(also see part 1)
What sort of stuff is “popular” in another country? How do we, as visitors, experience, catalog or contextualize pop culture?
Tokyo’s Shibuya district is the throbbing heart of Japanese youth culture, overflowing with pedestrians (and vehicles), with dense ground-to-sky advertisements for music and electronics and clothing.
Upon arrival, we see a truck driving by advertising an upcoming album release by Ayumi Hamasaki.
In fact, we see this truck – or others like it – constantly. We’ve never heard of Ayumi, but clearly someone wants this album release to be a big deal.
One evening, we notice large crowds outside Yoyogi National Stadium. Turns out it’s an Ayumi Hamasaki concert.
(Notice the suitcase, featuring her logo.)
Parked alongside the stadium are a number of Ayumi Hamasaki tribute vehicles
Passing by the next night, New Year’s Eve, there is an even more extensive display of tribute vans.
Assuming (and I do) that these vans were made by fans, and not record company plants, then at this point it becomes impossible to deny the obvious: she is huge. The larger-than-life marketing messages are appropriate given the enormous popularity. The foreigner’s reaction of “Well, we’ve never heard of her” is only a temporary refuge in the face of the demonstrable devotion.
Consider this: in a major city in the world there’s an performer where fans decorate their vehicles with her face on the outside and displays on the inside and tailgate together with their custom vans before concerts. And you’ve never heard or heard of her. (Disclaimer: doesn’t apply to you if you’ve heard of her).
And: spend a few days in this major city and you will learn about this performer over and over and over again and wonder how you could have possibly not heard of her before.
Tags: ayumi Hamasaki, concert, culture, customized, fan, j-pop, Japan, osmosis, pop culture, tokyo, van, vehicle
of course she’s huge. Any follower of Jpop/Jrock in the United States not only has heard of Ayumi, but has her music too.
Comment by HomeBiscuitsAndGravy 03.18.08 @ 6:27 am>Any follower of Jpop/Jrock in the United States
I think that disclaimer is the key!
Comment by Steve Portigal 03.18.08 @ 10:21 am
[...] You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art” — Aldous HuxleyLately, advertisers seem almost giddy at the prospect of all the new media channels available for selling product and creating brand images. Imagining all the ways digital media allows us to break out of flat spaces is a designer’s dream. Adweek highlighted the new Scion urban street displays, where passersby approaching the store window experience the cars moving further away. The Japanese are already masterful at using old and new digital media for short burst campaigns: the pop star Ayumi Hamasaki’s last concert featured a fleet of “tribute vans” each airbrushed with a different alluring image of Ayumi, tractor trailers wrapped with her album cover, and huge digital signs peppering the Tokyo skyline.But those who venture into this Brave New World of Bluecasting, moving screens, and SMS often have trouble demonstrating how such venues will actually pay off in sales and profit. And then the biggest venues for marketing can complicate life with gate keeping techniques or worse, allowing your competitors to siphon off customers (think of the complaints about Google’s new “search within a search” feature.) Not only does it undermine a company’s ability to get to consumers first, but it can be counterintuitive. Like diet books advertised on a gourmet recipe page featuring molten chocolate cakes, if you don’t know the big Freudian question (what DO consumers want?) digital media can easily confuse or annoy rather than entice. Emerging channels are new to both the seller and the buyer. The savvy media campaign takes a line from Lou Reed and engages both sides in the “beginning of a great adventure.”Companies need to get their feet wet with digital media, despite the uncertainty of its uses, especially to avoid those gate keeping measures and to establish brand identity in new venues. I don’t want a Scion (my dog, our daily muddy walks, and her serious furriness are better suited to something with a big washable hatchback. I’m so not Gen X or Y anyway…) but I’ve certainly been hyped at enough to know one when I see it. Scott Wensman claims that using emerging channels is more about developing an audience – and, most significantly, doing some solid consumer research to figure out what works. If emerging channels are going to evolve into the great advertising boon they’ve been hyped to be, advertisers are going to have to figure out how to sell product for people in lifestyle niches beyond teenagers, 20-somethings, and wannabes. While my 80 year old father might be enticed by a beautiful girl with a Red Bull LCD image on her chest, my 80 year old mother (who does all the shopping) would not. Show her an interactive video cookbook or a version of DDR with big band music, and you just might get her attention. Let her tell you what recipes to include or what songs she likes, and the technology gets sold along with the product.Tags: customer experience, emerging media, bluecasting [...]
Pingback by In-Store & Retail Media News: Brave new world of emerging media 04.01.08 @ 9:51 am