Friday, May 27, 2016

I Want You! - A Teaching Play as Soap Opera

Video of the Week

A teaching play in dramaturgy is this video from Peru - and also the right medium, a soap opera:

Watch on Youtube
Soap operas are in Latin America - and in India - the people's drug #1 on TV, and you might guess the viewer's gender ratio.

This NonProfit TV spot focuses exactly on this format - and then it uses a double effect for tension, which is curiosity due to the irritation and, of course, the good old climax:
  1. All soap opera viewers want to know one thing in particular: Will they be together in the end? Or not? The whole scene here heads for Laura's YES or NO..
  2. From that moment on, where our hero starts to put hard truths into flowery words, we all ask ourselves: Why? Where is this going? And of course we'll wait until the very end. 
And the answer is also perfectly timed. At the height of tension. The video stops exactly at that moment, where we expect Laura's response. And delivers the message: A phone number.

Target audience: FEMALE TV watchers, surely dozens of them, which should know exactly this emergency number of the Flora Tristán Women's Centre in Lima.

Because surprisingly, 14 of the 25 countries with the highest violence against women are not in the Arab world, but in Latin America. (International Policy Digest).

Lesson: Not only the story, but also the telling format has to match the target audience! This is actually a truism, but I can only marvel about the fact that it's overseen over and over again...