Editor’s note: Charles Young is CEO of Ameritest/CY Research, Albuquerque, N.M.
In broad terms, there are four potentially competing business objectives that must be kept in balance as a multinational corporation manages its international advertising.
The main reason to do advertising at all is to build a brand. A global brand is one that stands for the same thing pretty much everywhere. While this does not necessarily require that identical advertising executions be used everywhere, it does require that the advertising communicates the same meaning, in terms of strategic messages and brand values, everywhere. In short, the brand needs to speak with one voice.
Advertising has to operate within given financial constraints. In general, money saved in the cost of producing advertising executions can be put towards media buys to ensure that target audiences actually get an opportunity to see the advertising. The second objective, therefore, is to achieve economies of scale in the cost of creative production by re-using the same executions with minimal changes from one country to another. On the surface, this objective appears to line up with the first. In reality, as we have seen in our global pre-testing business, the same execution can work differently in different countries.
The most efficient advertising is advertising that makes each member of the target audience feel like the commercial is a personalized message sent directly to them. This is advertising the target audience is most likely to pay attention to, most likely to find relevant and emotionally engaging, and most likely to act on. Advertising that is developed in-country may have a home-court advantage in terms of how it scores on measures of performance — though we have seen that this too is not always the case. The challenge of managing international advertising is to make the correct trade-offs between in-country efficiency versu...