Many people see 3G as another big opportunity for businesses in China. For consumers, however, there’s still a lot of skepticism out there. Some say that 3G in China is fake as it doesn’t match international standards. There are rumors that China Telecom and China Unicom are merely interested in keeping their monopolistic control in the market and guarding against competition from more mature international 3G providers. Right now, Chinese consumers are not exactly crying for 3G. Those who are adamant about 3G are in the business and stand to gain from the 3G revolution.
Below is a blog post commenting on this topic from an advertising angle. It is by Xu Dawei (pictured here), a well-known planner, advertising man, brand strategy expert, and chairman of Beijing XuDawei Advertising Co. Ltd.
Why are 3G ads so hard to understand?
From outside the window, the noise is loud, the zipping cars and bustling people never stop. This window is Beijing. It is also China, the Oriental Express that never stops.
In high speed, China enters the era of 3G. It is supposedly a great leap for China. But there are so many great leaps in China in recent years that people have gotten used to them. Today it is increasingly difficult to keep up. Hard to keep up materially, spiritually and sometimes both.
Perhaps the telecom companies know that consumers are totally clueless about what 3G is, what 3G can do, and how 3G can change our lives. They launch these crazy ad campaigns aimed at educating the public. China Telecom’s 3G advertisement was really expensive and featured celebrities like Kai-Fu Lee [President of Google China] and William Lei Ding [Founder & CEO of NetEase]. After seeing it many times, I still have no idea what Lee is talking about. Ding’s language was also vague. The ad seems to be saying that 3G allows us to access the internet and email anytime anywhere. But haven’t we already been using these services for a while now? If the message is 3G can provide much better service for these applications, then how exactly is it better? Is it faster? Is the network more stable? The ad’s producer fails in sending a clear message and merely uses things were hear over and over. How can that possibly help people understand what is 3G and what is the era of 3G?
Another confusing 3G campaign comes to us from China Telecom. Their slogan was “Wonderful in Wo(沃)” (“精彩在’沃’”). I have no idea what it means. ”Wo” also means “in hand”? If that’s what they were trying to say, why not use the character “握” instead? The play on words is totally unnecessary. There’s no creativity here. Did they actually think this would become new slang for young people? Replacing “握” with “沃” is not exactly cool. Who were the geniuses behind this piece? What were they thinking? You need to tell people exactly what is so “wonderful” about 3G.
China Telecom and China Unicom are rich and powerful companies with marketing departments that are primarily concerned with spending tons of cash and getting the most airtime for campaigns to show the boss that they are actively promoting 3G. They are not too concerned with whether their ads are clear to the public. They would rather be playing golf.
I’m not exaggerating here. The reality is that ad and marketing execs are completely out of touch. They fail to notice the changes in target audience’s mind and they don’t care whether the audience is getting the message. The ad agencies are solely concerned with producing campaigns with exaggerated ideas or “creativity”, while the client companies have total confidence in them and give them license to do whatever they want.
As a result, many ads can only be understood by their producers. For the companies paying the agencies, they might have a slightly better idea after repeated pitching and brainwashing from the producers. The general audience is left finding the ads extremely difficult to understand. They know nothing about the content of advertisement, the advantages of the product and its points of differentiation. They don’t know why this product is more expensive or what the selling points are.
Have our ad campaigns lost their essences? What’s more, have we as advertisers lost ourselves? Do we still hold naivete, goodness, sincerity, justice and love in our hearts? How do we measure up as good people? In your spare time, ponder what is advertising? What does it mean to be in the ad business? What value or meaning do ads bring to the world and the individual?
Translated and edited by Johnvee Yin, Ying Xue and Mike Fung from BloggerInsight.com
It’s not intuitive to most people, three gayish men on a poster, one urban guy screaming WOW, and people are like “wtf that supposed mean??”. If I were the marketing director I’d use three peasants or something coz you want to paint a picture of ordinary people happy with it not some crappy bosses, people hate elitism.
I guess it might because the AD was made for businesses not consumers.
The need for 3g is mostly for applications which require high bandwidth. Maybe the Chinese people only uses phones for talking and not for applications.
heh, sounds like ads everywhere … hard to imagination a less creative lot that ad people