The most successful ads are at times the ones that communicate in a culturally specific way. Take the Idea Cellular commercial. The one about how the caste war in a village is stopped by replacing everyone’s caste-based names with their mobile numbers. The sign-off line, mouthed by a chamcha to village headman Abhishek Bachchan, is “What an idea, Sirji.”
This novel idea has appeal and relevance to Indians, but would leave most non-Indians scratching their heads – as caste is an alien concept to them as is the notion that one can identify a person’s caste from his or her name.
In the globalization era, when standardization across the world – be it in the ubiquity of McDonalds’ golden arches or in ad campaign ideas for brands – is the ideal, commercials like this one make you pause to question the virtues of uniformity.
The Idea idea is not an exception to the rule. Cultural specificity abounds in Indian advertising. Whether it is the sindoor of ICICI Prudential fame or the nazar utaarna performed by the mother on the son in the classic Asian Paint’s Pongal commercial – these visuals would be deeply meaningful to Indians but puzzling to outsiders.
Nor is this specificity restricted only to religio-cultural symbols: With drought looming large over India, the image of a wizened elder looking heavenward speaks deeply to us but would leave a Westerner cold.
This phenomenon holds true for other countries too. Take Japan, where the angle at which you bow has connotations that would be lost on us. Or America, where making eye contact with someone of the opposite sex in certain social settings is a powerful signal of intent. Indians, for whom direct eye contact with a stranger is often little more than passing curiosity, would truly be innocents abroad in such situations.
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The subject of this column is itself the subject of an interesting ad campaign by HSBC, ‘the world’s local bank’. One TV ad in this campaign, for example, shows a Westerner being served eel in China. Distasteful as he finds it, the foreigner finishes it as per the Western tradition of clearing the plate. To his horror, the Chinese try to serve him more eel as in their culture an empty plate means you are still hungry. Moral of that story: Leave a bit of food on your plate.And the moral of this story: Vive la difference!
(The author is Executive Creative Director, South Asia, Ogilvy & Mather)