Commercial Break: The Art of Selling
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Coming soon to your TV: advertisements from an unlikely locale--China. Just as it expands with a roaring domestic market, China's ad industry is going international and producing quality campaigns that provide a refreshing new mix of ideas and enthusiasm
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By Geoffrey A. Fowler/SHANGHAI
Issue cover-dated October 30, 2003
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THIS WINTER, McDonald's will bombard television viewers worldwide with a new ad in its youth-targeted "I'm Lovin' It" campaign. But in a first, an advertising team in China created the spot in a host of languages. Big Mac lovers in a range of Asian countries will soon also learn the "I'm Loving It" hand gesture courtesy of Leo Burnett China.
BUILDING BRANDS THE CHINESE WAY
Winning factors for ads that are made in China include:
• Creatives who deliver imaginative and independent ideas
• Ads appealing to a diverse spectrum across China
• Ad staff working around old problems such as censors
"In McDonald's history, all of our creative direction was led by America. But we now said: 'Let the best ideas win'," says Larry Light, the global chief marketing officer of McDonald's. And in a competition for pitches from ad firms from around the world, China came top with half a dozen ideas. The competitors even voted the China team the most imaginative of McDonald's global network.
"China just blew our minds. We didn't expect that kind of expression and joy," adds Light. "Our expectation was for much more conservatism, much less individuality and more caution."
China is gearing up for a new industry: creativity. As international advertising firms have moved into the country over the past decade, hiring and training local creative staff, they have reinvented Chinese advertising. Now they're winning international respect, and most importantly, they say, their ads are starting to be more effective in China. These Chinese creatives, as they're known in the industry, are finding new ways to push the old limits--such as inexperience, state censors, a wildly diverse consumer landscape and timid clients.
"Shanghai is going to be the next epicentre of creative happening," enthuses Adrian Holmes, chairman of Interpublic Group's Lowe & Partners Worldwide and a former copywriter, on a China visit in September. "The Chinese advertising identity will form out of a Western sensibility and a Chinese one to produce a new alloy."
Advertisers spent an estimated $10 billion in China last year, making it the world's fifth-largest advertising market. And it is widely expected to grow by billions of dollars more this year. At that rate, China should overtake Japan as the second-largest market in 10 years, according to Nielsen Media Research, the media arm of ACNielsen. And making ads in China isn't any cheaper than elsewhere.
But until recently, advertisers didn't get much bang for their megabucks. Chinese ads followed a highly literal style dominated by slogans, a result of the Cultural Revolution's emphasis on propaganda. Soft-drink-maker Hangzhou Wahaha Group pushes its cola as "the Chinese people's own Cola!" Many ads still feature stiff suits in factories thanking their loyal customers. Even Chinese have tired of them, saying the worst present brands "in an ordinary or boring way," according to a Leo Burnett study in 2001.
Now China's creativity is breaking out in ads ranging from burgers to rice cookers to sports shoes. In an unprecedented move, Shanghai-based advertising agency Nitro was hired in August to develop ads for a foreign company--Australian telecoms giant Telstra--to show back in Australia, not China. Nitro was founded by Australian Chris Clarke, who opened the agency with mostly Chinese talent two years ago.
"Eight or nine years ago, I couldn't get any open-minded local thinking here," says Clarke. "But now there's a huge opportunity to make a difference. China's film industry has exceptional creative talent--and people aren't tapping into that yet." The official Xinhua news agency hailed the Telstra coup as a first for the nation.
Even the government is helping to push creativity. State-run China Central Television, which boasts the world's largest viewership, is gearing up for a televised second annual international advertising awards show this month. The first, last year, attracted 5,000 entries.
This new generation of Chinese creatives looks to international ads for inspiration, with a Chinese twist. In September, hundreds of young Chinese ad-makers crammed into auditoriums in Shanghai for lessons in world-class creativity.
The Clio AdChina Show featured winners of the influential U.S.-based Clio international industry awards, and workshops explaining how the Chinese can break old habits. One session: "Flicking Your Creative Switch." Hungry copywriters and art directors scribbled down ideas and snapped photos of the award-winning ads from around the world. China's Clio entries have multiplied 10-fold since 1999 and Chinese ads won their first Clio awards, a silver and a bronze, last year.
International advertising firms are teaching their mostly local staff an approach to ideas that might have put their parents in jail. "In order to have creativity, you have to have independence of thought and a freedom to challenge," says Tom Doctoroff, Greater China CEO for WPP Group's J. Walter Thompson. So JWT brainstorming sessions in Shanghai take place in a room without tables or ordered seating, a sharp contrast to the hierarchy emphasized by most Chinese businesses. In a programme about the firm in September, Shanghai television noted local staff are encouraged to play--and beat--Doctoroff at ping-pong on the office table.
For ad firms, a decade's worth of recruitment is starting to pay off. Tao Lei, 29, is part of the team that developed the "I'm Lovin' It" campaign, and is among the first generation in China to develop careers under the industry's Chinese-foreign hybrid model. "I prefer working with people with different cultural backgrounds, because the diversity sometimes gives rise to creativity and inspirations," says Tao.
Born of experience, there are also new approaches to the old problem of getting past state censors, who have the power to pull ads that offend their sometimes-finicky sensibilities. No-nos include images of police, sexuality, Mao Zedong, and gatherings or protests, as well as challenges to authority and claims of being the "best." In China, the new creativity has to operate within conservative constraints.
For example, Coca-Cola's Fanta, the fourth-most-popular soft drink in China, asked WPP's Ogilvy & Mather for something that shows it as an antidote to everyday pressures on young people. An ad in the United States could be built around a teen's fantasy, or images of revenge on a mean teacher, says Jeff Delkin, Ogilvy's regional business director in Shanghai.
But that would flop in China. "We can't undermine the position of authority figures, primarily teachers and parents, in Chinese society," says Delkin.
Instead, Ogilvy created a national spot that shows drinking Fanta can be a fun group experience. In the ad, a student in a classroom opens a bottle of Fanta, causing oranges to rain from the sky. The teacher catches the oranges, and juggles them with his hands and feet--to the delight of the students yelling: "Ahh!"
But a deeper creative obstacle, many ad executives agree, is finding a way to grab attention while still communicating new brand ideas to consumers across a very diverse country. Companies usually budget for just one ad throughout China. Test audiences in cosmopolitan Shanghai, however, may chuckle at an ad that just elicits blank stares in small Western towns unused to brand choice. For years, a lowest-common-denominator approach--just pushing product features--has won out.
SMART ADS, DARING CLIENTS
So to develop a new national TV spot for a rice cooker from Chinese brand Midea, staff of Grey Global Group hung out with lonely mothers to learn what aspirations united them. "Housewives in China want their own space to follow their own interests and desires," says Kenny Wong, Grey's general manager in the southern city of Guangzhou. So the firm developed an ad featuring ordinary-looking Chinese housewives emerging from high-rise apartment blocks to play a great game of soccer--liberated from their kitchens by the auto-timer on their Midea rice cooker. "Chinese consumers can accept something that is very creative, but communicates a simple message," says Wong.
Disheartened ad executives say even a creative idea that survives censors and communicates across markets won't necessarily make it past companies with timid and immature attitudes toward branding. In the traditional noncompetitive state-business model, sales drives marketing--not the marketing-driving approach that is preferred by ad firms. "Somebody in that traditional structure usually doesn't have the background to understand the communication. Most of the good creative is killed in that process," says Grey's Wong.
So winning awards and international respect is as much about pride as it is a matter of opportunity for ad firms to prove their effectiveness to local companies, which are often conservative and more interested in immediate sales than brand-building for the long term. "We have to convince our clients that unique creative content, not just copying somebody else, can help them build their brands," says Spencer Wong, the South China creative director of Ogilvy.
Among the first to adopt a more aggressive attitude toward original creative branding are Chinese companies expanding internationally, such as appliance-maker Haier Group, a client of Grey, and sportswear-maker Beijing Li-Ning Sports Goods, a client of Leo Burnett.
As originality becomes more common, even old Chinese graphic-design traditions are finding new expression. Historically, verbal puns based on the double meanings hidden in the character-based language's written form are more common than the visual puns that dominate the West. So one ad for Epilady women's razors plays off the word for "woman"--with a Chinese character shaped like a woman--by adding hair under its imaginary armpits. The ad won a fistful of international awards, including two Silver Lions at the Cannes International Advertising Festival.
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1. SOCCER MOMS: Grey Global Group sells Midea rice cookers to cooped-up housewives. Some of the actresses playing mothers-turned-soccer-stars are former members of the China national soccer team
2. LOVIN' IT: Leo Burnett cooked up a special hand signal for the McDonald's campaign, which is being used around the world
3. EXPORT: Shanghai-based Nitro used famous Aussies to pitch telecoms company Telstra in Australia
4. TOUGH JUGGLE: Ogilvy & Mather's splash for Fanta thrills kids and censors alike by livening up a dull classroom, while never challenging school authority
5. PUNNY: This Lowe & Partners ad pushes washing powder Omo's stain-lifting power in a visual pun
6. VICTOR: J. Walter Thompson's TV spot promoting the CCTV ad awards spawned a catchphrase. The ad warns advertisers that unless they enter the competition, an old man hawking his scissors-sharpening services on the street might win the best advertising tagline prize. "The star could be him!" warns the ad |
