International advertising variations

The first part of our trip home a few weeks ago was aboard the Daewoo Express, which I think we've mentioned before.  On the Daewoo they show an in-flight movie, but the one time I tried to watch it I wished I hadn't bothered due to the sheer frequency and length of the advert breaks - usually with exactly the same adverts each time.

So this time I wasn't watching, except for when one advert caught my eye.  It was an advert for chicken. K&N's chicken, to be exact.

At home I reckon raw meat isn't that high on the list of advertisers flagship products, and if it did make an appearance, you might expect a beautiful farmyard scene with handsome brown birds pecking away happily under yellow afternoon sunlight, perhaps followed by a close-up of some mouth-watering dish being cooked by some celebrity chef.  Not so here.

Instead, this advert was about 10 minutes long, and comprised an amazingly detailed study of the life of the broiler chicken, from egg to dinner plate.  It had the eggs being picked out.  It had the little chicks hatching.  It had thousands of white chickens scratching about on a dimly lit warehouse floor.  (They may have skipped over the 'this is how we kill them' part...)  It had gargantuan factory production lines with big shiny machines to gut, clean and disassemble chickens.  It had quality control galleries, where lab-coated technicians would, at the touch of a button, dispatch sub-par chickens from the ranks of pristine carcasses to some unknown destination below.  It had yet more shiny machines to shrink-wrap the meat ready for sale.  It even had a short foray into their logistics department, showing palettes being forklifted into gleaming fleets of trucks.

It was fascinating.

And a far cry from the sunny ignorance-of-all-the-nasty-bits we like in our food production.  I think it comes down to a difference in background.  Whereas in the UK, where we assume all our food meets some EU regulations for hygiene (and, if we're lucky, animal welfare), we go for the aesthetics:  the nice looking farmyard and the tasty looking recipe.  Here, the company wants to make sure they show off every last detail of its cleanliness and professionalism (however close that might be to the reality...), and thus how much better their product must be than the cheap dirty animal from down the bazaar.

Their final product/brand name screen sums it up with their slogan:  "Safe and healthy".

Safe?!