How to get bland loyalty

International ad campaigns save money. But does one size fit all? Alex Benady reports on the perils of global branding

The advertising industry has spent must of the last 30 years talking about the globalisation of brands, with the likes of Coca-Cola achieving mega-bucks success on the back of worldwide campaigns. Now, late in the day, the struggling burger chain McDonald's is hoping to reverse declining sales with its first global advertising drive.

Five commercials featuring the R&B heart-throb Justin Timberlake are due to appear in almost identical form in 110 countries over the coming weeks. They first aired in Germany and reached the UK last week. By now you may be familiar with the ads, which have Timberlake singing, "Is this the place to eat? Since I don't cook, I'll just rock to the beat. I'm lovin' it. At the end of the day, to relieve the stress, we add a little play. I'm lovin' it."

Timberlake probably is loving it - McDonald's has given him six million good reasons to do so. McDonald's is loving it, too. The ads are part of a broader global marketing programme that it calls, somewhat sinisterly, "rolling energy", which it hopes will revitalise its recent lacklustre performance. "It's much more than just a new tagline or commercials - it's a new way of thinking about and expressing our worldwide brand," according to Larry Light, McDonald's global chief marketing officer.

Whether the 47 million people who visit 30,000 McDonald's restaurants every day are loving it is a different question. The campaign has already been given a critical mauling. One American critic described it as "a bizarre agglomeration of fake hip-hopitude, Pollyana depictions of young people, jumpy editing, insipid philosophy and an extremely dubious selling proposition".

That's the least of its problems. Actually, there are few truly global advertising campaigns. They tend to be limited to business products such as computers, some luxury and cosmetic brands and duty-free. A couple of years ago, for instance, Johnnie Walker ran identical ads in 207 countries. It seems that McDonald's is using Timberlake's youth appeal to cast itself globally as an American icon in the same league as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Marlboro and Levi's. The trouble is, it could not have chosen a worse time to do it.

"Americana just doesn't play that well around the world at the moment," says Simon Anholt, director of Place Brands, a company that advises countries on how to market themselves. "Especially since the Gulf war, there is widespread ambivalence about American values. On the one hand, the American promise of abundance and glamour is seen as alluring. On the other hand it is widely seen as alien and corrosive."

Worse still, there are increasing questions over whether global advertising campaigns really make sense. Only last week, a senior executive at the shampoo and cosmetics company Procter & Gamble, which spends $3.8bn (£2.3bn) a year on commercials for brands such as Pantene, confessed that the company has been "too global" in some of its past advertising.

The rationale for global advertising is that it saves money and gives a brand global coherence. The savings on shooting 110 different commercials can be as much as $50m-60m (£30-37m). It's a substantial amount, although in the context of the McDonald's global spend of $1.4bn (£800m), perhaps not crucial. The coherence argument is concerned with giving a brand similar meaning in different countries, largely, it is claimed, so that travellers from one country don't get confused about a brand in another country. That argument certainly makes sense for, say, Johnnie Walker, which sells widely in duty-free shops. Whether Omo loyalists will be heaving sighs of relief that, after years of confusion, their favourite soap powder is finally being advertised in the same way from Seoul to Santiago is open to debate.

Global campaigns are often little to do with what is right for the consumer, and a lot to do with what is right for the producer. "Often global advertising is driven by the desire of those at the centre of large corporations to control local marketers and limit their independence of action by imposing advertising on them," observes the chief operating officer of one international advertising network.

The dilemma for advertisers is that in gaining greater efficiency and control, they lose the cultural resonance that tends to make local campaigns more effective. A prime example is the Gillette's "The best a man can get" campaign. Although Gillette has a menu of clips of handsome, well-groomed men that are selected by focus groups in every country, it runs substantially the same ads all over the world. But the problems that it faces in each market are very different. In Germany, the home of Braun, dry shaving is popular, but the structure of German television makes it very easy to reach consumers. In Italy, wet shaving is popular, but Italian television is inefficient in reaching consumers. The Japanese, on the other hand, have efficient television, and love wet shaves. The market is dominated by Gillette's rival, Wilkinson Sword. Yet Gillette runs the same bland advertisements everywhere.

Blandness, it seems, is an inevitable consequence of global campaigns. "Advertising is a cultural phenomenon. So, to work, global campaigns have to mine the very thin top layer of global culture that we all share," Anholt says.

When you are selling a brand all over the world, there are also many opportunities to make disastrous mistakes. We are all familiar with brand names that don't travel, such as a lemonade called Piss. The same can be true of advertising slogans.

A few years ago, Pepsi Cola launched a worldwide ad campaign with the tagline "Come alive with Pepsi", which was translated into Chinese to mean: "Pepsi brings back the ancestors". McDonald's nearly precipitated a holy war when it unveiled a worldwide promotion using national flags. It did not realise that the Saudi flag had a verse from the Koran on it, and that the campaign was therefore blasphemous. And KFC's "finger-licking good" translated to "it makes you want to eat your fingers" in some parts of the world. It's surely only a matter of time before some hapless copywriter translates the McDonald's slogan "I'm lovin' it" to "I'm shaggin' it."