赛尔号战斗龙系精灵:求 中国广告和西方广告的对比,和各自的一些介绍,最好是英文的

China advertising
Poised to become the No. 2 ad market on the planet, China and consumer advertisers are focusing on the future of business.

By Jonathan Landreth
Previous China reports
Production sector booming
Dialogue: Chen Kaige
Big picture: Imax's long-term view
Sumner Redstone talks strategy
Changing channels: Television
Long view: Doing business

BEIJING -- It's nearing 8:30 a.m. one day in late December with the temperature at 6 degrees below zero outside the headquarters of China Central Television. Guo Zhenxi, a short man with a wry smile and a shiny black brush cut, enters what might be the only heated room inside the aging cement tower situated next door to a hulking military museum in western Beijing.

Although a nearby control room is filled with fresh-faced (and scarf-wearing) college graduates monitoring banks of Sony flat screens and big IBMs, a pass through the main soundstage, being readied for the Spring Festival Gala (the most-watched televised event on Earth), reveals a filthy theater with tattered seats. Guests waiting for shows to start taping on smaller adjacent stages smoke cigarettes in the hall in their overcoats.

Guo was in the office until 2:30 a.m.

He's busier than ever since his rise in December to director-general of CCTV's Financial and Economic Programming Center, a position that puts him at the top of financial channel CCTV-2 and in charge of advertising sales for all of CCTV.

A former soldier from Shandong province and a one-time bureaucrat for the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, Guo holds the key to the door that can lead advertisers to the world's largest TV audience.

He sits, sips his tea and quietly boasts that CCTV earned a record 8 billion yuan ($986 million) in 2004.

In calm pronouncements, made with the precision of a student of physics and management (Guo studied both), he says CCTV's ad revenue will hit 10 billion yuan ($1.24 billion) this year. They will grow again, he says, to 12 billion yuan ($1.49 billion) in 2007.

That's when CCTV is due to move across town into its new glass-and-steel home. The soaring arch of a building designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas will sit smack in the middle of the central business district and face a tower emblazoned with the name of U.S. accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers.

By the time Beijing hosts the Summer Olympics in 2008, CCTV's ad revenue will be 15 billion yuan ($1.86 billion), Guo says.

The ground up

China's advertising industry has sprung from nothing in little more than a quarter of a century.

It wasn't until 1979 that the country's Communist government lifted its ban on commercial ads.

Global companies now are rushing into China to try to grab and hold the attention of its 1.3 billion consumers.

In December, keeping promises made when it was accepted as a member of the World Trade Organization in late 2001, China lifted restrictions that confined foreign advertising companies to operating through Chinese joint-venture partners.

Industry estimates now show that advertising expenditures in China, fueled by unchained competition, will surpass those in Japan by 2010, making China the second-largest ad market in the world after the U.S.

The latest figures from Nielsen Media Research show that China's ad spending hit $37 billion last year, up 21% from 2004 and well above the region's average 14% growth. (Nielsen Media Research is owned by VNU, parent company of The Hollywood Reporter.)

Although TV still represents the largest piece of the advertising pie, one can't ignore that China's Internet users grew 18% last year to reach 111 million.

Studies show that China's Internet users spend more time online than they do with TV and newspapers, so it's no surprise then that by the end of December, the country's most-used search engine, Nasdaq-listed Baidu.com, saw its advertiser base jump 18.6% from the previous quarter to 63,000.

Baidu earned an average of 1,773 yuan ($218) from each of these advertisers, a quarterly increase of 9.7%, and says it expects its first-quarter sales may double as a result.

Guo's influence

Born in 1965, Guo Zhenxi started work at CCTV as a business reporter in 1992, two years before the introduction of public Internet access in China.

For six years, he worked his way up to editor, then switched to the advertising department, where he was deputy director for three years, then director for another four.

It is largely because of Guo's courting, industry insiders say, that in December, for the second year in a row, U.S. consumer products giant Procter & Gamble paid more for primetime ad time on CCTV than any other company.

P&G, whose brands Oil of Olay and Crest are among China's most recognized, is the most successful foreign marketer in China as measured by market share, according to a report issued in November by U.S. consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

China generated almost $1.8 billion in sales for P&G, or about 3% of its total revenue, the report says. While growth has slowed in major markets, including the U.S., sales have risen briskly in China, according to the report. In 2003, China was P&G's sixth-largest market, up from 10th in 2000.

Trust in TV

Guo says commercials in primetime -- roughly between 7-9 p.m. -- make up half of CCTV's annual revenue, and the 2004 auction of its airtime netted China's national broadcaster 4.4 billion yuan ($543 million) after advertising agencies took the 15% commission they are allowed by Chinese law.

April 2004 rules from the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television say that total commercial airtime on any channel must not exceed 20% of the total -- reduced to 15% during primetime -- and that no commercials may interrupt the broadcast of TV dramas and serials during primetime.

Although P&G led the way again in the 2005 ad auction at CCTV, Guo is quick to point out that Chinese firms increasingly are getting in the ad game, too.

"Chinese enterprises are becoming more successful and are focusing their energy on advertising strategy. They cherish the success that media can bring them," he says.

Mengniu, the dairy that sponsored last summer's hit talent contest "Super Girl Voice" (on competing Hunan Satellite TV), soft-drink company Wahaha, and appliance maker Haier are just three Chinese firms buying advertising to their benefit, Guo says.

Using the words for China's common people -- the "old 100 names" -- Guo describes CCTV's broad influence: "China's 'lao bai xing' believe in the media. They trust the media," he says. In China, where 800 million people live poor in the countryside, Guo says, "Farmers trust the media because they don't have other sources of information and many can't read the newspapers."

Finding buyers

But getting Chinese to try a brand, and then stick with it, is a challenge.

The recent McKinsey study reflects weak brand loyalty partly because of hard-to-shake financial conservatism among China's consumers, who are among the best savers in the world.

"In some sense, Chinese consumers are followers," Guo says. "If analysts' conclusions are correct and brand loyalty is low, then now is the time to advertise in China."

Finding China's willing consumers could be about to get easier.

Driven partly by the nearly 13% rise in China's retail sales to 6.72 trillion yuan ($764 billion) last year, research firm Nielsen is rolling out more technology to track Chinese TV viewing habits minute-by-minute.

Nielsen already monitors 11 Chinese cities and has a 1,000-household sample spread across Guangdong, China's wealthiest province, just north of Hong Kong.

Rita Chan, Nielsen's director of client services for China, says two more province-wide networks will be unveiled later this year in the East Coast provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, both bordering Shanghai, China's No. 1 ad market.

For Guo at CCTV, this should give big spenders a better grasp on what they're getting for their yuan.

After P&G, he says the biggest advertisers include dairies Mengniu, Yili and Guangming; China Petroleum and China Petrochemicals; big telecoms China Mobile, China Telecom and China Netcom; all the big Chinese banks, except the People's Bank; the big Chinese insurers; and such Western, brand-focused giants as Unilever, Coca-Cola and Yum!, the parent of Pizza Hut and KFC.

The newcomers to CCTV ads, Guo says, are the banks and the insurance companies, clamoring as they are for the attention of the fast-growing group of newly wealthy Chinese interested in credit cards for travel and shopping and in protecting their assets.

"Competition for consumers is everywhere, and this is a good thing for CCTV," he says, noting that 90% of CCTV's revenue comes from ads.

Steady revenue

In China's first- and second-tier cities, cars are the new televisions, Guo says, but the countryside is still focused on buying televisions and luxury foodstuffs. Attention everywhere is on getting ahead, and the pace of change is dizzying.

"Many foreign executives don't have a clear idea of China's vast market because it's growing too fast," Guo says, noting that gross domestic product figures released in December showed yet another consecutive annual rise of more than 9%.

Quinn Taw, an American of Chinese-Burmese descent, is chief strategy officer for China at MindShare, the biggest media-buying company in China, billing about $880 million in 2005 to earn an 8.4% market share, according to RECMA, a global media industry research firm based in Paris.

Taw, who grew up in Southern California and majored in English literature (after he gave up studying physics), calls Guo Zhenxi "hip," "savvy" and "the new face of CCTV."

In his central Beijing office, where the staff has grown to 300 from 53 in three years, Taw wears jeans and a sweater, both black. On a shelf above his desk is a framed photo from November 2004 of Taw standing in the CCTV control room with Guo and Richard Davies, Unilever's Asia Pacific media director.

Taw calls China the most complex media market in the world. Where else, he asks, could he be in charge of media buying for such competing clients as Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and Sony-Ericsson as well as Unilever and its rivals P&G and Nestle?

Taw says that before 2004, P&G was alone in the CCTV primetime auction because few others were attracted by programming that is still considered flat, adhering as it does to government censors' conception of what's appropriate for the average Chinese family.

Taw says Guo reached out to Unilever, Yum!, Nokia and others and made the numbers work for them. In so doing, he pulled CCTV out of what had been a feast-or-famine cycle with local advertisers, turning instead to steady, marketing-savvy blue-chip firms.

"Guo is succeeding in smoothing out the ride for CCTV," Taw says, noting that the CCTV ad chief is "fundamentally a nationalist Chinese who will do what's right for China without compromise," even if it means leveraging foreign firms' ad buys to get domestic firms to compete.

Sources: Nielsen media research, Monitor-Plus NMR, U.S. newspaper and magazine industry associations

Learning the ropes

Taw, who has worked in Beijing for four years, tells of his first four months in China, when he was out drinking -- OK, drunk, he admits -- with a Chinese pharmaceutical firm client from the picturesque and underdeveloped southwestern province of Guizhou. The man liked his new Chinese-American friend, so he leveled with him about foreign advertising.

"You don't know what you're talking about in China," the man told Taw. "The 6% growth many of your multinational clients are happy to report back to headquarters is pitiful. Through expanded distribution alone they ought to be able to achieve 70-80% overnight with their eyes closed."

Taw says he now agrees that growth of this sort is possible in China, where there are hundreds of second- and third-tier cities that are home to several million people.

To that end, MindShare opened its fourth full office in China last month, in Chengdu, the capital of southwest China's Sichuan province.

Part of MindShare's strategy is to help their clients in China to build their brands, not just make a quick buck, Taw says. They will succeed, he says, if they can weather the current cutthroat boom until their margins become respectable again even to Chinese from the country's hinterlands, where turning a profit is the prime motivator.

So it might seem a bit of a paradox, even in modern China, when Taw notes that Chinese media are not run as for-profit companies but rather as servants to the Communist party, a party that sets out annual quotas.

"Once media hit their targets, it's not in their interest, and certainly not their priority, to maximize profits above that," Taw says, declining to elaborate.

The implication -- confirmed by other industry sources who wished to remain unnamed -- is that media reporting greater profits will see both higher taxes and a rise in their targets set by the government the next year.

Stories abound of TV station heads who supplement their modest public incomes by raking in kickbacks from advertisers and brokers. It is China's media brokers -- whose numbers recently have dwindled in the big cities but remain legion outside them -- who for years have bought discounted ad time from well-cultivated state media contacts, then resold it at a markup to eager advertisers.

Taw says that it is this ad sales bottleneck in the hinterlands that has made it hard to have a national brand in China because local players protect their own.

Try to sell foreign soap in Sichuan and face competition from a local brand that is getting five times the ad time from a local broker at a quarter of the price. This challenge can be as hard for domestic companies as it can for P&G, Taw says.

"Multinationals spread themselves too thin with national aspirations, trying to achieve what's impossible in the short term," Taw says. "Buy one CCTV ad and it spills out into the provinces and cities in a different way in each place. The game is knowing where to top-up your media buys and how."

Market lessons

Tom Doctoroff is Greater China CEO of advertising giant J. Walter Thompson, a MindShare sister company under London-based WPP, one of the oldest and largest communications holding companies in the world.

In his new book, "Billions: Selling to the New Chinese Consumer," Doctoroff calls himself an amateur cultural anthropologist.

From his office in Shanghai, where he says advertising has long cost as much as it does in London, Doctoroff oversees accounts for such firms as Unilever, the Diamond Trading Co. and China Unicom.

A few months ago, JWT lost the Nike China account to the year-old Shanghai office of Nike's global advertising firm, Wieden + Kennedy, an Oregon neighbor of the sportswear giant.

Doctoroff says JWT lost the account after eight years because of a "fundamental difference of opinion about how to approach branding in China."

Doctoroff says he tries to get his clients to see the Chinese consumer in terms defined by the sixth century B.C. philosopher Confucius, whose writing he sums up as "the jarring co-existence of hierarchical regimentation and individual ambition."

When Nike tried to lay its global brand architecture of individualism on the Chinese marketplace, Doctoroff says he fought it.

"Nike believed they should be in China with guns blazing, trying to define individualism in a practically Western, aggressive way, where the brand would be a catalyst for profound cultural change at the base root of individual motivations," Doctoroff says.

He adds, however, that in his view, "There is no belief in -- by any level of society, including dyed-hair, new-generation youth -- the individual as apart from society, as challenging society or rebelling against society."

"The biggest red flag that I have for Westerners in China is: Don't assume that the sale that works in the U.S. is going to work here," he says.

Ginger Zhu, Nike China's public relations director, says Nike believes that with "its knowledge of the local cultures and solid experience with the Nike brand, Wieden + Kennedy China will help Nike China build stronger connections with the Chinese consumers."

Although it only recently has taken charge of the Nike China account, Wieden + Kennedy already is remembered here for a misstep it made in December 2004.

Authorities banned a Nike TV ad the Oregon firm released for global use because they took offense at a scene in which National Basketball Assn. star LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers defeated animated versions of a kung fu master, dragons and what looked like written Chinese characters.

Nike says the intent of the commercial, called "Chamber of Fear," was to pay homage to various film styles, including Hong Kong kung fu movies of the 1970s.

Zhu says that by featuring James in the campaign, "Nike hoped to inspire courage, individual style and expression in young basketball players throughout Asia."

"We regret the advertisement caused concern among some consumers. Nike did not intend to offend the people of China, or show disrespect to the Chinese culture," Zhu says, noting that Nike has been in the Chinese market since 1982. "The experience reinforces the fact that during communications, we need to be very sensitive to possible misinterpretations based on different cultural background."

Know the audience

If the subtleties of etiquette in China are hard to navigate when the objective is to create snappy ads, there's always an old-fashioned approach: Make ads that are straightforward in their message but omnipresent, even popping up in the most unexpected places.

Among the first big signs one glimpses on the Beijing skyline when driving into downtown from the airport is a giant red Nestle sign atop an aging office tower.

Hulking slowly past in bumper-to-bumper traffic, more than a few double-decker busses are painted from roof to tires with red Nescafe ads.

Ride a crowded commuter subway in the capital and, just when you thought you could rest your tired eyes from the swirl of ads above ground, there in the dark outside the car window is a cup of Nescafe flashing red against the tunnel wall.

Behind the holograph campaign, for which Nestle paid about 1.2 million yuan ($148,000) to rent four wall projectors for one month, is Frenchman Laurent Beloeuvre, the regional creative director for Dentsu, Japan's largest advertising agency. He lives in Beijing and works with a creative staff of 40, mostly local Chinese, on the suburban Beijing campus of client Nestle.

The foodstuffs giant has a number of the best-recognized Western brands in China, from Nescafe to Nestle spring water and Purina dog food, now meeting the needs of a growing number of Chinese who wish to feed their pets more than just table scraps.

In the late 1990s, when Beloeuvre began working on ads for Chinese television, he said people took things too literally.

For example, he said he had to be careful not to overdo the opulence of the apartment in which a product was featured, lest consumers think it beyond their reach.

But Beloeuvre says Chinese consumers are nothing if not fast to change, with urbanites especially now demanding cleverer messages and more eye-catching presentations.

Beloeuvre sums it up like this: "It's a bit like dog years here. One year in advertising in China is at least three years in the West."