I hate the increasing trend of dubbing American adverts British English. (Like ones for nose plasters, leapfrog, board games and others.) It looks terrible and cheap. Is it anything to do with ad execs thinking Brits won't buy something if it's sold to us by Americans? And why are some US adverts left alone, and why do some UK adverts have Americans in them?
No one minds US tv and movies, so why not leave the ads as they are?
In the Channel Isles, we were often used as guinea pigs for Kinder products that hadn't quite made it to the UK yet, and so we were treated to the cheesiest, most badly dubbed foreign adverts featuring European kids with pigtails almost orgasming over this Kinder Bueno. With the badly translated music too, which didn't quite rhyme when translated to English.
It's weirder when it's the other way round and when you see British adverts of British products being sold in another language.
I've seen plenty of Hungarian TV and seen UK ads for T-Mobile and Vodafone but in Hungarian itself. Tesco is a funny one too, in this country they're often classy looking but dull, over there they're rather cheap, tacky and cheerful, even with it's own catchy jingle...
While not entirely relevant to this thread, these videos are worth sharing.
Rachel Rice who won this year's Big Brother was on loads of commercials across the world and many are on YouTube (I'm assuming a family member has posted them). This is for some sort of cooking oil in the Arabic countries.
Notice how the bottle is in written in Arabic on the zoom ins but is in English (or the Latin alphabet at least) when they're zoomed out suggesting that the advert was also used in Europe/the Americas etc.
Then much of the advert had to be re-shot for the Saudi version so that the mother was wearing a headscarf!
In the Channel Isles, we were often used as guinea pigs for Kinder products that hadn't quite made it to the UK yet, and so we were treated to the cheesiest, most badly dubbed foreign adverts featuring European kids with pigtails almost orgasming over this Kinder Bueno. With the badly translated music too, which didn't quite rhyme when translated to English.
Actually, Kinder was one of the ones I was thinking of above when I said "badly dubbed ads are nothing new"
