|
|
Browse by Tags
All Tags » Advertising and Marketing
Sorry, but there are no more tags available to filter with.
-
A series of outdoor ads are circulating on China's Internet forums and may have the potential to cause a new round of anti-Western prejudice and conspiracy theories. Is the Western advertising industry is just going to follow the fate of the Western media to become the next target of protest and boycott?
The ads are allegedly designed by TBWA's Paris offices for Amnesty International. The slogan in the ads is “After the Olympic Games, the fight for human rights must go on.”
It is said that this series won a bronze medal in this year's Cannes Advertising Festival, but your correspondent could not confirm this from the Internet.
Interestingly, the TBWA is also the ad agency behind another series of Olympic-themed ads of a different type for Adidas. You can see them on Virtual China. They are unlikely to hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
|
-
 Together we are Blogger Guerlangwa has posted a gallery of 64 public service print ads for the Red Cross Society of China.
The "Together, we are" series (我们在一起) urges readers to assist with the earthquake recovery effort. This article is from Danwei.org
|
-
 Be a part of something historic CCTV's been broadcasting live from the earthquake-stricken regions of Sichuan for the past week, and has also been devoting interview and analysis programming to the earthquake relief effort.
It's also been running ads, of course. Here's a rate card that's been floating around online:
CCTV Earthquake-Rescue-Themed Advertising Plan
At 2:28pm on 12 May, a major, 7.8-magnitude earthquake occurred in Wenchuan County, Sichuan Province, in western China, a natural disaster that caused the worse loss of life in China since the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake.
CCTV has put the entire force of its stations to following the latest developments in the earthquake rescue effort, using live broadcasts, in-depth reports, and interviews to show the whole process of the Chinese people's united will to combat this natural disaster.
Humanity has emotions in the face of unfeeling calamity, so let us offer up our hearts and lift our voices to express our good wishes toward those who have been afflicted by the earthquake, and our sympathy and encouragement to those heroes on the front lines of the rescue effort.
1. Ad Format
Earthquake Rescue PSA + Company-Specific Earthquake Rescue-Themed Corporate Brand Identity Advertisement
1. Earthquake Rescue PSA: Produced by the Ad Department. A PSA with the content, "Earthquake Rescue, Unity of Will Forms a Stronghold."
2. Company-Specific Earthquake Rescue-Themed Corporate Brand Identity Advertisement:
1) Produced by the company itself. Content to be a corporate brand identity advertisement that complements the theme of the earthquake rescue effort.
2) Broadcast order to be determined according to the invoice.
2. Ad Broadcast Schedule
CCTV-1 and CCTV-News joint live broadcasts; CCTV-News live broadcasts. No fewer than 8 airings per day.
3. Ad Cost
Units: 10,000 RMB / day
5 seconds: 35
10 seconds: 53
15 seconds: 66
20 seconds: 90
25 seconds: 106
30 seconds: 119
CCTV
2008.05.13
via IdeoBook, who comments, "Who can make a mint off a national tragedy?"
On the other hand, a week's worth of live broadcasts on-location in the mountains of Sichuan can't be cheap, and CCTV did donate 50 million RMB to the relief effort, so maybe the reality isn't as crass as it looks on the printed page. This article is from Danwei.org
|
-
 You're famous now On 24 April, just before the May Day holiday, a post titled "Hunting for the Red Laptop Girl for seven days without eating or drinking" was published at the Soho Digital Community.
The thread, which has accumulated 2,586 replies and 2,157,856 clicks to date, consists of candid snapshots of a pretty girl whom the photographer is stalking. Lenovo's new ideaPad U110 laptop, in a fashionable red color, appears in practically every picture.
But some bloggers criticized the campaign, calling it a fake cooked up by Lenovo. They also judged it a failed online promotion.
Hecaitou wrote on his blog:
Maybe the girl has tough biceps and has no idea what a "laptop bag" is. And because the "peeper" photographer was equipped a top-level camera, the photos were so clear that people quickly saw through them and recognized the post as Lenovo's online promotion campaign. So what if they saw through them—the problem was that this operation didn't raise up any tide online. And even after 28 April, when major websites and BBSs carried out promotions, it didn't make waves.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
|
-
 Seven times lucky Omega reminds you that today marks 8,888,888 seconds before the Olympics Games. That's just under 103 days, for those of you keeping count in the more traditional manner.
This ad, which features an engraving of the Bird's Nest, appeared on page 2 of today's Qingdao Morning Post This article is from Danwei.org
|
-
 "Have you read today?" In this public service announcement that ran in The Beijing News today, the Central Publicity Department, the Party Office of Spiritual Civilization Development and Guidance, and the General Administration of Press and Publication remind you that 23 April is "World Reading Day" (世界读书日), the Chinese name for UNESCO's "World Book and Copyright Day."
The slogan on the book in the illustration reads "One good book, wealth for a lifetime."
Last year, popular historian and essayist Yu Qiuyu caused a minor controversey when he spoke out against creating a "national reading day"; part of his argument was that the UNESCO event was sufficient.
And on "World Reading Day" in 2006, Xinhua journalist Han Song blogged about the reading habits of government officials. This article is from Danwei.org
|
-
 Tastes good Steak Factory is a restaurant at the west end of Oriental Plaza shopping mall on Wangfujing Street.
There is currently group of outdoor billboards displayed near the restaurant, one of which featuring a woman biting on a piece of raw meat instantly triggered your correspondent's overactive imagination instead of my appetite. As you can see in the other photo, I was not the only person fascinated by them. This article is from Danwei.org
|
-
 Clean hands and magazine covers This article and the photographs are by guest contributor David Drakeford.
Yue Lu is a trendy mid-price Beijing restaurant owned by the highly successful 'cynical realist' painter Fang Lijun (方力钧) who is best known for the smiling, smirking, yawning bald guy in most of his paintings. Diners come for the spicy Hunan cuisine and to cement deals and friendships with chatter in various languages. Copies of Southern Metropolis Weekly and Chinese language Time Out are at hand and wall candy is provided by the Fang and his friends in the contemporary art scene including Wang Yin and Feng Zhengjie.
The bathrooms provide another potential trend – mirror advertisement.
Washing your hands dutifully at the basins you come face to face with the front covers of various magazines illuminated and rotated hypnotically just behind the surface of the mirror. The result is staying longer at the basin than you had planned and a mental connection between the publications shown and pleasant feelings of relief and cleanliness.
 And the ads rotate The company behind the novel advertising outlet is Mirror Media (明镜天下).
The magazines advertised are Quo, (新探索) Elle, Elle Deco (家具廊), Car and Driver (名车志), Psychologies (心理明刊) and Marie Clare (佳人). All are published by Hachette Filipacchi Media, the world’s largest magazine publisher, who claim to be the leading foreign player in China (plus the United States, Spain, Italy, and Japan).
Mirror Media seems to be targeting restaurants and bars in the Workers Stadium area with the mirror ads now appearing in bar scene institution The Den and a popular pizza spot called The Kros Nest.
Kro's Nest owner Olaf Kristoffer said they installed the mirrors about three months ago after a company representative pitched them the idea—wisely buying a meal first. They negotiated 5,000 RMB a year to have the mirrors installed and enjoy an added aesthetic benefit.
"We do get comments from people leaving the bathrooms," said Kristoffer. "Both Chinese and foreigners seem to think they look neat." This article is from Danwei.org
|
-
This is a follow up to a previous Danwei post — Focus Media apologizes for mobile phone spam.
Xinhua last week reported: China Mobile apologizes for mass spreading of spam text, referring to a CCTV news program that revealed Focus Media's hand in spam:
The country's largest mobile operator has vowed to block short messages originating from the seven condemned online advertising firms on Wednesday.
The seven online advertising firms, which included the Nasdaq-listed Focus Media, arbitrarily sent commercial text messages to over 200 million cell phone users whose personal information was fully controlled by the companies, through the two operators, China Mobile and China Unicom. .
What that Xinhua English article does not make clear is that the seven condemned companies actually all belong to Focus Media. A Beijing News article identifies the seven companies as: 北京世纪众凯、北京易通无线、郑州美和、深圳巨澜、深圳精准分众、广州玄武、深圳分信. This article is from Danwei.org
|
-
 Doggy doesn't care The China Daily reports:
Century-old bun producer adopts English name "go believe"
One of China's longest established food brands in northern Tianjin city has adopted an English name "Go Believe" which sounds like its famous but bizarre Chinese brand Goubuli, "Dog wouldn't care it".
Tianjin Goubuli Group Corporation, a 150-year-old stuffed bun producer, has started hanging on English boards on its branch restaurants.
"The English name sounds similar with the Chinese name, and it is positive and meaningful by highlighting the honesty of the company," Zhang Yansen, Chairman of the board with the Group.
"We hope it can be better understood and trusted by foreign guests," he added...
...The Goubuli brand first appeared in 1858 and there are various explanations for "Goubuli." The most popular one has it that a poor village boy nicknamed "gouzhai (puppy)" went to Tianjin and apprenticed at a food shop at the age of 14. Years later he started his own business of steamed stuffed buns.
Each bun has 15 wrinkles and looks like a chrysanthemum. Soft and delicious, the bun soon attracted numerous customers.
Gouzhai became so busy at the shop and had no time to speak with customers, who complained "Gouzhai sells buns but does not speak to people". The saying was then shorten to goubuli, which means "gouzhai does not speak to people."
Goubuli buns and 395 other cuisines around the country were awarded the title "Famous Chinese Snack" by the China Cuisine Association in 1997. The group made a profit of 40 million yuan ($5.3 million) in 2006 and expected to increase it to 70 million yuan in 2007.
Ah me. This article is from Danwei.org
|
-
Let's take a look at that hot new television commercial everyone's talking about.
First, a bit of background. One fairly common format for Chinese TV commercials is the three-peat: a company will buy a short ad spot—say, fifteen seconds—and then run an even shorter ad three times. At its simplest, a company can simply put up a still of its logo and repeat its name and slogan three-times in a loud voice-over. This sort of ad may not win any design prizes, but it's (a) cheaper to produce than a long spot, and (b) has the effect of tattooing the company slogan onto each viewer's brain.
It was in 1994 that Hengyuanxiang (恒源祥), a clothing brand founded in 1927, pioneered this format in a prime-time ad spot on CCTV-1. Its slogan, 恒源祥, 羊羊羊, was catchy and identified the brand with wool clothing.
But what if you're given more than just fifteen seconds of air time? Once again, Hengyuanxiang had a stroke of brilliance. Check out this 1-minute spot that ran on Dragon TV this week (the first few seconds are the end of the previous ad):
Did the station get caught in some sort of broadcast loop? No, that really was the line "Heng...yuan...xiang, Official Sponsor of the Beijing Olympic Games" (恒-源-祥, 北京奥运会赞助商) repeated twelve times, one for each animal of the Chinese Zodiac.
Aside from disbelief, the immediate reaction of many online BBS commenters was that Hengyuanxiang had undermined its credibility. It was compared to brands like Naobaijin and Huangjin Dadang, whose grating commercials play incessantly on local TV stations. But those ads still manage to move product, albeit quacky vitamin tonics.
Does Hengyuanxiang really believe that there's no such thing as bad publicity? Or is this simply the best that the company could afford after spending US$20 million sponsor the Olympics (a decision that was controversial even within the company, according to an article in Business Watch Magazine last year)? Chongqing Economic Times estimates the company spent between 9,000 and 52,800 each time the ad was broadcast (the ad rep that the CET reporter talked to suggested a "soft ad" as a more economical alternative to a one-minute straight-up commercial).
Chen Zhongwei, vice-president of the Hengyuanxiang Group and head of its Olympics projects, says that so long as people remember the brand, he's fine with all the criticism. And according to the Mirror, the company will hold a conference in Beijing on Sunday to announce its Olympics marketing strategy.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
|
-
 BMW Chinese New Year's Greetings Chinese New Year is a great time for wordplay. New Year's traditions themselves often involve homophones —fish (鱼) for abundance (余) or bat (蝠) for happiness (福), for example.
So it's no surprise that advertisers use similar strategies. Pepsi's annual ad campaign, which features trendy celebrities greeting each other with "We wish you a Pepsi-Cola" (祝你百事可乐), is probably the most visible (here's a video).
The BMW ad on the left, which ran in today's Beijing Youth Daily, hides model numbers in the characters that make up the New Year greeting 新春大吉.
The accompanying text extends other number-related wishes to readers: 3阳开泰 (Good luck in the new Spring), 5福临门 (May your home be filled with the five happinesses), 6六大吉 (may everything go as you wish), and 1路驰骋 (Best wishes for a speedy journey).
If you want to mess around with your own New Year's greetings, Microsoft Research's Natural Language Group has released a web toy that completes antithetical couplets, or duilian (对联).
After you compose a top line, the software will generate several choices for the bottom line that conform to semantic and tonal requirements. You can manipulate word boundaries if you want finer control over the results.
How does it perform?
We entered: 上单位知中国事， “Come to the work unit to learn about China."
One of the replies: 进机关是日本人, "Enter the government agency as a Japanese."
And the lintel banner: 为民服务, "Serve the People." This article is from Danwei.org
|
-
The ad on the left, of a smirking Chairman Mao gazing down on a new Citroen, sparked indignation from Chinese residents of Spain, where it ran earlier this month.
When the news hit mainland online forums, the reaction was much the same, with calls to boycott Citroen's vehicles in China.
The company pulled the Mao ad and apologized, saying that it never intended to offend the Chinese people.
Late last week, according to Swiss media, the Mao ad was replaced with the image on the right, featuring a smirking Napoleon.
Via Zhai Hua's blog. This article is from Danwei.org
|
-
 Energetic City Life for Desperate Housewives. The ad copy:
Lena awoke that morning to discover that her car keys and deposit book had disappeared. On the table was a slip of paper: Dear, they're breaking ground on the final building in Energetic City Life. I'll email you the specifics. Love, your husband.
This ad, which ran in the Beijing Youth Daily this morning, is for Energetic City Life (沸城), a residential development inside the southwest Fifth Ring Road on the expressway to Shijiazhuang.
The development extends the prospect of "North America Joyful Life" straight from the charming city of Philadelphia (费城), with which it shares a name. This article is from Danwei.org
|
-
Hu Xudong, a Beijing-based poet and critic, put up a blog post containing the following snapshot of a massage ad:
 A masseuse that makes house-calls. Hu writes:
You guys don't have anything up north...
I've been to busy to fart the past few days, so I've forgotten to put up this photo that I snapped with my mobile phone in the back of a Shanghai taxi.
This bright and shining prostitue ad streaked to and fro on the dashboard in front of the passenger's seat, where Beijing's taxis have a sticker reading "I am a smile ambassador for the Beijing Olympics!" To prove that I wasn't just jumping to a conclusion, I asked the driver, "Is that a normal massage?" The driver gave me a look. He said scornfully, "If you want a normal massage, they'll send over a normal one. If you want something else, they have whatever you want. Do you really need to ask, dimwit?" I immediately adopted the righteous tone of a cadre taking a visit to the south: "How could they place an ad here? In other cities, if they're able to pass out cards, they're already doing quite well. How can they be so aggressive in Shanghai?" The driver's tone became sympathetic: "You're from the north? Oh, you guys don't have anything up there. And if you do, you have to take it on the sly. How pitiful. Have a bit of fun in Shanghai, OK?"
This article is from Danwei.org
|
|
|
|