Why are Thai advertisements so popular around the world?

In recent years, Thailand's advertising industry has emerged rapidly. This Southeast Asian country with a mysterious mixed religious color has a strong and unique regional style.

Thai advertisers base themselves on their country's unique cultural traditions and integrate the experience of countries with developed advertising backgrounds to form a unique advertising expression that presents distinctive and distinctive features.

From the front-end creativity of advertising agencies to the back-end execution of production companies, Thailand has been recognized throughout the Asia-Pacific region as a country with a high level of advertising creativity.

Thai advertisements are always present in the world's five major advertising awards, including the New York Advertising Awards, Cannes Advertising Awards, London Advertising Awards, Clio Awards, and Moby Awards.

1. Thai humor

In order to attract attention, advertisements should quickly capture the audience in the shortest possible time and lead them to resonate with the message, and humor is a great magic weapon.

Thai advertisements attach importance to humorous creativity, but compared with the restrained and low-key humor in Europe and the United States, Thai humor is explicit and exaggerated. Thai people are good at looking at all aspects of life from a playful perspective. Even pain and death can become fantastic and colorful through the prism of humor, and they cheer for the little surprises in life.

The reason why Thai advertising creativity is becoming more and more popular all over the world is that Thai people can use humor to overcome difficulties, from inferiority and self-mockery to open-mindedness and freedom. This kind of optimism towards the hardships and tribulations of life has become the kind of freedom and liberation that people yearn for, especially in today's world of fierce competition and stressful life.

2. Popularization

Popularity is another important reason why Thai advertising has such strong vitality.

It replaces idol worship with public recognition, replaces celebrity endorsements with civilian interpretations, and dilutes the commercial flavor with human touch. This form of returning to popular aesthetic art based on concern for society and love for the people is one of the core reasons why Thai advertising has strong competitiveness.

With its profound cultural heritage, unique thinking patterns, optimistic attitude towards life, and excellent production level nurtured by the film industry, Thai advertising has successfully avoided competition with major European and American production companies and has embarked on a low-cost, high-creativity path of its own.

There are few stars and supermodels in Thai advertisements. Instead, real people or ordinary people are used more often to naturally bring the rigid advertising products into the lives of ordinary people and resonate with a wide audience.

The Thai public service advertisement "Life lies in movement" describes three fragments of life in just one and a half minutes: a petite female doctor prescribes medicine for a dazed patient, and the medicine turns out to be just a crazy and exaggerated dance; a picky customer has been trying on makeup for a long time but still can't find a natural blush that suits her, and the indifferent female clerk uses arm wrestling to get her what she wants; a depressed man who has just broken up looks at his girlfriend's photo and cries, then steps on a stool to reach the hanging rope loop - it's not suicide but exercise.

These three simple scenes convey the idea that life lies in movement: exercise is the most important prescription for a healthy life; exercise can make your skin more natural; exercise will provide the fastest comfort for your pain.

Ordinary life scenes coupled with ordinary characters make the advertisement more infectious and provocative. Most Thai advertisements use such ordinary actors to mobilize the audience's emotions with simple and natural performances. Their body language, facial expressions and voice techniques are all without any trace of artificiality. Some non-verbal expressions are even more touching in silence.

3. Ingenious fusion of lyricism and storytelling

Advertisement is an important tool for humans to communicate their emotions. A considerable part of the charm of advertising creativity comes from consumers' affirmation of the beautiful human emotions conveyed by the advertisements, and their identification with the human emotions such as friendship, love, care, and respect conveyed by the advertisements.

To this end, the creativity of Thai advertisements is often rooted in a dramatic story framework and fully mobilizes various lyrical factors to enhance the appeal of the advertisements. Thailand's life insurance advertisement is a good example. It does take some creative ideas to promote such a seemingly thankless job.

"The Story of Grandpa Qiu" is one of the touching life insurance advertisements. A magnetic male voice accompanied by light music tells the story of an 86-year-old man who has been playing the erhu on the mountain 20 kilometers away with a pot of clear soup for 30 years. Just because he promised his wife, he would prepare delicious soup for her every morning and play her favorite songs for her forever... The picture is clean and clear, the whole story is simple but complete, and the sad sound of the erhu and the faint sadness make people cry. Although his wife is dead, Grandpa Qiu still abides by the oath he made in his youth, silently guarding that simple and loyal love day after day. No matter how society develops, what truly touches people's hearts is true love. This advertisement also conveys to the audience the idea that Thai life insurance is trustworthy.

The reason why Thai advertising has all the above characteristics can be traced back to its unique multicultural culture. The development of multiculturalism in Thailand is a process full of initiative and autonomy. While being influenced by other types of cultural consciousness, it can both absorb the essence and remove the dross while maintaining its own independence.

Author: Ming Liangjun

Source: Mln_Malaysia