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Advertising and Marketing
Olympics! Olympics! Olympics!Posted by Joel Martinsen on Friday, February 15, 2008 at 7:56 PM
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, , 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
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Comments on Olympics! Olympics! Olympics!
that commercial has just ruined my day.
and it's only 8am in NY :-(
It's almost as bad as "Head-On"...holy sheisse!
link
Holy poop, this is a new acme in excellence. Not just the masonry-drill-bit approach to consumer psychology, it also sports shoddy technical skills (that futzy gap between audio loops) and my personal favorite, the grown woman who imitates a child's voice in order to pluck at our heartstrings and SELL MORE WHATEVER THE HELL IT IS!
Cause (fake) kids are irresistible.
A Chinese-language weblog post about the ad got a RECORD-BREAKING 60 VOTES on http://hen.huang.hen.bao.li/
link
Hehe.
This is enough to make anyone go postal. Even the Chinese, who embrace cacophonous noises ad nauseam as a way of life.
I'm assuming on the basis of the previous commercial (for some sort of baby product) that this commercial was broadcast on a family-oriented channel or perhaps on a show that reaches a significant number of new mothers or young children.
The catch is that kids would love this commercial and want to watch it all the way through, squealing with delight at the appearance of each new set of cartoon animals.
In the process both moms and kids will certainly remember the brand and the fact that they are an Olympic sponsor.
Brilliance!
The ad jingle now reduced to power points.
Dear god, I can only hope this starts playing on the buses.
I don't know if this is true or not, but if so, it's significantly less funny... my wife says this is a commercial for wool coats that's been around forever, and originally it was just "sheep sheep sheep!" because 1)wool and 2)The character for "sheep" is part of the last character in the company's name. The commercial is apparently famously obnoxious, and this is just a spoof somebody put together. Don't know if she's right or not, but I'd almost prefer to think it's for real.
Some of the comments say this is worse than "nao bai jin" commercials, now THOSE are pretty annoying. Personally, I enjoy Wang Wang ads, some of them are just hysterically corny.
But then again, watching it again, the banner along the bottom doesn't appear to be looping with every repetition of the tag-line, which seems to indicate that it's for real.
And apologies for repeating the thing about Nao Bai Jin when it was already written about, I read and watched the ad much earlier and commented later.
For Olympics' sake,it's a shame of Chinese AD.
That's retarded. Given the fact that we live in the age of the youtubes, you can't come up with a better animation for a 40 second filler? Heck, a plain 4/4 beat off an Casio is better than that crap sound loop. Insane.
But then again, I now know what it is like in Gitmo...
"Heck, a plain 4/4 beat off an Casio is better than that crap sound loop."---FREAK
Are you kidding? The Casio SK-1 is the greatest instrument of all time. Throw in John Tesh rocking it out to the former NBA theme while in a rooster pen like he did on Conan O'Brien and you have the best show ever.
Ooh! Here's a discovery: Apparently, Hengyuanxiang registered 19 URLs of the form www.a8888.com, www.b8888.com, www.c8888.com (all letters of the alphabet except for e, i, k, q, r, n, and x). The sites currently return "Service Unavailable" (including a8888.com, which was accessible when I originally wrote this post), but both Baidu cache and whois data reveal the Hengyuanxiang connection.
well done an ad that made me want to look to believe.
Shanghai Daily front page 210208 has given you more airtime.
again well done an ad that works.