Our topic for the workshop is advertising in Germany and Indonesia. We focused on the cultural differences between Indonesia and the western world. Therefore, we watched and analysed several advertisements from which we created keywords and developed key visuals based on our perceptions. The Indonesian advertisements were rather joyful with a surprising and emotional plot, while combining real-world elements and scenes with fictional (computer generated) elements. Through composing all these keywords we created the key visual.

To ensure it fits all the words we came up with, we chose to use a merman as the first keyvisual. On the other side, the German advertisements appear comparatively creepy, abnormal, absurd and silly. In contrast to that, they also seem very quirky and cute to us. Again, we paid a lot of attention so the keyvisual fits our thought process and came up with the idea of visualizing it with a clown who supports all the named adjectives.

To elaborate cultural differences and measure different perspectives we developed a survey built around our visuals. Our first content-based task was to write down 3 impressions the participant experienced from the visual. We chose this to foremost, get unbiased associations from the participant. The second additional question was what the visual could advertise. The purpose of this question was to receive and categorize associations the participants enter. Again, we wanted to gather unbiased answers. The third question was to weight given inverse pairs in five categories. With this task, we wanted to detect whether our personal perceptions and developed keywords would or would not match with those from the participants.

We found out that ice-cream displays a variety of topics that are perceived in a completely different way across cultures. In Europe, ice-cream is often related to the summer, beach, vacation and water. The reason for this is that unlike Indonesia where it’s always hot, there are only certain times when the weather is good and the normal consumer would eat ice-cream. Another area we dealt with was the association of clowns and the survey provided results for this topic. To lead back to the previous matter, for example in the cognition of a European, you could very well think of a clown in combination with ice-cream, whereas Indonesians would never associate the two. Instead, they rather think of a creepy creature of society. Not only ice-cream but also fashion poses a contrast in perception. Indonesia is a Muslim country so the women tend to wear a scarf and dresses covering the entire body. A European in contrast wouldn’t come up with the idea of going to the beach without wearing swimwear.

The main problem for the task was to find major differences between Indonesian and European people. Because of globalisation, there are many similarities even across cultures, so it was difficult to find a striking mismatch. Furthermore it was a challenge to rationalise these results. Therefore, we used outcomes from the other questions answered by the same people. This project shall work out how important it is to understand the opposition and their values such as their morals. A central aspect was to find distinctions in our cultures and our way of life. To do this, we analysed our questionnaire to discover major differences in connection with the key elements we worked out before.

In conclusion, the created media shall visualize not only the importance of behavior and the right communication wherever you are, but to draw a link to the advertisement, one should not forget about the cultural peculiarities and characteristics for making an advertisement. On the other hand, a lot of the commercials were quite familiar to us. That supports the theory that you can sense globalisation wherever you move. Furthermore, the fact that the advertisements are sometimes similar to each other unites us across cultures and shows that we aren’t as different from each other as we might have thought we were.