Creative Features of Globally-Understood Advertisements

Abstract

Although the globalization of advertising campaigns remains a contentious issue, the long-term trend appears to be in their favor—at least for world-class brands. Given that trend, this paper focuses on the executional properties of ads which facilitate the global understanding of their campaign themes, that is, of their intended meanings. Based on a qualitative interpretation of 321 transnational print ads in four product categories, several creative features are identified which distinguish executions whose meaning has culture-free, rather than culture-bound, understanding. These results offer guidelines for negotiating that critical step between knowing what meaning a global campaign's theme should convey and understanding how to construct the campaign's ads so that they impart that meaning.