Cultural Understanding

During my work experience at DraftFCB (Cape Town), I was taking note of the cultural influence in their design work. Since my dissertation title is 'Contrasting design cultures between South Africa and the Uk' this research is fundamental to my progress so I was interested in finding a really strong difference between the two design cultures. The strongest point was that there is a particular 'Africanism' within the industry in South Africa, which boasts a strong sense of pride to be South African. A lot of African style imagery is used, which is understood only through having a South African upbringing which a British person may not recognize or understand. What I also established is that the understanding of South African humour is fundamental in the majority of their advertising and that the humour there is very different compared to British humour. This also varies depending on the language used as South Africa has eleven official languages, which leads to many different meanings and interpretations. One of the languages for example, Afrikaans (originally derived from the dutch settlers), has a very particular sense of humour in which slang words or sentences can have double meanings.


For example, the advert above has a double meaning in that 'mit eish' when directly translated into English means 'with ice' but South Africans will only understand the humour as african people say 'eish' as an expression of 'wow'. This advert is exceptionally well executed in a tv ad as well (see below), and the simple play on words had all South Africans laughing and remembering the cleverness of the ad.



The print ad below is another example in which the Afrikaans saying 'ge-amp' here is used to illustrate the wires which plug into an amp or sound system, therefore implying that Klipdrift can get a party going. It is also however an expression in which English South Africans have adapted to the slang word 'amped' which is used to imply excitement, or strong enthusiasm.