Anyone who reads this column regularly probably believes that I find Japanese television completely worthless. It's not true; or, at least, not completely true. I think Japanese TV commercials are very good and often more representative of the hopes and dreams of the nation than the programming is.
However, I never thought that Japanese TV commercials were superior in quality to their foreign counterparts until I browsed the CD-ROM that came with the November issue of Kokoku Hihyo (Advertising Review). The disc contains 64 award-winning commercials from all over the world, and though they're clever and well-made, they don't display the ingenious blend of purpose and impact that the best Japanese CMs do.
For one thing, many of the spots on the CD-ROM are 60 seconds, whereas Japanese CMs rarely last more than 30 and are usually only 15. Whatever your thoughts are on the world's ever-diminishing attention span, the 60-second format requires a visual and narrative approach that draws more attention to the commercial itself than it does to the thing being advertised. Many of these spots are jokes, with the products or services functioning as punch lines. A typical example is an HJ Heinz CM made for English television, in which a rescue team comes upon an isolated ice station where all the inhabitants have starved to death despite the fact that the food lockers are full. In the last scene, we find out why: They ran out of ketchup.