While I was in China last week, I was lucky enough to be invited to an internal award ceremony held by Mindshare and Maxxus to celebrate the best use of media in Asia. Held in a decommissioned factory with walls of bare concrete, in one of the trendy areas of Beijing, the event featured the best examples of media planning and buying from across the two groups. For me it was a great opportunity to see what was happening in media outside of the two markets I’m most familiar with—the U.S. and the UK.  Based on what I observed, I’d say that the essential differences between Asia and the West is that while in the West we talk a lot about consumer engagement, in Asia they really practice it.

As consumers gain control of media, advertisers in Asia (and in the U.S. and the U.K.) are worried about the “Big Switch.”  The conventional wisdom says that TV advertising is becoming less effective, and that to counter its slide, we need to stop interrupting consumers and start engaging them.  (I have never understood why this is a big switch, since in the past people just went to sleep, read the newspaper or made the coffee rather than watch bad ads.)
In the West, I rarely get to see examples of advertising that really engages people, on TV or anywhere else. On this occasion, I saw several.  I realize that I was seeing a cross section of some of the best that ads region has to offer, but even so, I was struck by the true creativity of the different approaches. The following are just a couple of examples:

Appointment TV advertising in India

How do you make TV ads unmissable? You integrate a promotion to make people want to interact with them.

The objective was to increase volume consumption. Pepsi’s Khufiya Cards (Spy Cards) were distributed on large bottles of Pepsi. Each one contained a visually-encrypted secret code that guaranteed a prize. When placed against the blue screen which appeared during Pepsi Khufiya ads, the nature of the prize was revealed (typically money off the next purchase). Trailers, TV station announcers and newspapers helped publicize the promotion. Interest in the promotion was extremely high, resulting in strong sales and share growth.

Engaging the youth market in Malaysia

In a fiercely competitive market, Sunsilk shampoo needed to hold on to its number one spot. To do so, a multi-media campaign utilizing TV, interactive competitions, blogs, SMS and press was used to tell the story of Illyana, a fictitious 17-year-old girl whose character represented the personality of Sunsilk – friendly, approachable and trustworthy.

The story was told primarily through a series of five minute daily TV dramas titled “Sunsilk Impian Illyana” (”Illyana’s Dream”). The engaging story lines featured the trials and tribulations of Illyana, and her comical but thoughtful solutions to the problems facing her. Each mini-drama was screened twice a day, over 13 weeks, and consolidated recaps were aired at the weekends. Each episode ended with Illyana’s branded blog diary: http://www.illyana.com.my/. This allowed fans to catch up with the plot line, post comments and download pictures and ringtones. The end result was that Sunsilk maintained poll position and even increased share during the campaign.

Other examples included a reality series underwritten by Sunsilk in Pakistan that reframed expectations of women in the 21st Century, an infectious song and dance for Pepsi in India that became a social phenomenon, and giant Nike football installations in Thailand.

These examples serve to remind those of us in the West that creativity in advertising and media is alive and well in the rest of the world, and may even be healthier there than it is here.Š

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Creative, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Print this Page