Finding ideas that travel
Editor’s note: Charles Young is CEO of Ameritest/CY Research, Albuquerque, N.M.
In broad terms, there are four potentially competing business objectives that must be kept in balance as a multinational corporation manages its international advertising.
- Brand-building by speaking with one voice.
- Economies of scale in creative production.
- Maximizing local effectiveness.
- Speed of implementation.
The main reason to do advertising at all is to build a brand. A global brand is one that stands for the same thing pretty much everywhere. While this does not necessarily require that identical advertising executions be used everywhere, it does require that the advertising communicates the same meaning, in terms of strategic messages and brand values, everywhere. In short, the brand needs to speak with one voice.
Advertising has to operate within given financial constraints. In general, money saved in the cost of producing advertising executions can be put towards media buys to ensure that target audiences actually get an opportunity to see the advertising. The second objective, therefore, is to achieve economies of scale in the cost of creative production by re-using the same executions with minimal changes from one country to another. On the surface, this objective appears to line up with the first. In reality, as we have seen in our global pre-testing business, the same execution can work differently in different countries.
The most efficient advertising is advertising that makes each member of the target audience feel like the commercial is a personalized message sent directly to them. This is advertising the target audience is most likely to pay attention to, most likely to find relevant and emotionally engaging, and most likely to act on. Advertising that is developed in-country may have a home-court advantage in terms of how it scores on measures of performance — though we have seen that this too is not always the case. The challenge of managing international advertising is to make the correct trade-offs between in-country efficiency versus cross-country efficiency.
Finally, the world of business is increasingly moving at Internet speed. Projecting ideas around the world rapidly is one of the keys to winning in the global “street fight” for new business.
Creative options
From a creative development standpoint, there are three fundamentally different approaches to the development of advertising creative that we have seen our clients use with varying degrees of success.
Importing executions
Produce commercials in one country and have other countries import them for use in their local markets. The logic of this strategy is twofold. First, economies of scale are created by only having to produce one execution that can be used in multiple markets around the world. Second, and perhaps more important, the company can speak with one voice and project a consistent brand image around the world, hopefully leading to the creation of a global brand image.
The risks associated with this command-and-control approach arise from the fact that not all advertising can be expected to work equally well from one country to another. Failure can take various forms. First, advertising imported from one country to another can backfire by running afoul of cultural sensitivities. Second, trying to develop politically correct executions that work everywhere can lead to bland advertising that does not maximize local effectiveness. Third, any approach to advertising that fails to look at the possibly unique opportunities for the brand in other markets falls short of its mission to grow that brand globally. At the very least, with this strategy a certain fair play should apply: An execution that has been found to work very well in a foreign market should be a candidate for re-execution in the U.S. market.
Local production
Produce commercials that are entirely unique to the country in which they are aired. The logic of this local empowerment strategy is that the in-country manager is closest to the market and therefore is most likely to be aware of cultural nuances and market conditions. In theory this leads to advertising with maximum local effectiveness.
In reality, the risk of this strategy is that the brand identity that is created will diverge over time from the brand being created in other local markets. In other words, this strategy is fundamentally at odds with the goal of a global brand. It also fails to create an economy of scale for creative production. Lastly, an important component is the level of expertise and experience of the in-country manager in this highly creative arena.
Importing ideas
It is the idea behind an execution that gives it its meaning. If the goal of building a global brand is to make the brand stand for the same thing around the world then customers and potential customers everywhere should associate the same ideas with the brand. An execution and an idea are not the same thing. The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven are the same idea executed differently for a Japanese and an American moviegoing audience. In other words, there is a third strategy for managing global advertising: finding ideas that work globally.
An idea that travels may possibly be the best strategy for achieving a balance in all three business objectives. First, using the same idea globally is a way of speaking with one voice. Second, finding good ideas is a significant part of the cost of creative development and can contribute to economies of scale in the cost of finding effective advertising ideas. And third, re-executing in a local market is a way of making sure that the idea has maximum appeal to the local market.
For this last point it is important to understand that the advertising execution is a non-linear variable in the marketing mix. By that I mean small changes in executions can have large effects in terms of the overall performance of an ad. In contrast, media weight tends to be a linear variable — to increase the impact of a media buy by 10 percent you have to roughly increase the media expenditure by 10 percent. Consequently, the amount of money spent on re-executing a strong advertising idea in a local market may produce a greater return than putting the same amount of money in the media plan.
International barriers to universal executional effectiveness
A. Executional variables
These are some executional variables that can affect how well a particular execution translates from one country to another. Viewed another way, if these factors appear to be central to the execution — i.e., taking them out fundamentally changes the commercial — then chances are you do not have a big or global advertising idea.
- Complex language
Ads that are heavy on copy or highly abstract verbal ideas are not likely to travel well. Ads with stand-up presenters are likely to fall into this category. - Dialogue
Does the dialogue carry the story or do the visuals? A good way to think of this issue is in silent film terms. The more the story can be conveyed visually the more likely the execution will translate. Dialogue-laden stories require a heavy use of subtitles, which can hinder viewers’ speed of information processing. - Ethnic characters
There are clearly biases in many countries against members of other races or ethnic groups. Sensitivity to these issues is called for in developing global executions. - Local celebrities
For executions that use a celebrity, it’s important to gauge the limits of their fame. For example, television stars are less likely than movie stars to be international celebrities. - Business roles
Different cultures conduct business in different ways and so the business roles that characters are shown filling does not always translate well. For example, showing a female manager in charge may not play as well in countries where women have not risen in management ranks as much as they have in the U.S. - Culturally inappropriate cues
Props or other objects in the execution may take on unexpected meanings in other cultures. - Local settings
Unless it is intentional, it probably does not help to have “made in the USA” stamped all over the execution. - Humor
Visual or slapstick humor is likely to travel better than humor based on wordplay. - Music
Music tastes vary widely and musical trends travel around the world at different rates. Therefore, music-driven executions may test differently from one country to another. - Metaphors
Advertising that relies on metaphors can fail to travel well if the metaphor is not culturally accessible or clearly executed.
B. Strategic constraints
Strategic factors, as well as executional variables, can also affect how well advertising ideas travel. Obviously, a brand’s positioning is defined with reference to its competitive set. The competitive set, and the brand’s position within that set, may vary as a function of geography — you might be a market leader in one country, a minor player in another. Therefore, commercials designed to communicate strategic messages that reinforce a particular positioning can be expected to vary in performance internationally as a function of the changes in the market context.
What have we learned
We have found that the Ameritest heuristic model of advertising is global. This is the model first introduced to the Quirk’s audience in the March 2001 issue. By validating the model with international data, we have shown that we do not need to reinvent in each country the research methods we have developed for bringing discipline to the advertising process. An analysis of an extensive international pretesting database, reported at the ESOMAR conference in Rome in 2001, found that regardless of whether you are airing it in the U.S., Europe or Asia-Pacific, an effective commercial can be defined as one that gets the attention of its target audience, makes an impression of the brand, and motivates interest in doing business with the company. Moreover, regardless of which country you are talking about, the kinds of executions that we have found get the attention of the audience are those that reward the viewer for the 30 seconds of time you are asking them to give you by entertaining them, doing something they like and that is different from anything else they’ve seen before. And, regardless of country, the way to motivate that audience is to communicate a relevant, believable and brand-differentiating selling proposition. In other words, while it may not be possible to always create universal commercial executions for global brand building, we researchers can apply one universal standard of quality for monitoring global advertising effectiveness.
What has worked for our clients so far
Brand image is determined with reference to the self — the I of the customer. In other words, a product has truly become a brand when it becomes my product. The warmth and intimacy of the brand relationship is created in a variety of ways, from real experiences with the company to virtual experiences created by advertising. In fact, the stories that the best advertisers of global brands have been telling in their advertising have been creating those kinds of bonds. This is in striking contrast to the kind of advertising the competition has been putting on air — a lot of computer graphics, a montage, little narrative structure, emotionally bland.
Our content analysis of over 200 business-to-business commercials tested around the world suggests that the following types of executions are superior in terms of their ability to attract the attention of the target audience:
Focus on one idea...from the customer point of view...utilizing humor...or drama...with lots of structure — i.e., stories...using characters...in well-defined roles...dealing with problems of today (not the future).
This type of advertising, focusing on ideas or universal stories dealing with real human values, pays off in the long run compared to flashy video technique-oriented ads that characterize so much business-to-business advertising. The challenge, however, is to generate this kind of advertising in a form that speaks to audiences around the world. In other words, it requires genuine insight into the human character.
References
Young, Charles, “Researcher as teacher,” Quirk’s Marketing Research Review, March 2001. [To read the article, visit www.quirks.com and enter Article QuickLink number 671.]
Young, Charles, “One Size Fits All: A Global Model for Diagnostic Pretesting of TV Commercials,” presented at ESOMAR Rome Conference, 2001.
Young, Charles, “The Visual Language of Global Advertising,” Admap magazine, April 2003.
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