Advertising on television often falls into neat, stereotypical categories; beer ads are funny, car ads are slick, men in household products ads are dumb, wives in electronics ads are shrews.
But Thailand is quietly becoming the world leader in a special niche: The tear-jerker. John Lewis, a British department store, has become renowned for its Christmas heart-warmers and tear-jerkers, and nearly every massive multinational from Google to Coca Cola has least produced at least one. Thailand’s ad industry, though, is taking them to the next level.
The genre is so popular in Thailand that companies write special, extended-length versions of tear-jerker commercials that run for several minutes, and go viral on YouTube and Facebook. Security camera company Vizer is the latest to pull at Thailand’s heartstrings—this ad, uploaded by the company on August 27, has already been viewed by 5.4 million people on Facebook and over 3 million on YouTube :
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