displacement activity

 
"Ambassador, with this global advertising campaign, you're really spoiling us."

To advertisers, global campaigns make a lot of sense. You centralise the production budget. You prevent marketing and advertising fiefdoms building up. You feel like you have full control of your brand.

The flipside is, as the budgets get bigger, so do the stakes. When you get it right, you'll be a hero to your entire organization. Countries will cry out for your next Big Idea. All over the world there'll be people building their careers by taking credit for your work (I'll come on to why this is a Good Thing).

You will accumulate enough air miles to take your next holiday on the Space Shuttle. Eventually you will have to leave your job after a scary episode where you wreck your apartment on the Ile St Louis after hallucinating that it's full of giant centipedes, and you realise that you are mad. (Or was that just me?)

But let's be honest. For every Wassup, there's a hundred Ferrero Rochers.

Get a national campaign wrong, and you might get a slump in a single country. Get a global campaign wrong and then see who wants to sit next to you in the company cafeteria.

Over our careers at Myrtle, several of us have worked on some of the more successful global campaigns of the decade, and have the awards to prove it (effectiveness awards, not just creative ones). We've put together some thoughts on how to avoid an invite to the Ambassador's Party.

But perhaps we should put the most important one first:

formulas = death

If there's a rule about international campaigns, it's that a rigid approach guarantees disastrously bad work. It's taken Unilever two decades to work that out. So that's 20 years' worth of embarrassment you've saved by reading this far.

Stating the obvious

Look through the magazines in any major art bookshop on earth, and you'll find copies of Lurzer's Archive. Published in Germany, Lutzer's showcases the best ads on earth. It's an incredibly culturally sensitive magazine which goes to great lengths to explain the meaning of ads that aren't immediately obvious. "Pok is both the Taiwanese word for pride," explains the earnest caption, "and the sound of a golf ball hitting a flag."

Ah-ha!

Or, "Jeffrey was a popular English children's' entertainer, instantly recognised by anybody raised in the UK in the late 1970s."

And the ad creatives of the world marvel at the ingenuity of their far-flung colleagues. It's heartening to read, to see that many countries have moved on from aping New York ads from the late 1960s, and are finding their own culturally diverse voices.

Is it compelling? Visceral? Does the room seem to disappear around you and make you want to run, run, run somewhere and do something, but you're not sure what?

Mmmmm. Nope.

Then take Cannes. The Cannes advertising awards are judged like this: each judge sits in a hotel room with a TV and a load of ads on tape. As you watch, you push a button marking the ad from 1 (crap) to 5 (gold, luv). You sit in your dark room with your bottle of Evian. And. Watch. Thousands. And. Thousands. Of. Ads. From. All. Over. The. World.

Really quickly you become smelly, irritable and ratty. Anything that's not immediately comprehensible is zapped.

The result? The Cannes reel is full of anything which lightened the judges' benighted lives. Slapstick. Punchlines. Rug-pull gags. Big emotions, big statements writ large.

Subtle, acute observation does work. Irony rarely does.

Cannes is a good indicator of what crosses cultural boundaries. The same things appeal to everybody, because we all identify with them.

(It's interesting to see what gets booed in the Cannes screening rooms. The nice campaign for First Direct featuring Vic Reeve's sidekick Mortimer was roundly booed. If you don't know who he is, and how his humour works, the ad really falls flat.)

And this is the key to global advertising. Find the universal human truth behind what you're selling. It's not really that revolutionary, it's what marketing should be about anyway.

When you buy Sure, you don't buy underarm dryness, you buy confidence. When you buy an Apple Mac, you don't buy silicon and Kilobytes, you buy empowerment and self-expression.

Campaigns that work cross-culturally are a good discipline: they force you to get back to the emotional basics of your brand, your product and your audience.

Consistency - the hobgoblin of the small mind?

Winston Churchill's quotation is often bandied around in international campaigns. Why, marketers and agencies ask, do we have to be consistent? Is it so that somebody back at HQ can pin all the ads on a board, and feel that they're doing a good job?

Mmm. Good point. In fact there are many brands where consistency is vital. Consumers pay for the experience of American Express and Holiday Inn to be the same the world over. And by definition their core market are travellers. So it's an extension of their brand to communicate in a consistent way. And it undermines their brand to do otherwise.

Similarly, companies that invest heavily in international sponsorship will quickly get themselves in a tangle when they try to put together a campaign for the Olympics or World Cup if they have multiple tones of voice or styles.

David Ogilvy had a good technique for deciding whether or not to run globally created work in a country: test it against a locally produced ad. When the results are positive it should be used locally. The local agency will have no recourse to a "Not invented here" syndrome.

(NB it's probably not wise to let your local agency run the research themselves.)

Campaigns vs. look and feel

When a team is given an international brief which will be adapted locally, they will instinctively look for a campaign idea. This can be at the expense of doing great individual ads. They end up with something that passes all the consistency tests, but is oddly uninspiring.

There is little that the local brand managers or agencies can do with it beyond slotting their own words and pictures in, like some kind of join the dots exercise.

The better - but harder - way to do this is to dictate a look and feel, and a tone of voice, which can be followed by any decent creatives. These days, with cracking work being produced everywhere from South America to Slovenia, there's no excuse for any agency, anywhere, being unable to produce a decent print ad or poster at least.

If only all campaigns were as reliable as Volkswagen.

In the late 60s DDB hit on a look and feel for Volkswagen that still works today. If you haven't read it, there's a book called "Remember all those great Volkswagen ads?" which documents their rise. They even did an ad headlined, "How to write a Volkswagen ad" which pretty much sums it up.

What's the big campaign idea behind Volkswagen? What's the hook? It's not easily expressed. There's no formula. There are rules, there's a tone of voice and a layout which Helmut Krone designed to be recognisable from fifty feet away.

There's a gentle humour based on observation. There's a clarity of thought and expression. Good creatives get it. And it's the same in France, Germany and Taiwan. Just watch the Cannes reels and look at the awards annuals.

And if you don't care about awards (and who does?) look at the Volkswagen sales figures, and brand recall.

Of course, Volkswagen have been doing this for thirty years. They have one of the greatest ad pedigrees ever. They have an almost unassailable momentum. And boy have they worked at it.

But life would be boring if these things were easy.

Agencies and international campaigns - the awful truth

International campaigns can meet two fates in agency networks.

Bandwaggons

"We need Pepsi scripts," say BBDO New York. And all over the world, creative teams in every BBDO office drop what they should be doing and start bashing out cute little scenarios for Joe Pytka to shoot. Ted Sann's fax machine starts running out of paper in the middle of the night as the Europeans and Asians turn their work in. It's a Creative Director's dream - if nothing else, then the Infinite Number of Monkeys with Laptops Principle means that a few really world-class scripts are going to end up on his desk.

How do Pepsi get like this? The answer is so simple, it sounds really trite. Pepsi is an opportunity to do great work. Everybody wins from being involved in a Pepsi ad.

Look at the credits on the awards for Pepsi ads. Often there's half a dozen copywriters and art directors, as well as three or more creative directors. Bullshit, obviously. But an inclusive policy of crediting anybody remotely involved with a piece of work keeps everybody happy.

And when it goes out for adaptation by local agencies, it gets treated with the respect it deserves. Because the agency people see their own careers being forwarded by their association with it. They are involved with the process of making the ads - if a script from Belgium is bought, then the Belgian team are shipped over to make it.

It is vital that local agencies get this opportunity. Because the alternative is:

Siberia

You know those Dirty Harry films where the tough Lieutenant tells Clint, "One step out of line and I'll have you busted so low you'll be taking orders from the guy directing traffic on Main."?

Agencies have something similar. It's those big global accounts where no work is done locally, and where nobody likes the work.

A wonderful example of this was a recent spate of letters in Campaign magazine over the authorship of a car ad. Usually these things are "I did that and he's taking all the credit" wrangles. This was the opposite, people politely correcting the assertion that this dreadful film had anything to do with their agency.

Things are shipped out to be adapted. New voiceovers are looked after by TV production assistants "for experience". Any script rewrites are given to the students in on a placement.

Anybody who's a thinker or a strategist quickly leaves. The accounts often end up run by people who are fabulous air traffic controllers who have never made an ad in their lives.

Which is fine, and maybe it's what you want, so long as you never ask them to actually make an ad themselves.

Cultural responsibility

If you're doing global campaigns your company is a global citizen. Of course you'd like to be a good global citizen, and not just the Global Village Idiot.

We're not going to go on about cultural imperialism, shipping out regional managers from HQ etc etc because it all gets a bit preachy.

But as communicators in emerging markets find their own voices, they are producing work which speaks to their own compatriots in a way that the imported stuff never will.

Which means it makes good business sense to scope out the local talent in each region, and work out how you can best use them. Chances are they're a lot cheaper than their equivalents in Soho and Madison Avenue.

Barry Owen, a creative director in the Far East for many years, wrote, "Advertising must sell. To sell it must work. To work it must be brilliant. To be brilliant it must be relevant, culturally. It must connect."

And if you are going to be an imperialist, then remember: successful empires were built through trading relationships and mutual growth. Unsuccessful ones were built on military conquest and subjection of the local population to alien cultures.

Don't worry about:

People get themselves in a tizz about details of international campaigns which are actually pretty straightforward.

Some of these that we've experienced:

Nowhereland When shooting a global ad, there's a natural tendency to make your location non-specific. I've sat in a great many meetings listening to phrases like, "But that's so obviously an American telephone/ street/ suit/ haircut." So what? Think of all the successful UK ads that are obviously set somewhere else, from Dr Pepper's "Butt Naked Boy" in the American Midwest to the Stella Artois dramas on the Massif Central. Nobody racks their brains thinking, "our audience won't identify with this". Of course they do. Big truths outweigh small details.

What's empathy anyway? As a Londoner I have more in common with people in Hong Kong or New York than I do with somebody in Leicestershire.

Nobody identifies with nowhere. In the immortal words of Jah Wobble, it's "The empty internationalism of airport advertising". To be avoided.

Everywhereland Every big corporation looking to boost its share price these days seems to do the "Anthem ad". This tends to involve a single sentence, broken into phrases, said by men, women and big eyed moppet children in countries around the world. They often resort to crashing racial stereotypes (bowler hatted man on double decker, sumo wrestler strolling in jockstrap through neon-lit Ginza electronic market). Only Playstation has ever pulled this off credibly. Which means it's been done. Which means leave it alone. You know where it's been.

Dubbing Anglophone audiences hate dubbing. The critics recently slammed a dubbed video release of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. To us, dubbing is deeply naff. Not so to the rest of the world. Thanks to Hollywood, most non-English speaking countries have sophisticated dubbing industries - they do it much better than the English and Americans. And nobody thinks it's weird. To see an American film in France with subtitles, you have to go to a trendy cinema in Paris. Nobody else there actually knows what Leonardo di Caprio sounds like.

Don't worry about going to elaborate lengths to avoid dubbing. Just make sure you get it done in the individual countries, by the people who do the feature films. Don't try to centralise it: there's a very small pool of Norwegian voiceover artists in London. Believe me, I know.

And don't ask your talent to try to mime the ads in 25 different languages. I once sat into the early hours of the morning with a fairly well-known Hollywood actor and half a dozen dialogue coaches trying to get him to mouth the words in every European language. The results looked like the Iraqi video of those Harrier pilots shot down in the Gulf War. And meanwhile my Art Director (yes that Marcus) was in an LA nightclub getting off with Winona Ryder.

Japan is different A friend of mine is the Creative Director of one of Japan's biggest New Media agencies. He said to me recently, "Two things bother me about Japan. One, the way people keep looking at you and nodding wisely and saying, 'That won't work here. Japan is different'".

What, I asked, was the other thing that bothered him? He stared into his beer, and quietly said, "Japan is different."

Don't worry about making campaigns work in Japan. Get a local agency and get them to do their own thing. Japan is different.

(The French will tell you that the same is true of France. Ignore them.)

Brian Millar 11:53 AM link