Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen

My name is Sorokin Roman. Today I am going to present my course work.

The subject of my course work is Advertising and anthropology. My course work be in 3 chapters. The first chapter is about anthropological features in advertising. The second part is dedicated to client relations and the importance of negotiations and workshops. Then the third chapter describes the role of anthropology in marketing. In the first chapter I’m going to talk about the anthropological study of Sri Lanka and about Japanese advertising campaign, how the international company in Tokyo elevated it’s brand image in U.S.A and Germany. Then in the second part I want to describe what is a workshop and say about metaphors of war. And finally I explain how ethnography connected with anthropology and say about the study on drugs in the lives of mainstream tweens. My talk will take about ten minutes. If you have any questions, please ask them at the end of presentation. That’s all for the introduction, now let’s move to the first part of my talk, which is anthropological features in advertising.

I’d like to begin with a definition of anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humans, past and present. Anthropology examine social patterns and practices across cultures, with a special interest in how people live in particular places and topics such as health, work, ecology and environment, education, agriculture and development, and social change.

Now I want to speak about the anthropological study of Sri Lanka and about Japanese advertising campaign

Marketer’s interest in the advertising business came from contemplating the analogy

between anthropological and advertising practice in Sri Lanka. Anthropologists interested in Sri Lanka have understood it as a society shaped by local religious, kinship, caste, and estate systems. More recently, they have emphasized new expressions of Buddhism, ethnic violence, and the historical memory. These interests have created a picture of Sri Lanka that is perfect but incomplete. Advertising people are interested in the same society pictured in different terms. For them, Sri Lanka is a society of consumers. It divides into two groups – the middle class, typically English-speaking and living in Colombo, and those who live in provincial cities and villages. The ethnographic study of Sri Lanka begins with Seligmann’s early twentieth century account of the island’s only aboriginal people, the Väddas, and that focus on the primitive, the traditional. Only recently its focus fell first on a small, Westernized elite living mainly in

Colombo. Advertisements, framed in English, and often featuring line drawings of

European faces and places, treated those consumers as ‘brown Englishmen’ given

to the tastes and values. For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, advertising ignored the great majority of Sri Lankans. Over the last third, advertising and ethnography moved in opposite directions – ethnography spread from village to town; advertising from the capital city to the hinterlands.

One Sri Lankan radio commercial featured a working man, not the kind of person who

gets moved around the city in a taxi (and who ordinarily shows up in advertisements),

and those class references were given voice by the everyday language the

man spoke, their effect made stronger because his words appeared in a ‘zone of

display’ where a more formal Sinhala dominates. Who better than a taxi driver to

appreciate the value of a battery that starts at once? people in the advertising business nowadays cite it as the paradigm example of ‘local idiom’ . But the most instructive aspect of this radio commercial is that virtually no one followed suit, exploiting a working-class model, in the

following thirty years. The great majority of advertisements on radio, television, and in print use more formal language and feature models who show no signs of manual labor.

That’s a perfect example of implementation anthropological knowledge in advertising.