Bland Branding

The latest ads in Colombo seem to consist of young, fertile looking people acting like children. Products rarely appear in these ads so they could just as easily be ads for phone companies, ice cream, soda or herpes medication. I am not an advertising expert, but I see enough that I would like to humbly request a change.
This trend began with Dialog’s youth positioning, which at least involved people holding phones. Later Tigo abandoned the pretense of selling telephony at all and simply showed young people having an inane amount of fun.  The latest addition is the new Elephant House campaign which looks exactly like the mobile phone campaigns, except someone is presumably eating ice cream off camera.

Attractiveness

On the most basic level an ad needs to get you to look, which these ads do. We are all attracted to youth, sometimes sexually or sometimes sympathetically, but they always catch the eye. These ads, however, do not go past attraction to making one actually think about anything. Indeed, some of the ads are so bland that they actually reprint Indian stock photography without doing any creative work here.
Mainstream Indian advertising, by contrast, sells actual sex. Adverts for everything from motorbikes to body spray carry the unsubtle promise that these products will get you laid. Sri Lankan ads don’t sell sex per se, they sell some sort of weird consumerist stupor. The promise behind Sri Lankan products seems to be that they will make you dance or play like a child or, less generously, an idiot.
On one level this is because we can’t sell sex. The police have begun cracking down on ‘indecent hoardings’ and advertising and actually removed many. On another level this is because many Sri Lankan companies and advertising agencies seem to lack imagination beyond communicating that X or Y product will make you ecstatically happy.

Overload

The difficulty is that so many brands have adopted this bland (and cheap) approach. Right now it is becoming hard to tell ads from Elephant House and Etisalat apart. Both are green and both have few distinguishing characteristics beyond young people and a logo. Both have flooded the country with hoardings at various points, and both recede just as quickly into the scenery. Etisalat has better photography and art direction, but both both campaigns communicate curiously little.
The argument is not whether sex sells or whether youth sells. Both do. The question is how much do they differentiate and, as a consumer, how much do they entertain. By now, almost all Indian ads have beautiful people and professional production values. What sets them apart, however, are the occasional flashes of wit. Some Indian ads are so funny or smart that they transcend language, and that’s what Sri Lankan advertising should aspire to.
It is actually no small thing that we now have adverts which use less than 15 fonts and avoid using stolen, pixelated images from the internet. Campaigns like Elephant House should be commended for that. Having raised the bar to the floor, however, it remains for these companies to push a little further. Sri Lankan brands now need to move beyond being pretty to being both pretty and smart.