Celebration or Cage Match? What Eurovision Teaches us about the Audience for Global Content
At first glance, it looks like an odd creative choice. Will Ferrell plans to make a movie about the Eurovision Song Contest.
Ferrell’s Swedish wife introduced him to the event in 1999, and he quickly became a fan. Few Americans share his passion. In 2018, the Eurovision coverage on LogoTV attracted 74,000 viewers, a mere two tenths of one percent of the US viewing public.
In an attempt to explain the concept to an American audience, New York based journalist Arwa Mahdawi described it as “the Super Bowl of Camp”. From beauty pageants to Broadway, from John Waters to RuPaul’s Drag Race to…well, the Super Bowl itself, Americans consume camp ravenously. Yet Eurovision hasn’t become Must See TV.
Some countries embrace Eurovision and all it stands for. Other countries — including some which participate — show lukewarm enthusiasm.
Is it a simple matter of taste, or are there deeper cultural issues afoot? And what lessons does Eurovision hold for creators of global content?
Eurovisiophiles: Some very rough math
As one might expect, the European Broadcasting Union watches viewership numbers closely. It doesn’t release figures as a whole, but secondary sources[1] tabulate them from reports by member broadcasters.
Using these figures, if we divide the number of viewers for any viewing event by the total population[2]of the viewing country, we get an approximate measure of enthusiasm for the contest. I’ve based the calculations on 68 ratings events between 2016 and 2018, for which data are available.
What cultural characteristics predict a big audience for Eurovision? As an exercise, I correlated the index with the six dimensions of cultural difference developed by Geert Hofstede — known as Hofstede 6D. While the figures are extremely rough, they give us some tantalizing clues.
Masculinity. Is Eurovision competitive enough?
Ten years ago, I’d just arrived in Germany to take up a new job. A colleague felt he needed to explain Eurovision to me, a non-European.
“We never win, because of the tactical voting,” he explained. “Countries often vote for artists whom they think can beat larger countries like us. Or they will vote for other countries that have no chance of winning just to keep votes away from countries they don’t like. All of the Eastern Europeans vote for each other, just to increase their chances. It’s never about who’s the best.”
Citizens of several other countries agree. So much so, that long-standing BBC Eurovision host Terry Wogan resigned over the unfairness of the fight. At a 2009 Eurovision summit in Lucerne, Wogan cited military history as a partial explanation: “Britain has attacked nearly every country in Europe and people don’t forget.” Italian musicologist and broadcaster Franco Fabbri calls the ESC a “war without tears.”[3] As a Euronewbie, these attitudes perplexed me.
Germany, the UK, and Italy are among the Big 5 European nations; they get an automatic berth in the final, so the deck is already stacked in their favour. An English-speaking culture, the UK has a head start in what is arguably a lingua franca of pop; in 62 years, songs in English have won 31 times. And to prove my colleague wrong, Lena took the ESC trophy home to Germany in 2010.
While judges may conspire, it would be rather more difficult to get entire populations to agree on a complex, manipulative voting strategy[4]. There is much more evidence of what Annemette Kirkegaard calls “buddy voting”[5], particularly among Nordic and Eastern European viewers. Voters vote for artists that feel familiar, to whom they can relate, and who send them good vibes. Kirkegaard feels compelled to point out that some countries actually consider buddy voting a bad thing.
Hofstede 6D labels countries like Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom as masculine. Their cultures value assertiveness, toughness, competitiveness and success, especially among men[6].
Our Eurovision index shows a solid negative statistical relationship with Masculinity[7]. The twenty most lacklustre audiences on our list averaged a swaggering 60/100 on the dimension. Nations like Hungary (88), Italy (70), Switzerland (70), Poland (64), Australia (61), and the Czech Republic (57) all delivered relatively low TV turnout.
The Eurovision final performs best in countries which value quality-of-life over a constant thirst for success. Their Masculinity score averaged a mere 22[8]. A great many of the top twenty audiences came from Estonia (30), Finland (26), Lithuania (19), Denmark (16), The Netherlands (14), Iceland (10), Norway (8), and ultra-cuddly Sweden (5).
Don’t you hate it when your team trains hard, works out a game strategy, and loses to people who just show up and play for fun? One can only imagine how Mr. Wogan felt.
Uncertainty Avoidance. Don’t look under the dress