There is almost no Pepsi in Japan.
It’s the sort of thing you don’t notice till someone points it out. But once they do, the absence is obvious. I had a great chat with my supervisor about media in the country today, and he spoke about the Pepsi test: “if you want to know about a country’s media, look for the Pepsi.”
Pepsico is currently able to advertise products on Sky channels, but not on TV, and this is because of the monolithic nature of Japan’s advertising industry. The industry is almost totally dominated by four large players, of which the biggest, Dentsu, books up around 60% of all TV airtime more than a year before airing. And it seems that Coke has a longtime platinum contract with Dentsu, and were able not only to convince them to shut out Pepsi from their share, but to pressure the other agencies into doing likewise, effectively closing the ports to Pepsi products. There are vending machines on every street corner and Coke is the only western brand in any of them (I’ve only seen one which was defeaced in any fashion whatsoever, the one pictured below, outside a painfully hip skate shop. They’d also voluntarily put coke stickers on a bench outside the shop, combined with guns, skate tags and graffiti’d hopes for world love. It’s a brilliant simulacra of cultural poverty which seems to unify Japanese counterculture).
My supervisor tells me that pretty much every TV show is sponsored or ‘brought to you by’, and that in a show sponsored by, say, Toyota, all the bad guys will drive Nissans.
It all bears further research, particularly into the credibility meltdown that the public service broadcaster, NHK, suffered a couple of years ago due to bribery scandals and the possibility that they’d allowed the state to fiddle one of their documentaries and other programming, including among other things reviews of the third Star Wars prequel. It got so bad that around 30% of the license fee owed wasn’t being paid; many of these households were not paying in protest, which I guess is the first step towards a full-scale Rebel Alliance.
In other news, Yahoo Japan is to launch a new generation of ‘Interest Match’ advertising, which tracks browsers with a cookie and then provides intelligent ads and referrer information. It also supposedly can target by gender, age, geography and time of day. A big corporate rollout for what’s essentially ‘legitimised’ spyware attracted privacy questions even at the launch, though the bloggers they invited did seem quick to realise that better targeting means more ad revenues for everyone. ‘Kimochi Warui’ seems to have been the focus group’s biggest worry: it roughly translates to ‘creepiness’. The system is only going online in Japan, presumeably with the aim to tweak and release it in other markets later. Japan is where it’s all happening.
I’d also like to showcase what might be the most frustrating, but also the most arresting, advert I’ve ever seen. Unlike crawlers it respects the boundaries of its allotted banner space, but the slightest waver of interest from you, and it’s got you. It is really quite annoying so I haven’t put it up here, but go and have a look, and keep clicking.
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Finally, I wrote a while ago about the question of interfaces as the frontier of hardware convergence in the home. That is to say, the need for a simple, wireless, robust, preferably one-handed interface with the screen for on-demand on your TV to make the jump to the Internet as the source of all entertainment. In short, you can navigate an on-demand menu with a remote, but you can’t use it to navigate the net. A couple of new solutions are coming out in prototype, deceptively simple things which might just allow an inter-generational jump from scrolling through channels to navigating a sea of entertainment. Toshiba’s face- and-fist-recognition screens sound more promising than Panasonic’s similar ‘Digital Hearth’ venture, which can tell when you smile. Better than the Nielsen system, any day. That said, Toshiba’s interface notion of holding up flashcards to your TV in order to control it would take some getting used to.
A particularly interesting interface concept to have come out of the TechCrunch50 conference is Swype (generic url, go to Video section to see it in action). It’s one of those idea that you know you could have thought of first if you had just put your mind to it, though in this case that feeling might be justified.
