Advertising can tell a lot about a country

Basically, advertising is the voice of the market in a particular country, the voice of its’ business and therefore the mirror of its’ current life. From catalogs or advertisement boarding in the street till films in the television people see how they can live and correct their life in that direction. Add here the main idea of playing mostly emotions instead of ‘technical characteristics’ of a product and we’ll see how strong advertising affects people’s life values and desires.

We can also point some functions of advertising that will help us to understand what influence it has and what exactly it reflects.

By informing us about a new product or a new service advertising assists its’ popularization, not only like “know more – buy more”, here we can define two sides at the same time: increasing and demand, and supply. “Buy more – than produce more”.

A kind of educational thing as well, sometimes leading to a comical situation, so now all the Russian men know that women shouldn’t wear white and tight clothes on their ‘critical days’. Let us now come back to the economics. A good ad not only helps to promote a product, but to sell it and this way the ad saves the business. Every time stimulating consumers’ interest enough to be ended with a purchase, advertising helps to keep the producing company on the top and consequently saves its’ working places.

As a result the more ads we see on TV or on the streets or wherever else, we realize that our market is improving and the level of life is rising in general.

Showing some kinds of lifestyle and making us wish more and more, advertising creates some images in our minds, some standards which not necessary reflect our present needs but gradually correct them and in the end lead us to their new forms.

And as a result here we’ll have advertising as a compressed image of our contemporaneity. Ideally, accumulating feelings (don’t forget that feelings is the main instrument and the main thing that advertising appeals to) and experience of entire society it should strive for harmony of human beings’ desires and the society’s integration around the common goals. By this feature it helps people to feel that they are a part of that society, the nation that is offered the best.

If to speak about how the particular advertisement says us something about the particular country, there we can point at two sides of the problem as well. It may seem right when the producers count on the habit or custom as well as the thinking of the population in some advertisements, like the product is a specific thing for this nation, but it definitely doesn’t matter if we speak about a worldwide known brand like Coca-cola or McDonald’s since wherever we are we will see the same films or billboards. Thou in some cases, it is very easy to realize the difference of culture from each country through the advertisements. Being once at “The night of the adveaters” I’d like to give you one example when I could clearly understand the culture difference between the ad-producers from different countries. In the advertising films from Vietnam the image of a woman cooking is always appeared (by the way just like in our ad-films) while in other western countries, the image of a man cooking is very normal. That can make us think about advantages and disadvantages of “global feminization” but this are going to be the very other story.