Tommy Lee Jones....is an alien?

This is a long running series for Suntory Boss, Rainbow Mountain Coffee. I never had the rainbow mountain coffee when I was in Japan sadly, but I did have hot canned coffee from a a vending machine which was awesome. Let me say that again, I GOT HOT COFFEE. IN A CAN. FROM A VENDING MACHINE.

Anyway, the idea is that an alien comes to Earth to investigate and disguises himself as Tommy Lee Jones. He finds the coffee to be wonderful on this useless planet.

check these out.









You can find the rest on Katz515's page

Fanta!

Today I present to you a series of Fanta ads that ran in japan chronicling a school somewhere in Japan with a set of very interesting teachers. It seems like it would incredibly awesome and seriously frustrating at the same time to attend that school.



I like the way it had 9 executions! By the 3rd one I was excited to see what antics were going to happen next. Mr. DJ (DJ Sensei) was a badass. Overall a good example of a strong campaign...although I think it was aimed at children of a younger age which is a bit of an ethics issue.

I wonder what laws Japan has regarding advertising towards children, and just in general.

Keirin Ads!

My good friend in Japan sent these too me last night and also explained the Arnold Ad. Look back and then read on.

This post is doubly good for me because it combines two things that I love: Advertising and Bicycle track racing.





These ads show off Keirin Racing, an awesome Japanese past time. You can think of these racers as the greyhounds of American betting tracks. They live on there bikes and are pretty much monsters on the track. People in Japan view bicycle racing as an honorable career, often aspiring from young ages to become racers, which is why these ads are focusing on an emotional appeal.

Learn more about Keirin

Windows 7 in Burger form

Check out this Windows 7 Whopper! Looks delicious in a ridiculous way. No clue if this is real or not, or what it says for that matter, but this showed up on my Facebook wall and I just had to share it with you all.

UPDATE: If they made this Texas style (with cheese, bacon, and jalapenos) I would totally attempt to eat it.

Arnold was in japan and I have no idea what happened

This is one of the post that shows how some Japanese are complete insanity. It seems to be for some sort of supplement, or drink. I'm sending it to my friend to see what he can tell me. This also demonstrates the Japanese habit of putting American (I know Arnold isn't American by birth) actors and actresses into their ads. Until then enjoy!



UPDATE: My Japanese friend got back to me and explained what this commercail's about. Here's exactly what he had to say about it.

"OK this is an old commercial for a kind of energy drink.they are playing chinese traditional board game. but in this case, they are playing a game so-called customer game, that is , playing with business clients. The point is that Arnold won that game although they had to make the clients win. and the contract got cancelled because of him. so he took the energy drink to chin up."

Soft Bank

I Like Softbank. It's a cellular provider in Japan that has an interesting brand image that features clean white motifs, and dog that is the father of a family. Also, the family has a black brother who has his japanese down pat.

check out a few ads I stole from some other blogs.







After our trip to Singapore last summer we swung back by Tokyo to visit for a few more days, to find that although we'd been gone for a month Tokyo had changed a bit. The most noticeable thing was the release of the iPhone 3GS worldwide, and SoftBank was pushing it hard. I'll never forget the Japanese man in the iPhone section of the huge store in Akiba shouting about the iPhone while wearing a mantle/cape that had the soft bank dog on it.

Shame on Me

Well I've been away for awhile since school has been crashing down on me the past few weeks. I've finally got a breather here for a few days which is nice, but shortly the cycle will start all over again.
But Enough about school, let's talk about Japanese advertising. Today we're talking about Dentsu the largest advertising giant in Japan and surrounding areas.

Via wikipedia: "Dentsu's sales are more than double its nearest competitor, Hakuhodo or ADK, in the Japanesemarket. Dentsu's success and dominance in Japan stems from Dentsu's origins as a media representative during the early part of the 20th Century. Dentsu produced the first newspaper advertisements as well as the first television commercials in Japan. Dentsu now offers a range of services, all in-house, from traditional marketing and creative, to specialty disciplines such as sports marketing, entertainment rights, PR, digital contents, and a growing range of communications services.

Dentsu has a Digital hub for Europe and global communications, called Dentsu Digital, based in Brussels."

Basically if you want to be a part of advertising in Japan, Dentsu is your go to place. My Japanese contact's sister is in advertising in japan and somehow does not work at Dentsu. (It's pretty competitive I hear) But she'll get there eventually I assume. Also Taichi, (my contact) is at sea for a month, so finding ads is kind of tough at the moment.

I'm going to keep this short since I need to get back and just dump some links at the end here

Good Innovation
Dentsu's English Site
Dentsu's Wiki page

BOOSH (shout out to THE Ben Zeigler)

I feel the need to explain this blog a bit since it's just starting as a way to let you all as reader know what I'm doing, but also as a way to spell out to myself what I'm doing. This blog is a way for me to A: showcase advertising from Japan, and B: discuss it and compare it to advertising here in the United States.

There out plenty of blogs out there, some dealing with similar topics, like this one here. Japanads.net That blog showcases American celebrities in Japanese ads, which is all well and good except there's no analysis or anything. It's really missing something.
Derek also sent me this site Japander.com which is another celebrity based site.

This rant has gone on long enough. Stick with me and hopefully this will turn into a great thing.

Here's an ad for Toyota that is definitely filmed in Japan with Japanese actors which leads me to believe it's from Japan. The English copy at the end throws it a bit though. either way, enjoy.

So here's a first attempt at an entry. Let's see how well this works.

This ad is for a cheese curry, my friend who lives in Tokyo said he remembered this coming out around the time he was in middle school which would be the early 2000s.




What makes this ad interesting to me is the fact that it's dubbed in Japanese. The people in the ad are clearly not Japanese, yet the cheese guy looks like he jumped out of some crazy Japanese anime show.