Financial Times

Local firms eye wider markets in advertising campaigns
Local companies have started to look beyond Sri Lanka in their advertising strategies and begun to present themselves according to global perspectives, according to Michelle Kristula Green, President, Leo Burnett Asia Pacific.

Having visited Sri Lanka for the fifth year celebrations of Leo Burnett Solutions Inc., the local office of the international advertising giant, Green, told The Sunday Times FT that during these five years local clients have developed their advertising and marketing communications solutions.

"However, there are far more opportunities in Sri Lanka for more developed ideas in advertising," she said adding that it is still a maturing market. Advertising executives said that advertising costs are so high that companies have begun to adopt the practice prevalent in India of creating campaigns that would be suitable even for overseas markets, should they decide to export their products.

Globalising local brands and localising global brands in the context of Asian advertising, Green said the global brands have changed the way they feel about local markets. "In turn, we have observed that local brands are catering more and more towards a global platform." She said that in advertising, the ASEAN region is taken as a separate market because of the similarities in market developments.

"Greater China is regarded as a group, Korea and Japan are taken as a single market and Australia is considered as a sole market because of the similarities in each market's dynamics."

In the ASEAN region she said that the urban population arrives from the rural areas and there are a lot of similarities in their purchasing habits. "There is still a lot of tradition in those markets and we are very conscious to those sensitivities when developing ideas," she said.

Green said six out of the 10 top markets for advertising are from Asia and they are growing at huge projections in terms of expenditure. Indonesia, China and India are among the top six markets for growth in advertising.

"The advertising industry in Sri Lanka is similar to that of the Philippines, as there are large rural markets," she observed. When asked if advertising in Sri Lanka cannot make a larger impact to the rural end of the market, she said that it depends on the time constraints and the ability to distribute the product to the rural areas. "Therefore the clients have conflicting priorities to balance," she added.

In Sri Lanka, according to AC Nielson research, in 2003 the annual advertising expenditure was Rs. 8.8 billion. Fifty seven percent of this has been for TV, 30 percent for radio and 13 percent for print media.

Globally, Leo Burnett currently handles seven of the world's 25 most valuable global brands such as McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Walt Disney, Marlboro, Kelloggs, Tampax and Nintendo. It also handles 22 other brands in the top 100 and has been in Asia for the last 20 years.

Green manages the activity of the unit's 23 offices comprised of 1,500 employees in 16 countries and has lived and worked on four continents. The first woman to run a multinational agency in Japan, and one of the only non-Asian agency heads to have proficiency in both Chinese and Japanese, Green began her career at Burnett more than 20 years ago and has worked in Chicago, Taiwan and Tokyo on a wide range of multinational clients.

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