| Literature suggests that culture determines advertising content and advertising itself serves to reflect culture. Creative strategy, the heart of great advertising, mirrors important cultural meanings. Unfortunately, few cross-cultural studies have been conducted regarding political advertising. This research is a comparative examination of the cultural aspects of political commercials within two countries—Taiwan and U.S. Ads associated with the 1996 presidential campaigns in each country were compared in an effort to explore how cultural differences may influence creative strategies within a venue of political spot advertising.; This study is based on two important assumptions, Hall's assessment of the degree to which cultures are high or low in context, and Hofstede's analysis of the degree to which cultures adhere to an individualistic or collectivistic orientation. Cannon's useful framework, which consists of four considerations: utilitarian, ego-defensive, value-expressive, and knowledge-oriented, was employed for categorizing creative strategies.; A total of 194 ads from Taiwan and U.S. were analyzed. Generally, the results demonstrate Taiwanese and American presidential hopefuls were “more different than alike” regarding the use of creative strategies in political spots. Specifically, the utilitarian strategies such as the use of instrumental appeals and fear appeals were popular in both countries, but operated in Taiwan at the collective level, while operating at the individual level in U.S. Moreover, Taiwanese utilized fewer negative attacks mostly implicit. In contrast, Americans conducted more negative attacks mostly quite explicit, and tended to adopt negative production techniques more often. For the ego-defensive strategies, Taiwanese presented more emotional appeals, while Americans offered more rational appeals. Taiwanese spots also included more songs to express emotion than did their American counterparts. With respect to the value-expressive strategies, Taiwanese relied more on running mate settings to value espirit de corps than did Americans. Lastly, regarding the knowledge-oriented strategies, compared to Americans, Taiwanese used bandwagon settings to stress their popularity more frequently.; In sum, the implication is that despite similar democratic political systems, cultural differences play an important and striking role in the practice of indigenous political advertising. Creative strategies in political spots are generally reflective of the cultural orientations where they occur. |
