I’m sitting on a floor mat eating sticky rice and laap in a Thai hut located in Essarn. With me are 5 kids, 5 ladies and 3 men: all Thai. Only myself can understand English. Everyone is glued to the TV, a new Thai soap everyone loves. The commercials come and booom: It’s David Beckham in an Adidas commercial explaining how anything is possible….In English! Everyone laughed and I asked if they understood what he just said. No surprise they didn’t.

Some media campaigns do make me laugh, even the big brands seem to get it wrong! If you are advertising on a Thai TV network, why not use subtitles or even better, dub the sound? Without doing so you have 99% of your viewers scratching their heads trying to figure out what the commercial was about.