Here in Britainland, a significant proportion of the ads on TV were obviously made in another country:
American adverts are common. Sometimes they’re dubbed with British voices, sometimes not. But even if they’re well-dubbed, you can tell from the colours that the ad started out in NTSC.
And ads from the rest of Europe are common too (a little less so than american ads), always dubbed ofc. Fashion and beauty ads in particular often use the same ad across many countries; I think it’s good for them to seem “continental”.
Question is; does this happen on American TV? Do you get dubbed french ads for perfume? Anything that looked like it was filmed in PAL?
Not very often, but it does occur. For example, Stella Artois ads are clearly European, and they come across quite differently than the ads we’re used to. There are others, but I’d say foreign ads are not very common.
Don’t even get me started on old Mentos commercials.
No, almost never with some caveats. Almost all U.S. advertisements are specially created with the U.S. audience as its primary target. You won’t see ads that were made for several countries as a group here unless it is some obscure channel or possibly a non-English channel but I don’t think they usually do that either. You will see some ads that are set in a foreign country and show foreign people as a theme but that is done intentionally.
America’s both too large (physically and economically) and too isolated (geographically, economically, culturally) for foreign advertisements to make much of an impact here; if someone wants to sell to the American market, it’s generally worth their time to invest in a whole American division that can do American market research, deal exclusively with American laws on a state-by-state basis, and make ads just for the American market. (I’m sure there are exceptions but right now I can’t think of any. Even the BBC has BBC America as its own little entity.)
Apart from American imports, how many non-European ads appear on European TV?
Back in the '90s, Mikhail Gorbachev did a commercial for Pizza Hut when they first moved into Russia. It eventually got subtitled and released in America as well.
That’s pretty much what I figured.
Also, I should be clear that I am not putting a value judgement on this; I have no opinion of whether it would be good, bad or neutral for more foreign ads to be on american TV.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single ad I’ve seen on british TV that was neither european nor american.
But note that there isn’t really a “european TV”; the market is pretty fragmented. And with the big cultural differences it’s not like it’s just domestic TV.
I saw an article about this - for quite a few pan-European car ads they show cars with faked palindromic-reflective licence plate numbers so they can just do a horizontal flip with the video for the UK and Irish markets.
I don’t think that’s really what the OP was asking about, but a significant number of Canadian businesses put commercials on stations that broadcast out of Burlington, Vermont. That’s because these stations are available in Montreal, which is a much bigger market than, well, Burlington, Vermont. This would be an example of advertisements on a U.S. channel created for a foreign audience.
I used to live in Vermont and have been to Burlington many times. I love the state more thing anything but I wouldn’t put anything past the hippies there. It’s Northern Vermont. Who are they going to advertise too other than Quebecers? Cows don’t listen to the radio much an, even if they do, they tend to be a really poor consumer demographic. It is scary to think that Northern Vermont is actually ‘The South’ to people in Montreal.
While Montreal gets its American television channels from Burlington, other places in Quebec get them (or used to get them) from Detroit (of all places). Depending on whose house you were in, you’d either hear about the deer that wandered downtown or the three people shot point-blank downtown on the local news before watching Letterman.
This isn’t quite the same thing, since it’s not a produced spot shown for television, but it is a foreign ad on TV. Some of the ads that appear around the Seattle Mariners baseball park (meant to appear on television, similar to football[soccer] ads that display around the edge of the field) are entirely in Japanese. This isn’t because of a lucrative Japanese-speaking American fanbase, but because the games are broadcast in Japan (due primarily to the success of Ichiro Suzuki, who transferred from the Japanese leagues to the US). They can actually get more money from Japanese companies, though some kind of work for most Americans as well, e.g Nintendo.
MLS (pro soccer league) games might well have ads likewise in Spanish, though that’s as likely to appeal to the rather large Spanish-speaking population in the US as it is to foreign broadcasters.
Two that I suspect were made abroad:
–A British Airways ad where a BA stewardess takes charge of some public calamity, like a woman giving birth in a public park (The humor was distinctly not in keeping with American ads at the time, although a lot of the extras in the ad sure seemed to be American). Early-mid 80s.
–A German car ad (BMW or Mercedes-Benz) where the assembly line workers in the 20s and 30s are singing “Falling in Love Again” while putting the finishing touches on classic roadsters (I can’t imagine an American ad agency using that particular imagery to connect with American car buyers). Mid-90s.
Of course, there is the occasional ad that is supposed to look like the setting is Europe or Asia… I vaguely recall seeing one and realizing “hey, that’s the Venetian in Las Vegas!” I guess with green screen location shooting is less necessary. (Long shot stock footage of Parisian cafe exterior, cut to interior set that could be anywhere)
British Airways a decade ago was known for producing global commercials that had localized voice-overs. This one featuring Lakme’s Flower Duet comes to mind.
I also have my suspicions about the Ricola commercials.
This varies by region, though: Up in the northern tier of Montana (Havre, specifically), you just don’t see or hear Canadian ads unless you tune into a TV or radio station that’s actually broadcasting from Canada. Our cable and satellite TV packages certainly don’t include any Canadian channels, and the American ones don’t run Canadian ads, as I said. I doubt it’s much different in, say, North Dakota.
Of course, that isn’t a region with big cities on either side of the border; mainly, it’s cattle and wheat as far as the eye can see on both sides of the frontier.
The fifth-largest television network in the US is Spanish-language; there are a couple other major Spanish-language networks as well. Surely at least some of these run Mexican or other foreign-produced advertisements…?
Lots of ads made for US TV are made outside of the US. I personally worked on a Toyota Scion ad about 6 years ago. Shot in Melbourne (Australia), post production in Sydney, was aired for the US market. There was no actors in it, just shots of the car, music and tagline titles so accent wasn’t an issue.
It’s also common to go to South Africa to shoot for big budget US car ads etc where they need to shoot during the northern hemisphere winter, but it’s meant to be bright and sunny.
Although it’s less common, yes sometimes an ad made specifically for a foreign market will air in the US. I’ve also worked on L’Oreal, Garnier and such hair and beauty products ads, if an ad gets really strong response it will get picked up by other markets. So a european hair ad from Garnier might end up running in the US, but they’d redub the voices and also replace shots of the pack (eg the bottle) with ones which match the local packs.