All About Japanese TV Commercials

While not nearly as lavish as the Hollywood-level TV commercials created for the Superbowl, Japanese “CMs” are a lot of fun to watch. My impression of American commercials is that they’re often very talky (“and if you act now, get $1000 cash back or 2.5% APR on a 60-month loan, some restrictions apply…”), overtly stating features and benefits. Japanese ads are likely to be simpler in concept, for example a sporty car driving through a desert while a beautiful woman flies overhead in a helicopter, or a Japanese family that has a cow living in their refrigerator which gives them fresh milk whenever they want it. Sometimes Japanese commercials can get quite deep, like the long-running Boss Canned Coffee series in which Tommy Lee Jones plays a space alien here to observe Earth culture, or a series of ads about a “magic elevator” that stops at different floors, where a writer, a musician, a kabuki actor and other persons of interest are waiting to discuss philosophical questions (“What does it mean to be alive? Learning not to be afraid of making a fool of yourself every once in a while”) over a cold glass of Asahi Super Dry. A few more thoughts on Japanese TV commercials. First, they’re more honest. If a given brand of toothpaste will only remove 98% of plaque from your teeth on average, the animation in the commercial will always make sure to leave a tiny bit of CG dirt on the teeth, to avoid making a claim the product can’t back up. Like many countries, Japanese companies in Japan are forbidden from directly comparing themselves to other company’s products, which changes the way the benefits of different products is presented to viewers and removes some of the negativeness. And in the super-connected Internet era we live in, nearly every commercial ends with a web search box showing related search terms being entered through a computer keyboard. This is a “call to action” to get the viewer to get off his butt and proactively start to seek information about a product or service, and it’s the most over-used device in Japanese advertising today.

Japanese TV commercials are fun, and sometimes confusing.