Witawat, who is chief executive of advertising agency Creative Juice\G1, said yesterday many international judges in advertising competitions have grown accustomed to the way Thai agencies apply creative comedy. This used to make Thailand a prominent country on the global advertising stage.

However, after seeing the style for several years, other countries such as Japan, India and China have learned to adapt comedy to their cultures and apply it to produce advertisements.

More recently, Thai agencies have tended to give emphasis to making their advertisements look funny while forgetting to link the funny content to the brands being advertised.

These factors resulted in Thai works receiving fewer awards on the global stage, including this month's Asia-Pacific Adfest, Witawat said.

He said many advertisements are successful in making people remember the ads, but fail to link the comedy to the brands of products or services and consumers eventually cannot remember what was being advertised.

If agencies produce ads that are good fun, with good methods of linking the fun with the brand, they will win the hearts of competition judges both locally and globally and at the same time create strong bonds between advertisers and consumers, which is the core objective in making advertisements, he said.

Nevertheless, Thailand is still recognised on the global stage as being among the world's top 10 countries for creative advertising.

In the most recent Gunn Report for Media, which is an international measure of the success of media innovation and creativity, Thailand is ranked as the fifth best country for advertisements this year, up from sixth place last year. Meanwhile, Australia's Campaign Brief magazine ranked seven Thai advertising staff - known in the industry as "creatives" - as among the world's top ten. It ranked one of these, a "creative" working at Creative Juice\G1, as the best in the world.

Witawat said he expects Thailand to maintain its world rankings this year.

One of two major local events to showcase Thai works this year - the 4th Adman Awards and Symposium 2007 - will be held on June 8 at the Royal Paragon Hall in Siam Paragon shopping complex. The theme for the event is Love at Second Sight. It has one new competition category - integrated marketing communication - for campaigns that have appeared in at least three different media.

The Adman Awards will also have another special category - Honour the King -which will feature only in the 2006 and 2007 awards in honour of His Majesty the King's 80th Birthday. The category is open to advertisements for the King in four areas - TV, print, outdoor and ambience and radio. It will make a total of 16 award categories at this year's event.

It will also have two symposia - a student symposium being sponsored and co-hosted by Rangsit University and an executive symposium being co-hosted by Brand Age magazine. The topic for the study symposium is the same as last year: "Advertising - What They Don't Teach You at School", and the topic for the executive symposium will be "Consumer Co-Creation Advertising".

The competition is expected to receive up to 1,300 entries this year, up from last year's 1,183.

Witawat said spending on advertising grew 1.7 per cent in January and 7 per cent last month. He expects the figure to be higher for this month.

New television advertising is more about building awareness of brands of products and services rather than building corporate images because advertisers are more concerned about selling products.

Nitida Asawanipont

The Nation