BY MULUGETA GUDETA
I still remember the time when advertising for commercial purposes was prohibited in Ethiopia not by law but by administrative decision at a time when ideological correctness was more important than anything else in the country.
Capitalist advertising was found subversive, spreading the culture of consumerism and the so-called imperialist and decadent influence. The huge advertising billboards on the walls of big buildings in Addis were pulled down and sometimes replaced with huge portraits of the communist leaders.
The portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin adorned the former “Revolution Square” where class struggle was taking place between the revolutionaries and reactionaries of the day who spoke the same language but fought over the correctness of spellings in words.
One famous Amharic word that led to the spilling of blood was “Enashenifalen” versus “Enachenifalen”. These two words are spelt differently but meant the same thing: “We shall win”. The difference was between the “shenifalen” and “chenifalen”, differences emanating from pronunciations in two different dialects, the first rural and the second urban.
The revolutionaries who used the one pronunciation considered themselves true followers of Marx and Lenin while those who used the other pronunciation accused their “enemies” as revisionists and reactionaries.
The two different ways of writing the same thing covered the deep mistrust and enmity or hostility that was characteristic of Ethiopian revolutionaries in the 1970s and 1980s. Looking back at those “infantile disorders” as Lenin would say, one is appalled by the depth of ignorance that begot senseless violence.
The times soon changed in the 1990s and capitalist correctness was allowed buildings to dazzle the viewers from the top of huge buildings from where beautiful girls smiled with their advertisement of the latest beauty soaps or the most fashionable dress or the state of the art car.
Instead of the dour faces of Lenin and Marx, we could see the smiling images of athletes who grinned with triumph or Coca cola bottle with their sugarless brands. The three revolutionaries, Marx, Engels and Lenin, sometimes dubbed the “Trinity of communism” by fun-loving Ethiopians, suddenly disappeared from their respected and respectable places atop the Revolution Square.
The place was renamed or rediscovered its old name as “Meskel Square” although nobody worried about planting a huge cross on top of it like the one we see in Rio De Janeiro in Brazil.
I recently came across an interesting article on a blog page that defines the term “advertising” in a succinct way by saying that, “Say the word advertising to someone and the immediate images will spring in mind: billboards, television, ads, buses with banners, flyers shoved under your nose-the list goes on.
Advertising is ubiquitous in modern society and while some people have some understanding of the power it wields over our everyday choices, few realize the subtle nuances of advertising that cause to be so effective.”
Advertising has indeed become “the new wave” in the commercial district of Addis Ababa where small as well as big businesses seem to be living and breathing through their advertising signs. What is sometimes funny about these signs is that they may be written in the wrong way or they may not reflect what the owners want to sell and to whom they sell their products.
I once came across a sign on the door of a small restaurant with a sign that tell the viewers that it has “resumed business anew” (beadis melk sira jemirenal). Judging from the dilapidated look of the small eatery, with its plasters falling down from its walls and the piece of red cloth hanging from its door, one has the impression that the so-called restaurant is transferred from one of the rural towns in our deep south and planted in the heart of Addis.
By the look of the words on the sign that were not printed but written in long hand with a heavy dose of red paint, you are immediately discouraged to get into the room to see what they serve in what new way.
What is funny about the signs on billboards is that they sometimes carry words wrongly spelt or with wrong sentence construction that may be tolerable on the ground that Ethiopia is neither colonized by the British nor has English as its national language. However the mistakes show how poorly we are using our poor knowledge of English in the service of advertising goods and services in the wrong way.
Many, if not most advertising billboards in Addis Ababa are written in Amharic and English and nowadays in Afan Oromo too. One can understand why they use local languages but why using English since we have not a big community of English speaking Ethiopians or we have no substantial foreign customers who are using English to go and dine at the small hotel I tried to describe above.
By the same token, we are not going to use all the 80 languages of Ethiopian nationalities to write advertisement for them. This is technically impossible and functionally absurd. We use the major languages, which in our case are Amharic, Afan Oromo and Tigrigna that are spoken by the majority of people who are also consumers of goods and products.
Another funny feature of advertising signs in Addis is that their owners or advertisers sometimes borrow or “steal” names for their businesses. I have come across another hotel somewhere in downtown Addis that bore the name “Sheraton Hotel”. The owner may be fond of the true Sheraton in Addis but it would be a disservice, if not a defamation of the true Sheraton to use the same name to hang it over the door of a modest café or burger joint. According to the blog article I sited above, “Language is the ultimate power in advertising. A strong company name or tagline can make or break a product.”
You cannot obviously make your business thrive by naming it big. Many people in this country call their children “Habtamu” (or “The Wealthy”) but this alone would not make their children really wealthy because wealth requires hard work and other qualities more than parental wishes or dreams.
The little story about Sheraton may be an extension of our culture of naming our children after saints, heroes or big men. That is not a bad habit as such but what happens if children with names of heroes turn out to be sinners, heroes turn out to be cowards and big men names produce little men? What would a father with a child named “Liqu” (The Erudite) stands last in his class or fails to pass the elementary school examination? Hope turning into disillusionment!
Our television advertising has also some funny side. There plagiarism is the name of the game. As soon as a new sign on a new product catches the fancy of consumers, another brand emerges by imitating the brand name as well as the advertising on TV. This is most notable among the fruit juice advertising companies that are using similar techniques to sell their products, and if possible, undermine their competitors. The call them Jolly Juice, three D juice, and what have you. The juice may be different but the way they advertise them are almost similar.
The clips are strikingly similar and the actors who play them are often the same people who monopolize the advertising business in specific products as if they are the only people in town who can speak Amharic and dance to the tune of the music accompanying the advertising.
They say that advertising costs are skyrocketing these days and the reason may be the exclusive domination of a few advertising companies that have managed to recruit big name actors or journalists to ran their ads and in the absence of competitors, try to enjoy monopoly prices for their services? It is easier these days for actors to become advertisers simply because advertising clips require some stupid dances and movements that cannot be call artistic by any mean.
Take the case of journalists-turned-advertisers whose confidence emanates only from their bombastic voices or their handsome or pretty faces. Journalism and advertising are two separate careers and there is no reason for a journalist to become an advertiser without learning the science or art of advertising; and vice versa. I am not sure who is issuing the silence for this kind of career shift.
Anyway, the political billboards at the old Revolution Square are long gone never to come back. Commercial advertising is here to stay and thrive instead of decline. New professionals will replace older ones and educated people will come after the men and women who work in advertising out of love for the profession or from the absence of lack alternative careers.
The bottom line is that advertising is a respected as well as a lucrative profession and advertising a science of luring people to buy certain goods and services. Honesty, trust and qualification should therefore be the ruling ethics. Advertisers big or small should adopt the culture of ethical and honest advertising and culture-specific advertising language, particularly in advertising Ethiopian goods and services to foreign buyers.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD SATURDAY 24 JUNE 2023
