Die LA Times über interkulturelle Probleme bei der Werbung in China: An NBA basketball star dukes it out with a Chinese kung fu master and wins. American audiences probably would enjoy the flashy fight sequence in the ad and leave it at that. Not in China. Viewers offended by the Chinese defeat expressed their outrage online. Authorities yanked the Nike ad in December, saying it violated the country's dignity. Ditto for Japanese carmaker Toyota, which aired a commercial last year showing one of its sport utility vehicles cruising past kowtowing Chinese stone lions. ...  Such are the pitfalls of doing business in the world's fastest-growing advertising market, in which sensitivity about cultural icons and Western dominance is acute. Yet multinational companies eager to sell their products to more than 1 billion Chinese say that in some ways consumers here are very easy to please, as long as you know what makes them tick. Topping the don't-go-there list is anything that resembles rebellious or anti-establishment behavior, said Tom Doctoroff, the regional director of advertising giant J. Walter Thompson in Shanghai. That means scenes popular in the West, such as soccer players causing traffic jams by kicking a ball around in the middle of the street, would be out of the question here. ... Determining what is proper behavior, however, is not always easy. Pizza Hut didn't see a problem with showing a boy standing on a desk to tell his friends how good his pizza tastes. Censors killed the ad because standing on a table with a crowd watching was considered rebellious. Advertisers also can forget about showing tattoos, pierced ears or women kicking and punching the air in an aerobics class. Individualism is frowned upon. Even sheer indulgence takes a back seat to practical benefits. "If a woman takes a bath in a beautiful, comfortable tub, that is not going to sell here," Doctoroff said. "Nothing is just about feeling good or tasting good. Everything has to have a payoff." So it wouldn't work to show a woman enjoying a cookie in the comfort of her home. But if a commercial showed a group of people eating cookies in public, it would create the feeling that they were members of the upwardly mobile middle class and the ad would be a success.