We have provided multicultural advertising services to clients in every category including Bell Canada, Brampton Transit, Burlington Transit, CBC, Centennial College, City of Brampton, Diageo, Niagara Region, Procter & Gamble, Rogers, Shaw Cable, Sobeys, TD Bank, Unilever, VivaNext, Walmart and York Region Transit.

Social

View Gavin Barrett's profile on LinkedIn

Facebook

Gallery

Translate

Non-stop to New Delhi

Non-stop to New Delhi
An ad for United Airlines created by Gavin Barrett to advertise the launch of a new non-stop United Airlines Hong Kong-New Delhi flight. From the Barrett and Welsh archives.

DISHUM! THE BARRETT AND WELSH GEARSTORE

DISHUM! THE BARRETT AND WELSH GEARSTORE
Cool swag from an ad shop which does multicultural work with real impact. Like this In a Mumbai Minute clock.

Blogadda

Visit blogadda.com to discover Indian blogs

Blog Archive