This award-winning campaign, surprisingly, got a few backs up when it ran
in Malaysia.
Amway, you may know, is an American direct-selling company, like Avon,
but for household cleaning products.
They came to us, without a pitch, wanting a corporate ad announcing their
arrival in Malaysia, as well as the fact that, as good corporate citizens, they
supported the local old folks' home.
After briefing me, the Amway client then tabled his own creative solution
- a layout featuring a huge logo topped with the headline 'We Are Here'
or some such tosh.
Now, to be fair, they implicitly knew that they should lead with the charity
story, but, as clients will, they had an unshakable belief in the mystical
powers of their own logo, which, in this case, no one had ever seen before.
Happily, they eventually accepted that they would gain the most goodwill if
they honoured the old folks first, the home's carers second, and themselves
a distant third.
I explained that this would mean quite a modest little logo, but they could
see the logic of the argument.
The mini-furore occurred when a number of over-patriotic (not to say paranoid)
Malaysians complained in a regional ad-mag that a US company like Amway had
no business casting aspersions on the way their country treated their oldsters.
A fair point, possibly, but when it was pointed out that the clients who approved
the ads were all Malaysians, and that the stories were true reflections of the
lives of the subjects, we heard no more.
This campaign won the best English copy award at the Malaysian 6 As.
|