Thoughtful China: TBWA’s Keith Smith on why advertising is getting sexy in China

China is a critical market for global advertisers but its importance is not being reflected in the work being produced here. Many Chinese ads lack creativity and marketers seldom take risks.

This week on “Thoughtful China,” host Trevor Lai speaks with Keith Smith, president, international at TBWA Worldwide, about China’s rising importance, the country’s HR challenge and creative reputation and how digital media has revolutionized the ad industry, especially in Asia. Here are some highlights from the episode:

“When we started in China, there was very much a feeling that advertising wasn’t necessarily the kind of business that young kids wanted to get into. When you looked at youth in China and the kind of businesses that they wanted to go into, it was very much financial services, investment banking, that kind of thing, advertising wasn’t seen as a particularly sexy business which we’ve always felt in the rest of the world clearly it is. But I think that’s changed a lot in the last four or five years,” Smith said.

“We’ve had this huge influx of young kids coming into the business thinking, ‘Hey, there’s an awful lot I can do in this business.’ I think the other thing that has really helped that happen is the whole growth of digital, because a kid in China, in Shanghai, can do a great digital idea which immediately can run anywhere in the world,” he said.

“With the benefit of hindsight, we probably felt [China] was going to be more important earlier than some of our clients had actually, in reality, been able to establish a business there. I think some of it is hindsight, because I think that even though our clients were telling us it was going to be very important, in reality they hadn’t actually been successful in establishing proper businesses there,” Smith said.