Abu Dhabi: With a constant and continued globalised media, as well as imported content, the discussion of localisation within the Middle Eastern media scene as well as how to make localisation successful was the topic of discussion at the 2014 Dhabi Media Summit.
One of the keynote speakers on the panel talk was Rashed al Hamoodi, the Emirati creator of the popular cartoon series Mansour, with Hamoodi discussing Mansour as a successful example of localised content within the Middle East media industry.
“Localisation is not just about the language it is much more than that, in the Mansour show we are placing content that has the cultural, principal, and the values of the Emirati and Arab youth, so it’s about the value and principal of the show.”
Hamoodi also talked about how it was very important to not simply import content, but to produce localised content and to become a distributor of such content, “Today we should no longer simply rely on being consumers of imported content, today we should export and produce content from Abu Dhabi for the outside world, which is the Arab youth. Mansour has a social message that is relative to the region, there is a need for local content and we are responding to that need.”
“We have introduced new characters to our show as well to meet this need to the region, we have introduced an Egyptian character, and a Saudi character. In season two Mansour travels to different countries to highlight the countries that are relevant to our viewers, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.” He went on to add.
On the subject of whether the cartoon series Mansour could also become global, and branch outside the Middle Eastern market, Hamoodi said that there was interest from outside the Middle East, “We have gotten a lot of interest, we have received interest from Indonesia, and Europe as well. There is the need for Muslim content and Mansour also represents that and this allows us to even go outside Middle Eastern countries, so for example in Indonesia we have a similar culture and similar principles, we don’t share a similar language but we have other similarities as the ones I mentioned.”
“To elaborate more, when we launched our Mansour game we had 1.2 million downloads with Egypt being the number one downloaded, followed by Saudi Arabia, and then came the United Arab Emirates. So we do have a lot of interest not only in the UAE, so we are hoping to continue to gain interested beyond the UAE.” He continued.
With content also being available on several different platforms other than television these days, Hamoodi mentioned how Mansour and its content would be made available on these other platforms such as gaming and social media.
Sami Zaatari is a trainee at Gulf News.
