Chapter 165 Fooling the Audience

Realizing the explosive and sensational potential of the finale of *Infinite Challenge*, the Dragon Television station held an immediate meeting to discuss how to extract the maximum value from this grand conclusion.

Dragon Television had invested a substantial amount of money into the show. Like East Entertainment, they had intended to shape the program into a variety show with top-tier acclaim from its very inception. Otherwise, they would never have allocated the most prime Friday night time slot to *Infinite Challenge*.

"Swayed" by Dragon Television, advertisers had poured a tremendous amount of money into the show during its first season. But with the show's ratings plummeting so drastically, which of those financial backers wouldn't complain?

Because of this, Dragon Television had even personally visited and apologized to quite a few of their friendly advertising partners.

Yet, apologies alone were useless. To win back the advertisers' hearts, the best approach was to improve the show and drive up the ratings.

Now, with *Infinite Challenge* reaching its finale, unexpected brilliance unfolded as the stars, led by Lord Pao, delivered such a spectacular and riveting competition!

Once these two episodes aired, the reputation and public attention of *Infinite Challenge* would likely skyrocket like a rocket!

This would not only give Dragon Television an account to satisfy the advertisers but also help them entice even more advertising sponsors to invest in the show's second season!

With a stellar reputation, high ratings, and advertisers willing to spend big on commercials, who wouldn't want to produce a few more seasons of the show?

After watching this thrilling finale of *Infinite Challenge*, Dragon Television didn't even need any prompting from East Entertainment; they already had the urge to keep the show going.

They even decided in a meeting not to cut the remaining three-episode allocation for *Infinite Challenge* over the next three weeks! Following the original contract, they would grant *Infinite Challenge* another three weeks of prime-time slots!

However, the broadcast volume for these three weeks wasn't about letting East Entertainment cut the finale into three parts. Instead, it required them to combine the two previously prepared episodes into one, or simply pull out a single episode to air this week.

This week, the finale would not be broadcast just yet.

The rough-cut version currently provided to Dragon Television by the production team had wonderful content, but the details were terribly messy—clearly a hasty rush job done against a tight deadline.

Moreover, since today was already Thursday, Dragon Television was deeply worried that having only a little over a day would leave East Entertainment's team unable to produce a flawless, polished edit.

If such a magnificent dish were to be stir-fried until it was burnt, it would be an absolute tragedy!

Dragon Television would rather sacrifice a week to wait for East Entertainment to cook this dish to perfection before serving it to the audience, ensuring the best possible acclaim.

Dragon Television also planned to tilt certain resources over the coming week to properly promote the finale of *Infinite Challenge*, letting more people know that in this concluding battle, the highly anticipated Lord Pao would deliver a heaven-defying performance! At the same time, heavyweights like Li Xuan and Luo Zhikang would be joining the show!

Such a gimmick, if promoted well, would undoubtedly capture the audience's attention and lead to substantial progress in the ratings.

However, without much promotion and if aired immediately, no matter how good the word-of-mouth was, the ratings might not necessarily rise.

After comprehensive consideration, Dragon Television decided to wait until everything was fully prepared—specifically at eight o'clock next Friday night—before serving this unprecedentedly lavish feast in variety show history to the viewers!

It wasn't until past eight o'clock on Thursday night that East Entertainment finally received word from Dragon Television that their three-episode broadcast quota had been restored!

This news left Xiao Qiang and the others greatly exhilarated, yet overwhelmingly exhausted.

Having continuously worked on the fine-tuning of the finale, these people must have gone forty-eight hours without closing their eyes.

Right in the middle of their hard work on the fine edit of the finale, they received the news that tomorrow's broadcast of the finale was canceled, and previously recorded footage would be aired instead.

This left the production team feeling simultaneously painful and joyful, surprised yet helpless.

After resting for a short while, the production team worked through the night to remix and refine those two pieces of footage, adding a preview of the finale to the end credits in a desperate bid to build the most perfect setup for next week's grand conclusion.

The production team was rushed into utter chaos, everyone driven mad by the clock, scrambling to beat the deadline to catch up with the schedule. As a result, nobody even had the time to notify the artists about this week's content change.

During the recording of the finale earlier, both Xiao Qiang and Shen Yulin had swallowed their pride to beg these celebrities, hoping they would post on Weibo or WeChat Moments a day or two before the show aired to help promote the finale.

The celebrities had all agreed to the production team's request and promised to post promotional messages over the next two days.

On the night the recording wrapped up on Wednesday, Wang Dawei was the first to post on Weibo, urging fans to closely follow this Friday's finale of *Infinite Challenge*, teasing with suspense that Lord Pao would have a "mind-blowing" performance on this episode!

Afterward, flatterers like Faze and Peng Liang also posted on Weibo urging fans to pay attention to this Friday's finale of *Infinite Challenge*.

By Thursday, almost all East Entertainment artists—including scholars who rarely promoted shows on Weibo like Luo Zhikang—had posted messages urging everyone to pay close attention to Friday night's finale of *Infinite Challenge*.

Lu Kai, Sophie, and Lv Cheng were also exceptionally active in posting Weibo updates to promote the program.

Even Pan Ziwen, who enjoyed a fairly good personal friendship with Wang Dachong, spared no effort in promoting the show on Weibo.

However, he didn't dare mention Lord Pao's heaven-defying performance, lest he be publicly condemned and lose followers.

East Entertainment's Bai Xinhong and his peers also dared not mention Lord Pao in their promotional Weibo posts out of fear of losing followers.

In fact, upon receiving the notification from Dragon Television on Thursday night to change the broadcast plan, someone in the *Infinite Challenge* production team noticed the celebrities posting promotional Weibo updates for the finale and reported the issue to Xiao Qiang and Shen Yulin.

These two wily old foxes played cunningly and kept the matter from the artist management teams. They intentionally let the celebrities continue their promotions, ultimately hoodwinking the entire nation's audience to a miserable degree...

And hoodwinking Zhang Qiyang and Li Xuan just as miserably.

Because their schedules were packed too tight and the previous recordings had been too exhausting, Zhang Qiyang and Li Xuan hadn't found a spare moment to post promotional Weibo messages.

It wasn't until Friday morning, after completing the rehearsals for *I Am a Singer* at Stardom Television and lifting the heavy stone from their hearts, that the two of them successively posted on Weibo to promote the finale of *Infinite Challenge*.

Zhang Qiyang's tone was extremely instigative, directly declaring on Weibo: "Tonight at eight, lock onto Dragon Television. Lord Pao is going to take you flying on the finale of *Infinite Challenge*!"

After her artist management team, led by Chen Ke, held a meeting to weigh the pros and cons, Li Xuan was deeply depressed to find herself unable to mention Lord Pao's heaven-defying performance on Weibo, nor could she interact with Zhang Qiyang online.

Despite being a megastar, Li Xuan was also afraid of losing followers.

In the end, the Weibo post she published was a promotional draft tailored by her team, primarily highlighting her own performance on the show, which made many of her fans look forward with great anticipation to tonight's finale of *Infinite Challenge*.

Yet who could have imagined that the finale of *Infinite Challenge* broadcast tonight would turn out to be a counterfeit Li Kui!