Wednesday, 16 November 2011

TV Commercial in Multi-Racial country


Advertising, a way to promote brands and also disseminate information on a particular issue is a common media tool used by the advertiser. It can be in printed form, television or radio. Producing television commercial is often harder than producing other form of advertisements as it is needed to take consideration into different aspects such as language and story line.

During the Ramadhan period in 2011, TV8 had published a television commercial that teaches the non-muslim on what should not do and what are the correct way of doing it. However, the content of the commercial was being perceived as offensive by the netizen. In the commercial video, the Chinese girl appeared to be behaved inappropriately during the Ramadhan period and this triggered criticism from the public because it was perceived as racist by other races especially, Chinese.

                                      TV 8 Ramadhan TV Commercial 2011
                                      (source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdSIcRTtjMI)

From the negative outcome of the television commercial, it can be said that the director of this commercial did not take cultural context into the account. In this multiracial country, it is always a sensitive issue when it relates to racial. Without taking this element into the consideration set, the outcome may turn negative. Malaysia in a high cultural context country, words selecting and dialog in the television commercial are very crucial to the expression and outcome of television commercial and also advertising (Ahmed and Mouratidis 2009). It seems that in the Ramadhan TV commercial was alluding majority of the Malaysian Chinese were behaving inappropriately previously. Perhaps, the way the commercial convey messages was incorrectly.

In my opinion, television commercial that relates to racial does not work in Malaysia. Because by doing so is considered as breaching the advertising ethics in Malaysia culture. No matter which races a commercial was targeted on, the perception from the public is very important, the tendency to trigger criticism is very high. In a nutshell, a small mistake in the process of designing commercial advertisement does give a huge negative impact to the publisher especially with the assistant of Facebook and Twitter, the impact will be spread to the whole country rapidly.

Reference list

Ahmed, T & Mouratidis, H 2009, Website Design Guidelines: High Power Distance and High-Context Culture, International Journal of Cyber Society and Education, Vol.2, No.1, p.47-60,

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