Hong Kong appears to be following the lead of Japan and Thailand and
increasingly resorting to wacky and bizarre ads to try to cut through
the clutter and get people's attention.
BBDO started the trend about three years ago with Sunday and the
momentum is building. Recently BBDO followed up with E*Trade, then there
was Saatchi & Saatchi's work for AXN and Taikoo and Ogilvy & Mather's
San Miguel Light.
Even local hotshop MK2 have jumped on the bandwagon with its campaign
for Suzuki.
This is a good development for Hong Kong advertising, which has
consistently lagged Japan, Singapore and Thailand in the creativity
league. The Gunn reports of 1999 and 2000 highlight this.
The current crop of ads are well crafted and the logic can be traced
back to a source point of insights on which the campaign was built.
But let's hope that the industry doesn't get carried away and simply
produce the wacky and the bizarre for the sake of being different.
In the few years before the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from British to
Chinese sovereignty, there was a plethora of nostalgia ads, which
rapidly became a cliche.
One only has to look to the United States at the beginning of last year
when dotcoms turned up the intensity level of the bizarre dial to plain
insane. The high point were the dotcom-dominated commercial breaks
during the Super Bowl when diehard football fans were treated to the
spectacularly hideous as ad after ad tried to outdo each other for
ridiculousness, which probably did more harm than good for the brands
involved.
Hong Kong hasn't reached that point. Neither have other Asian
nations.
But there is fine line that sophisticated audiences can discern. Cross
that line and consumers vote with their wallets by declining to
purchase.
