A Facebook friend is actually concerned I’ve been missing for over a week! And for that I’m grateful but I’m constantly on the move visiting some distant kindreds in Swatow, China. Now that I’m back I want to share an insight into how billboard advertising goes in China.
Super-size billboards erected along highways are a rarity in little Singapore, so they easily get my attention whenever I travel. The loudest things about billboards are normally:
1) A picture of a model
2) The product in his/her hand
3) The product name
4) The tagline
(Unfortunately, most Chinese companies don’t often have a URL to display, but this would be a receding trend.)
The tagline is what I want to touch on because the way they are crafted is quite distinct in China. Perhaps stemming from its roots in Socialism, most taglines have a “social cause” overtone or imply a benefit to society in general. Contrast this to a consumerism-based tagline like McDonald’s “I’m loving it”, or “Tell me what you want and you can have it all!” which is about “I, me and myself”.
Another distinctive feature of a Chinese tagline is its ‘couplet’ or dui lian form. Anyone familiar with the Chinese language would know this: a couplet comprises of 2 verses with an equal number of characters for each.
So how does a tagline in China read like? The best I can think of as an example in English goes like this:
“An apple a day
keeps the doctor away.”
Let me loosely translate one tagline I saw as:
“A kilogram of milk
strengthens the Chinese people.”
See? It reads like a couplet and implies a social benefit about keeping healthy. It doesn’t say how crunchy or juicy the apple is. Consumerism-based advertisements do exist in the media like the TV and magazines, but I reckon you might have a better chance at tapping into the Chinese psyche if you can craft a couplet tagline, that is, if you’re going to do business in the Land of the Dragon.