Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [96]
“Oh,” he said. “She is one of our finest copywriters. Today, she won a Lion.”
I made it back to the hotel as the sun began to rise. In one corner of the lobby a creative team from the United States was having a client call. In another, more than twenty Brazilians were gathered around a Mac G4, waiting for a soccer game to begin streaming live. Presently, a Polish gentleman wandered over to ask the Brazilians if he could watch.
A few moments later I did the same.
The Future of Advertising Is a Seven-Year-Old Girl in Shanxi Province Skimming Her Fingers over the Keys of a Mobile Phone
If the night at Cannes belonged to the young and the stupid, the day was all about getting smart. In seven days I attended several dozen workshops and seminars. If one topic or theme stood out because in many ways it transcends advertising, it was a series of presentations dedicated to contemporary China.
Since pundits from just about every aspect of business and culture agree that we are living in the Chinese century, and since the festival took place on the eve of China’s Summer Olympics, it should come as no surprise that there was an unprecedented focus at Cannes this year on the world’s third-largest ($60 billion annually) and fastest-growing advertising market. Because advertising in China was re-legalized only in 1978, soon after the end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the presumptive opinion of many is that Chinese advertising is woefully behind the times and that marketers in China are playing catch-up. But according to a study of more than six hundred Chinese advertisers and agencies undertaken by R3/Grupo Consultores and revealed in Cannes for the first time, because China has no burdensome legacy advertising processes in place and its markets are growing with such velocity, China is actually playing leapfrog, bounding past conventional global marketers, and the world will soon be playing catch-up when it comes to integrated branding.
Should we be scared, impressed, or merely skeptical?
After their presentation, I met with the principals behind the study, ShuFen Goh and César Vacchiano de la Concepción. While their talk was filled with insights and misconceptions about how to market to China’s 6.2 billion people, I wanted to know more about their findings regarding advertising and mobile phones.
Goh told me, “The first button a child pushes in China today isn’t the television, radio, or computer, it’s the mobile. And in China mobile is king.” And because the Chinese depend so heavily on mobile content—from financial news to farm forecasts to mainstream entertainment—Goh said the biggest advertising driver and integrated opportunity for China, and soon everywhere, is the mobile phone. Indeed, with 530 million subscribers and adding as many subscribers per month as there are people in Portugal, China Mobile is by far the leading mobile carrier in the world.
“In China the clients know that for a brand to be successful, you have to communicate this way [with mobile as part of an integrated effort] with every job,” Goh said.
So is China leapfrogging the rest of the world in integrated advertising as well?
“Absolutely. You saw the mobile figures. With some projects—for instance, with Coke’s pre-Olympic spot in China—we were activating messaging [text messaging, video trailers, access to additional online content] in a hundred cities of more than one million people for whom the mobile phone is their primary source of information. These are numbers you cannot ignore.”
When I asked if there might be a letdown in Chinese advertising after the hoopla (and concurrent controversies) of the Olympics, Vacchiano shook his head. “The Chinese don’t see the Olympics as the culmination of their efforts. They see it as the starting point for something much larger.”
Later that day at a cocktail party I tried to get the creative leader