LEADER: Wacky campaigns boost SAR's profile

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.

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