Advertisers facing creative challenge

Though Fink's team can comply with stricter deadlines, he said the increased pressure for results can detract from the final product.

"I think clients need to be educated to understand the fact that if we had a bit longer, you would get more effective advertising," he said.

"When I was working in London you could be quite subtle, you don't have to tell them everything. Here in China the main thing is, because the advertising agency is younger, the target market is less sophisticated and you just have to be a little bit more informative, you have to tell them everything."

The need for a direct message is not the only difference when it comes to Chinese ads.

In China, there is an increased emphasis on using celebrities and famous faces to sell everything from dumplings to toothpaste. In the past, Chinese advertisements also lacked the ability to stir emotions though this is changing.

"Already I can see a little bit more emotional advertising, even compared to a year ago," he said.

Even as China makes its mark in the print and outdoor fields, digital and Internet advertising are quickly becoming the future for marketers looking to peddle their brands to China's next generation of consumers.

In a country of more than 500 million Internet users, taking to the Internet to push products has seen the biggest boost over the past two years with brands trying to tap into social marketing phenomena such as Weibo, China's Twitter-like micro-blogging service.

Internet advertising revenues in China hit $6 billion in 2011, with revenues growing at a significantly higher 26 percent compared with the overall advertising earnings. By 2013, the figure is expected to climb to $9.6 billion.

Chinese-born American Micky Fung, founder and executive chairman of Touchmedia, was one of the early foreign advertising minds to take advantage of the growing thirst for digital advertising in China by launching a campaign to install touch screens in taxis throughout Beijing and Shanghai.

With big-ticket clients ranging from Coca-Cola to Disney, Fung's interactive screens have been more than a success. He said the popularity is an indicator of just how eager companies in China are to take to digital media. "In China and globally also there is a shift from conventional media to digital," Fung said.

"From the client perspective, it always struck me that conventional media such as newspapers and TV have huge reach but no ability to interact, measure or respond."

He attributes part of Touchmedia's success to the effectiveness of outdoor and interactive advertising found in China.

"Different things work here at different levels," he said.

"If you look around a Chinese city, you will notice that China has much more outdoor advertising than any European or American city. The population density is dramatically higher. A good billboard in Chicago might be seen by 20,000 people a day compared with 500,000 in Shanghai."

Though China's advertising industry still has a long way to go before it meets the level of sophistication of its Western counterparts, the relative youth of the industry is allowing it to adapt to cutting edge advertising techniques.

Xu Yun contributed to this story.

toddbalazovic@chinadaily.com.cn