Product: World Mastercard Summary: To the sound of tinkling fairy chimes, a woman walks into a dark wood-paneled shop with a wicker basket. The elderly shopkeeper smiles crinklingly at her as small objects around the shop move charmingly of their own volition. She buys things like laughs, smiles, contented sighs--it's all super Harry Potter. She brings her magic basket through the moving, rustling shop to the clerk, despite the fact that it's all free. Cut to an oddly-animated beach (complete with bathing machines). The basket contents frolic with the children as their mother enjoys a huff from her bag of sighs. Zoom out through the clouds--the whirling globe becomes the O in World Mastercard, which is misty for some reason, probably magic. Themes: wonderment, animism, free as in beer See Also: etsy If you watch closely, you'll notice that the whole "priceless" series of Mastercard ads have stopped saying that things have prices, and have moved toward a strategy of just having everything in their commercials be free. It's not hard to see how this might relate to the current insane level of consumer debt, but that's not really what I want to talk about. I'm here to make a broad generalization about American and British ads. Now, I'm not an unbiased observer. I watch the shows I like to watch, and sometimes I watch the ads in between. In America, this generally means I'm watching channels aimed at your 18-35 male demographic, while in Britain, it means I'm watching Channel 4 and general-interest programmes. Sample bias is an issue here. On the other hand, it's a blog. So: Broadly speaking, American and British ads have different tones. Basically, it's about different kinds of happy. Ads want you to associate their products with pleasure, so generally they'll try to make you happy. (And insecure, but that's another post.) American ads want you to be happy like this: Exciting happy, Disneyland happy, snowboarding and yelling "WOOOOO" happy. The happiness of x-treme. British ads want you to be happy like this: Comfortable happy, warm and fuzzy happy. The simple pleasure of a cheese toastie. You'll see lots of high production values and whiz-bang CGI in both genres, but in what I'm calling British-style ads it's funneled towards bringing a sense of delight and wonder. Think of the Coke ads where a man puts a dollar in a machine and it is transported to a magical vending-machine fairyland. American-style ads are all about originality--showing you the newest, the biggest, the strangest and most shocking thing. These are the ads that have "do not attempt" in small letters at the bottom. As you can surmise, I consider this Mastercard ad a classical example of the British style, wherever it was made. The use of the cloud-cut makes me speculate that it's multi-regional, but I am not willing to do any research on this topic. Unless it jibes closely with my preconceptions.