As we were getting acclimated to the altitude in Cusco, we did a little wandering around with the tour group and on our own. Our tour guide was very frank with us about the condition of the locals and mentioned that many of the housing in the mountains outside of the main city had finally only just received power and water. I’m guessing this is why we saw so many billboards and ads for basic household items like ovens and faucets. Normally saved for high end magazines in the US in order to reach the targeted audience, pretty much everyone was in need of ranges, crock pots and coffee makers.
And of course I had to take a picture of the only digital billboard I saw. While the photo doesn’t do it quite justice, it was a screamer of a board and was at a 5-way intersection and it could be seen by about 4 ways really well!
While ads on buildings on ads are normally reserved for Vegas, NYC, LA, (and we had our first big one in O-town – Transformer destruction), brands on buildings were quite common.
Blech. Inca Kola. Never tried it because someone said it tasted like bubble gum. Blech.
Movistar and Claro were the big cable and cell phone companies (yup, they do both) that were advertising. Movistar has business as far north as Mexico to the tip of South America. Claro is also in many of the same countries, as well as Puerto Rico.
These familiar brands had big presences in Cusco. Nextel was competing with the brands mentioned above, plus a few others. I didn’t see any iPhone ads, though. I wonder if Toyotathon translated well enough in Spanish for people to know that Toyota was just trying to sell A LOT of cars. Marathon is Spanish is maratón. Maybe it should have changed to Toyotatón?
I’ll let you look at the picture more closely and figure out which sneaky ad this is for.
It is really neat to see how ads are different in different parts of the world. You can start to figure out primary industries, how much discretionary income they have, and what life stages have the most discretionary income. For Orlando, tourism is the primary industry, the discretionary income is either really high or really low (as you can see from the botox/plastic surgery doctors and luxury cars vs divorce lawyers whose unique selling proposition is rate, and fast food dollar value menus; but you don’t see much in between; and older people have the discretionary income. For Cusco, the primary industry is also tourism, there’s not a whole lot of discretionary income – what people are looking to buy are new necessities, such as home goods and communication tools; but the young people have the discretionary money. They are young enough to want to evolve their homes to be state of the art with cable and nice appliances. The older generations are still earning incomes and spending that income on a day to day basis, at the local markets. Some young people follow in their footsteps, but the universities are bustling and the young people that are staying in Cusco (as many are leaving) are performing white collar business in the new sectors/industries that are able to now cater to the locals.
Patti is still learning 