Madagascar

Okay, a short quiz:
How fast can you match these slogans with their companies?

"I'm loving lt!" Las Vegas
"What happens here stays here." Taco Bell
"Just do it!" AT&T
"Come fly the friendly skies" All State
"The best part of waking up" Nike
"Reach out and touch someone" McDonald's
"You're in good hands" Folger's Coffee
"Think outside the bun" United Airlines

Adverstising is probably the most important job in a major corporation. Slogans are the way we are introduced to a company, and more than often, it is what makes us choose one product over another. Companies know this, and are willing to pay to get the company gimmick perpetually playing in our subconcious. In 2006, McDonald's spent about 15% of their profit letting us know we were "lovin' it" (very creative, Justin Timberlake), and it cost Burger King 20% for you to 'have it your way'.

Mottos and slogans are engrained into us even as children, and by the time we're adults we are George Costanza mindlessly humming, "By Mennon" as we walk down the street. These cute quips and clever puns influence us whether we want them to or not... even on things we don't, or shouldn't, care about. When you're in a grocery store buying paper towels, are you going to grab the 'Quicker Picker-Upper" or the off brand in a the yellow wrapper? Who cares, you ask? You do! Don't act like you don't know I'm talking about Bounty... and you know that because at least three times a day you see some idealic American mom with perfect hair happily mopping up the mess made by her adorable child with a missing front tooth.

But, when advertising goes international, these solicitous slogans sometimes don't translate quite the same. In China, Pepsi's 2000 slogan, "Pepsi- The choice of a new generation" directly translated into Cantonese as "Pepsi- Brings back your dead ancestors." The word Pinto, as in the Ford brand car, is Brazilian slang for "tiny male genitals", and Frank Perdue's slogan "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken" got translated into Spanish as "It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused".

Gerber assumed they would have no such probem, since they don't really have much of a 'slogan' to speak of. We all recognise Gerber by the angelic looking child on the label of their tiny glass jars of baby food. When they decided to break into the African market, their adorable little logo was plastered all over the jars, much to the horror of the African population. Since most Africans in rural areas are illiterate, in most cases when an item comes canned or in a jar instead of writing what it is, they simply show a picture of the contents. Imagine what they thought when they saw a jar of drab colored indiscernible gloop with a picture of a baby on the front!

Thus proving, a picture is worth a thousand words, and words are worth a million laughs when they're translated directly into another language.