DB (France) for Fight For Literacy
Having organized an event aimed at raising awareness towards illiteracy, I love this series of ads.
During the past three weeks, I went back to Hong Kong, and travelled to Taiwan with my parents. I had a few conversations with different close friends who are now working full-time on Marketing stuff. After telling them about my dream to help non-profit organizations through advertising, they asked me what was the difference between ads in Australia and ads in Hong Kong.
I had never really paid much attention to ads in Hong Kong before this trip, so I could be wrong, but here’s what I’ve noticed:
- A majority of the ads are retail advertising. (Less real-estate ads nowadays, probably because those damn agents know that the real market’s in mainland China thus spending the advertising budget up north instead…)
- Therefore the ads are mostly informative and lack creativity…all you’d see are walls of text with a celebrity face next to the advertised product. (I don’t know if it’s just me being a typical ad man or what, but nearly all of the ads in Hong Kong seem to be unconvincing to me as they focus on hard-selling and celebrity advertising…)
- There’s hardly any advertisements by non-profit organizations (well if you think about it, since rental prices are always increasing at an insane rate in Hong Kong, non-profit organizations can’t afford to rent a space to advertise on TV or outdoor billboards…).
And the same applies to the ads in Taipei too (which shamefully I have to say, I had never been to Taiwan prior to this trip).
So yeah, it’s a shame that there aren’t many non-profit organization ads in Hong Kong…
On a sidenote: Saw a completely wtf ad in Taipei. Technically it wasn’t an ad, more like to create a brand image x shop decoration I guess? This Comebuy bubble tea shop was located on one side of a crossroad, and its wall was covered with different images of young adults - with their faces being smothered/drowned in different bubble tea toppings…..it looked scary, to be honest. One of the toppings looked like frog eggs (which, I saw that some hawkers actually named their bubble tea stalls as “Frogs laying eggs”…), and it wasn’t a nice sight to look at. Left me thinking why would someone want to create a brand image like this.
