Monday, September 29, 2008

Since we were talking about global ads and hybridization, I thought I'd share some very localized ads for some global brands as a contrast to the last conversation.
Since I am familiar with India, thats what I am using. But its interesting how localized, large business conglomerates can get. As I said in class the last time, I feel brands like Coca Cola which are aimed at almost everybody in the international markets they enter, they have to become localized to sell. And so products like Coke which are going to be accessible to all, adopt very local flavors to their ads. Incidentally if you see this ad, there is a very strong message of national integration. When you see this ad, you will see many socio-economic classes of India, and the message of the ad is that Coca Cola binds us all (lol). I would be interested to hear what you say.

click on the link below to see the ad

The first is a coca cola ad



Another thing that I found interesting in India this summer was the rise of the Indian music bands using Western popular music formats. There were these new bands singing in what could be defined as traditional Western rock, electronic, experimental and house music that were really being noticed in a big way. They sang in English, Hindi or Bengali, but as we discussed in other examples for class, they were using Western formats for expression.

They have always been around since I can remember, but they are only now gaining popularity in a big big way with the help of new music labels, clubs which encourage live music, etc. This new music video by one of them really caught my eye, as I was watching it on VH1 India.

Click on the link below:

The band is called Shaa'ir and Func by the way and the song is called OOPS

Once you see the video, do you think this is hybridity? In my opinion, to a outsider looking in, this could be another example of hybridity in the way Homi Bhabha talks about it, when he refers to “cultures of postcolonial contra modernity” that are in fact “resistant to…..oppressive assimilationist technologies….but they also deploy the cultural hybridity of their borderline conditions to ‘translate,’ and therefore reinscribe, the social imaginary of both metropolis and modernity”.

Enjoy the videos and let me know what you think.




3 comments:

Kristina said...

I thought that both of the videos that you posted were perfect examples of what we discussed last class. The Coca Cola ad is interesting when compared to the Motorola phone ad that we saw last class because you can really tell the difference in the target audience for both ads. This was the first Coca Cola ad that I have seen that was targeted at a localized audience in a different country and I thought that it did a good job at appealing to many different types of people (as seen in the diverse body of people on the bus). Now I am actually interested in looking up more Coca Cola ads from different countries.

gayatri said...

yeah coca cola and Mc Donalds.....you'd be amazed at how much they localize.....its almost impossible to know they're not Indian sometimes

Yana said...

I was doing some googling and was wondering if you'd hear of this MTV Desi thing that has started, aimed at South Asian Americans. Here's one blog post I saw about it (yes, I was googling glocalization when I found this): http://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2005/06/mtv-desi-hybridity-glocalization.html and the Wikipedia page about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV_Desi . It's not only a kind of glocalization, but a totally different phenomenon targeting individuals from one locality who have transitioned to another and yet still want to retain both their own culture and global trends. Pretty interesting, maybe could do a whole post on it some time because I'm interested in everyone's opinions..