SLOW ADVERTISING

If you were to pluck the fulness of your being from the fastforward lightspeed staccato rush of the modern megamedia mindflash, your body from the hypermomentum tomorrownow timeplasma of urbaniamania, and in a fully mindbodied experience softly send yourself meandering down a narrow village road anywhere in rural Japan, sooner or later you'd likely come upon a sugidama (sugi: cedar; dama: ball) hanging outside the door of a local sake brewery. In your strange new state of mind you'd pretty likely whisper wtf?

Unlike the Vegas Strip, say, or one of those tv uzi-ads that repeat the product name at a pace set to induce monetary seizures, when sake is first set to brewing, in accordance with the traditional manner a ball made of freshly cut green cedar branches is hung outside the brewery door as a sign to the community that the new batch is now brewing. In the real world, which is local, this is important news. As the sake brews in its natural way as time passes in its natural way, the cedar ball ages in its natural way. As the ball dries out and turns more and more brown, the closer the sake is to completion, until at last the fully brown ball tells all the village and all who pass along the road that the sake brewed and sold here is now ready and available. Slow advertising.

Imagine that: months of fragrantly tantalizing tenterhook advertising, all without using even one microvolt of electricity. So natural. So elegant. So knowing - and knowing of so many things - a tacit knowing, in which all share. Without neon or billboard. Who now knows how long it takes for cedar branches to turn brown, and that that duration matches the time it takes for sake to become sake? Some elderly folks still know these things, in the small, emptying country towns...

THE MODERN ECONOMY IS UPON US.

Only trouble is, computers just can't lie,
or even bend the truth very well.
Yet.

via reddit

NO WONDER THE WORLD IS A MESS

I remember, back when I was a kid in the 40s, how the advertisers of the time were tirelessly educating the public as to the horrible new social scourge that was Body Odor (and the advertisers had just the chemicals to hide the terrible affliction), then by the 50s they had body odor locked and needed a new blight, so they crammed the public ear and eye with the suddenly embarrassing condition of dandruff (and they had just the stuff to conceal the problem), then came frizzy hair and they had just the stuff etc., the public accepting all those received embarrassments one after another as though they were genuine afflictions and always had been, needed "fixing" right away, and weren't merely created by advertisers.

And that's the way it's been ever since, with by now so many other natural processes transformed into devastating personal plagues that the social remedy section of the supermarket/pharmacy is a mile long, but the advertisers are running out of shticks (living room odor??), so something had to give, and it's always the consumer.

These social lab experiments often happen first here in Japan, where the media audience is an advertiser’s dream: you repeat the repetitive jingle often and monotonously enough and you've got a loyal market, even for stuff like chewing gum that "enlarges breasts." They've pretty much used up the scourges of youth, though (pimples, dull hair, skin etc., largely caused by the junk food they also flog), and they need a new source of scourges.

So they've locked onto boomers now, and the aging society, and brought ageism into the equation as a source of new social afflictions, starting with the looming horror they've named kareishu (aging odor), for which they're flogging "over 40 soap" at over 20 dollars a cake, for the magic bubbles that will remove that nasty miasma of over-40ness that floats about you wherever you go. There's also a chewing gum that makes you smell like you're under 40! (I. e., a mobile vat of variously toxic deodorizing chemicals).

Anyway, I've been over 40 for nearly 27 years now, and smell as sweet as a baby, except after I've been splitting firewood for a few hours, when I smell like Achilles. As far as I'm concerned, those marketeers can stuff the fragrance of age. But then I'm not and never have been your typical consumer, who not only won't object to this ageist travesty, they will dutifully buy the brand new discovery that gets rid of their brand new problem and protects them from the curse of aging just like in the commercial.

Watch soon for over 50, 60, 70 soap, shampoo, conditioner, with zeolite, titanium, magic crystals, metaquantumnanoplasmaultra whatever, it's a list longer than a lifetime.

If consumers and voters are the same people, no wonder the world is a mess.

TRUTH OF ADVERTISING

Saturday went to the impressively located Otsu City Museum of History to see an exhibition on the history of Japanese advertising from the Edo era to the 1950s or so, the ads (from woodblock prints and old wooden signs to lithographed posters and signs of paper and metal) to no surprise predominantly promoting drinks and pharmaceuticals and insecticides.

One poster showed a sexy young lady ecstatically spraying her immediate 1920 environment with deadly chemicals; another promoted an earlier version comprising a bent straw through which the kids of the household could blow, spraying toxic chemicals on the insects hovering around their elders, such fun!

But back then there were few rules; thus the surreal sight of a poster featuring a dainty woman in kimono driving a big beer truck in 1911, another young beauty in kimono touting rubber cement for men to repair their bike and truck tires with, another featured a naughty flapper girl with skirt hiked up to here holding yet another beer. In perhaps one of Japan's earliest e-commerce posters, a kimono'd woman talking on a wooden wall phone in a lithographed poster for a Tokyo kimono shop says "For the finest in kimonos, dial 18"! It was totally rad when it came out, much like what is totally rad now.

Things have changed in some major regards, though, the big illnesses then being syphilis and worms; also, the image of Bismarck was a big draw, but the general concerns then as now were bad complexion, bad breath, indigestion, headache and dandruff, one brochure touting a "medico-chemical oily tonic for dandruff scales containing cholestero-lecithin"; another blithely promoted the World Congress for Leisure Time and Recreation in Hamburg, July 23-30, 1936, with the very concept of leisure about to undergo blitzkreig, as evidenced in the wartime propaganda posters (which the Japanese visitors seemed to avoid) shouting how America had killed Japan's friends, and picturing art-deco Japanese bombers swarming over art deco American industrial sectors, others idolizing the kamikaze who stood gazing infinitely into the wind; yet others promoted Japanese war bonds, a bad investment, as things turned out.

There in a several room nutshell was the truth of (not in) advertising (and its bedfellow, politics) anywhere in the world, at any time. I left hoping that visitors weren't viewing the exhibition as merely a cute but simplistic version of a now mature and reliable medium, but as evidence that advertising is no nearer the truth now than it was then.