The Most Perfectly Positioned TV Show in Tunisia Is One You Probably Hate

 

Mal3ab El Noujoum is dépassé, low-budget, and despised by half its potential audience. That's not a problem. That's the strategy.

Let me start with a confession. When someone suggested I write about Mal3ab El Noujoum  ,  that three-hour Monday night show with the fuzzy audio, the guests who look like they wandered in off a café terrace, and a presenter who treats brevity as a personal affront  ,  I laughed. Then I thought about it for a week. Then I stopped laughing.

Because here's the thing: this show has survived more than a decade in a brutally competitive Tunisian media landscape. It has posted some of the best ratings of its slot in certain seasons. And it has done all of this without a production budget worth mentioning, without slick graphics, and while being actively despised by a significant portion of its theoretical audience.

Most brand managers would look at that profile and see failure. I look at it and see textbook positioning.

The generics don't stand a chance, but not for the reasons you think

Go watch El Hiwar Sport. Go watch Ettasia Sport. Decent shows. Professional presenters. Guests who arrive in suits, speak in complete sentences, and will never, under any circumstances, tell you who actually runs Tunisian football and why they probably shouldn't.

They are, in marketing terms, line extensions of each other. Competing on the same axis, for the same undifferentiated audience, using the same vocabulary of institutional respectability. The kind of strategy that makes sense on a PowerPoint deck and produces mediocrity in the market.

Meanwhile, Baccar is doing something entirely different. Not better production. Not more credible analysts. Not more refined presentation. He is doing something far more valuable: he is being specifically, unapologetically, irreversibly something.

And that something has an audience. A real one. A loyal one.

Know your customer. Actually know them.

The fatal error most Tunisian media brands make is targeting everyone. Which, as any serious marketer will tell you, is a sophisticated way of reaching no one.

Baccar, accidentally or otherwise, does the opposite. His audience is older Tunisian men who watched football before the Premier League turned everyone into a tactical analyst. Men who remember the old players, the old clubs, the decades of federation politics. They don't need xG explained to them. They need someone to tell them what actually happened in the boardroom last Thursday.

And crucially: these are men who are institutionally suspicious. Not cynical for its own sake. They've earned it. They've watched Tunisian football administration long enough to know that the polished guest on the other channel, the one in the blazer using modern frameworks, is almost certainly not telling them everything.

The rubrique where Baccar visits old Tunisian players in their homes, those intimate interviews shot wherever these men actually live, isn't filler. It's a precision targeting device. It signals, unmistakably, who this show is for and who it isn't. Young men who want Champions League analysis will tune out immediately. Good. They were never the audience.

The Trickster as competitive advantage 

There's an archetype in brand strategy, the Rebel, sometimes the Trickster, that works by positioning against the establishment. Think early Ryanair. Think Red Bull before it became the establishment itself.

Mal3ab El Noujoum occupies this archetype almost perfectly in its category. The show has made corruption exposure its editorial spine. Federation mismanagement, buried dossiers, the people who run Tunisian football and the decisions they'd rather you didn't discuss on a Monday night at eight, this is the show's recurring subject matter.

This is not journalism exactly. But it doesn't need to be. It needs to be the thing that the other shows won't do. And it is.

The guests reinforce it. They're not formal. They don't dress like corporate spokespeople. They speak like people who know the cuisine interne and more importantly, they look like people who know it. That's not a production failure. That's an authenticity signal. The target audience reads it correctly every time.

The hatred is the proof, not the problem 

Here's the part that most people miss, and that most brand managers would find uncomfortable.

The people who despise Mal3ab El Noujoum, the ones who find it dépassé, provincial, beneath serious attention, are not evidence that the show is failing. They are evidence that it is working.

A well-positioned brand is, by definition, wrong for a large segment of the market. That's not a bug. That's the mechanism. A brand that everyone tolerates is a brand that no one loves. The contempt of the wrong audience is the mirror image of the loyalty of the right one.

The show has survived ten years not despite the haters. Partly because of them.

What Tunisian media brands should learn from a show they'd never admit to watching

Positioning is clarity. Clarity is the courage to be wrong for some people in order to be right for others. Most Tunisian media brands, and frankly most Tunisian brands full stop, are so terrified of alienating anyone that they end up meaning nothing to everyone.

Baccar, probably without a strategy deck to his name, built a brand with a defined audience, a coherent set of values, a consistent tone, and a content approach that serves his viewers' actual psychology rather than a generic idea of what a "football show" should look like.

The production quality is low. The positioning is immaculate.

There's a lesson in there. Most people are too busy sneering at the show to notice it.