Censor... anything but the creative muse

Last week, my advertising class was given our “Good Ad/Bad Ad” assignment (self-explanatory), and in the midst of my ad searching, I came across three ads that stood out from the rest. In fact, I had remembered seeing this one particular campaign floating around on the internet a while ago, and I deliberately went googling to try and find it, only to discover it didn’t fit the assignment criteria (had to be from a magazine... but more on that aspect later).

Our text Hey Whipple, Squeeze This addresses an advertising paradigm called “positioning” where the idea is that there’s only a certain amount of room in a consumer’s head for products. If your product isn’t in their head already, the only way you’ll get access is if you de-position one of your competitors, or try to plan an ad campaign that will fill any available head space.

This is a definition that seems to summarize the typical Western (read: North American/European) market: highly saturated, and with numerous brands touting similar products. But what about more difficult markets, such as the Middle East, where the competitors aren’t other products in the market place, but the market place itself? So far our text and classroom discussions have been focused on how Western advertising companies selling Western products are fighting for the top spot in Western markets. But what happens when a Western company wants to market in a country that has strong censorship against the very products they want to sell? Advertisers have to get a little creative, and things get a lot more interesting.

Enter the international brand Change and their campaign to promote lingerie and swim wear in Saudi Arabia. The country’s censorship laws which aim to uphold the morality of its people inevitably result in products showing Western models with exposed skin being scribbled over with marker before hitting the shelves (see this edited package or this amusing doctoring of Katy Perry’s CD).

But Change wasn’t about to back down to the challenge; instead, they did probably the smartest thing they could have ever done, which was to turn the idea of censorship into an advertising tactic (“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”). I'll let the ads speak for themselves:

Images courtesy of AdBlogArabia.

This is a great campaign in that Change understood the type of market they were trying to access and altered their campaign accordingly. This did this not only visually, but also by way of distribution: instead of trying to get ad space in magazines, Change decided to keep their campaign under the wire and get at their female market by submitting their ads to local and international blogs, which proved highly successful.

The Change campaign is a prime example of the changing face of advertising. Whereas advertisers in North America go to great lengths to attract customers by making their ads stand out from the rest, those aiming for a more conservative market must figure out how to get past the marker-wielding middle man first before reaching their actual customers.