Homogenous Multinational Ad Campaign
So you're a company with a product(s) in various countries, and mean to exploit capitalize on that, while minimizing costs a publicity office in each country would incur. What can you do? Make an ad campaign that can be easily used across nations, perhaps with as little change as using different models/actors, languages, and substituting the flag/national colors for these commercials, if at all.
Huge success! Profit!
Of course, you have to be careful that (like a term paper) this copy/pasting does not somehow offend someone... which it will probably do because it's just so darn easy to offend at least someone. On the plus side, it can give your company a very powerful image for being highly coordinated and multinational for pulling these off simultaneously across continents.
Another benefit to designing these ads to be international from the get go is it avoids "recycling" ads targeting consumers in country A on consumers in country B, which can lead to all sorts of amusing gaffs or horrendous lack of judgment.
Compare the Market-Based Title.
- Coca Cola is a huge fan of this strategy. They used in the Olympics with the multilingual cans, and this ad which cleverly subs the team/national colors for the team it endorses (Across what may well be most Latin America).
- DeBeers diamond ads (shadows) and Mentos ads (no dialog) are done like they are for this reason.
- The iPod ads. Like the DeBeers ads, the silhouettes avoid racial problems, and the song the actors dance to can be easily changed to one more familiar with the local audience. Many of them use original music so that even that is unnecessary.
- A lateral thinking puzzle illustrated the potential pitfalls of this trope. The problem posed was that such an advertisement actually hurt sales of a particular product in certain countries: the answer presented was that it was an ad for laundry detergent, displaying a pile of dirty clothes on the left, the laundry detergent in the middle, and clean clothes on the right. The problem was that it assumed a left-to-right reading order; in countries where a right-to-left reading order, and thus natural viewing order, is expected (such as Israel, where Hebrew is read right-to-left), the ad seemed to be saying that the detergent made clean clothes dirty.
- The American movie Couples Retreat was criticized for removing the two black actors from the international versions of the advertisements.
- HSBC's advertising campaign is something of an inversion: to go with the slogan "The World's Local Bank", the adverts are about differences between cultures (a word or gesture meaning something different, for instance) and sometimes deliberately invoke examples of Bite the Wax Tadpole.
- Of course, HSBC's name is an example: it originally stood for "Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation", established to finance colonial British trade in China.
- Several ads for the 2012 Ford Focus are used worldwide, made possible by the fact that the car differs between world markets mainly in powertrain options, with few external trim differences.