Advertising in different cultures

I have just been commenting on Robi's blog. A post he had about Indian ads. I ended up saying a few things that I had once planned to use for a post of my own. If you like you can check his post and my comments here.

Also pasting it here so my readers can read it without jumping around.

Hi Robi,
First of all thanks for your comment on my blog.

This is what I had come to say when I saw this post. Struck me as quite interesting. I live in the UK so I don't get to see any Indian ads these days. Both the videos you have posted were hilarious; the first one I didn't watch after 59 seconds, it was kinda distasteful.

On the whole, I think, it is part of a copywriter's basic education to "know his audience" which would mean cultuaralizing (making my own word here for your concept) the ad campaign. I have lived in the US and seen their ad's, now I live in the UK and watch their ads, and of course, I have lived in India the most and seen a whole lot of their ads. I'd rank them, on the basis of personal preference, India then UK then US.

They are ALL tailored to their culture. If you ask me, American ads, 95% of them are just yak-yak, only words, either from an on-screen character (a celeb if possible), or voice over on images of the product or something like that. British ads have a strong weirdness factor in them, do something absurd on screen then relate it to the product with words.

Indian ads cover a lot of ground in variety and creativity. You can watch an ad for all of 59 seconds and not know what it is all about and then just see the name of the product in the last second and you are forced to nod and admit that it "makes sense".

I have been always interested in ads, they are quite fascinating in their novel, creative ways. I miss that living in a western country, here there is too much repetition of the same ads. In India, several new ads are released every week, (I am talking about TV spots), and it's fun to watch the new ones. Believe it or not quite a few ads earn their place in water-cooler chats and such.

So, coming back to your point, I think ads are already tailored to their target cultures - Americans want information as much as possible; if you convince an American with features and benefit you can force him/her to pick up the phone and order the item right away. Hence, the yak-yak ads.

British are nice, polite people with their straightforward mindset, genteel and gentle, always trying to act prim and proper. Hence the weirdness, once you got their attention with the absurd visual, feed them the information needed to make them buy.

Indian, it's simple, so many types of people, so many sub-cultures, so many mindsets, hence, so many styles of ads.

Well, that's my 2 bits, take it or leave it. :-)

Nice post, I think I am going to read some more of your posts. You have an interesting way of picking up on things and I like that.

Regards,
Sunil

Advertising point of view

I watch a lot of ads and as everything else I think about them also, so you may see some more posts about ads in here.

When I watch some ads I wonder if the ad agencies think of the general public as a bunch of dumb idiots. And then I wonder if they are right. Case in point, 2 cases actually, 2 car ads.

Kia cee'd: This young man rings the doorbell, a girl comes out, they are awkward about hugging or kissing, can't decide, so I'd guess they have been dating for some time but not yet in the girlfriend-boyfriend stage. They get in the car, she says, "Nice car". He drives to some place, stops the car and proposes to the girl, right there, without a ring, just some stuff about "buy a house, get a dog..", and she says yes. They don't know each other well enough to hug without awkwardness and it's the first time she's sitting in his car (if had just bought it, the conversation would go differently), but he proposes and she accepts. Then they get out of the car and you see that he has parked away from the building, in pouring rain, in the middle of a grassy lawn, where there are no other cars around. With all that space he parked in a place where the car will get wet and they will have a puddle in their shoes just walking through all that grass to the building. Voice over talks about quality commitment and 7 years warranty.

My question: Do only dumb people buy Kia cee'd or it makes them so dumb just by driving it and traveling in it?

Toyota Yaris: They have a series of ads all on the same theme, one person doesn't treat the car with respect and the owner of the car gets even with them. Ad 1 - A girl is flying her boyfriend's remote control plane and then purposefully smashes it to the ground pretending to lose control. Following the gleam of devious victory in her eyes the flashback shows a scene when this guy was helping her carry stuff from the car and since both his hands were full he kicked the car door shut with his foot. The girl saw it and resolved to take revenge. Ad 2 - Two buddies crossing a muddy patch on rope and this one guy cuts the rope when the other is just above the mud, causing him to splash in the mud. Flashback shows that guy 2 had put his foot on guy 1's car's dashboard as guy 1 was driving. Voice over says, "Toyota Yaris, treat it with respect!"

My take: The people who disrespected the car did it in carelessness and negligence (or necessity, how do you close a car door when your hands are full of grocery?), but the owners of the car acted with devious craftiness, premeditation and deliberate revengeful intentions. Again, it maybe that only mean people would buy this car or they get this mean streak after they buy the car.

Every car has a character and it attracts people of that character to buy and/or it influences the character of the owner by association. I know this from my own experience with motorcycles and observing different cars and their owners in India (where the car models are not so numerous as to lose track), you can confirm this simply by asking any man who has owned multiple models of cars over time.

So, my question is - are we as dumb as the advertisers seem to think we are?