Insane Japanese TV Commercial
By Barry Ritholtz - April 22nd, 2011, 7:18AM
Wait until you see what it is actually for.
Madness.
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Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
April 22nd, 2011 at 8:33 am
Bizarre indeed!
April 22nd, 2011 at 8:47 am
Now, that is a different way to do commercials!
April 22nd, 2011 at 8:59 am
What I wanna know is real, or CGI?
April 22nd, 2011 at 9:16 am
Apropos for Earth Day.
Looks like a contender for a Guinness world record.
The actual commercial couldn’t be 3 minutes long, could it? Most TV watching Americans would be asleep or texting long before the end and would never even see the product.
A great example of useless product differentiation.
And a good example of not-so-good advertising. The content is so compelling that it causes the viewer to think about it rather than the product, and then it never makes a meaningful connection between the two: what is the relationship between this clever but irrelevant engineering project and the cell phone? Wood? Yes, but then what is the benefit of wood to a cell phone? None. There is no real message. They could have at least said, “Hey, if you are a tree-hugging lover of nature, then buy a wood cell phone to show the world your affection for mother earth.” Maybe that message comes through subconsciously, but I think it’s too obtuse.
Marketing: the “science” of motivating people to buy what they don’t need and didn’t want or even know existed.
April 22nd, 2011 at 9:45 am
Mother Nature exists to serve as a tool for our narcissistic self-indulgence. The more wood phones you buy, the more trees we’ll chop down. Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” is the anthem of consumer demand and makes all the animals happy. Happy Earth Day, Happy Easter, and Have a Nice Day.
April 22nd, 2011 at 10:06 am
where do you get this stuff?!
April 22nd, 2011 at 11:01 am
Bizarre, long and irrelevant….but who cares? This thing has gone viral and its good for brand recognition. This ad stands out in a very very crowded market. The other video on you tube that I saw had more than 3 million views in less than 3 weeks. Good work.
April 22nd, 2011 at 11:05 am
@Transor Z
Well said and I largely agree.
But it is my hope the “narcissistic self-indulgence” that relates to natural products and portraying a environmentalist self-image to the world will at least engender / maintain some level of awareness in those consumers of the importance of these issues.
My worry is that succeeding generations are becoming increasingly isolated from nature, moving to a more virtual reality, and as a result have a lack of awareness / concern and even a fear of nature and its flora and fauna. I fear that lack of interest / concern / appreciation of nature will lead to further degradation of the planet.
And in this case, at least trees are a renewable resource. Compared to the current radioactive pollution of the Pacific ocean, it doesn’t even register as a significant environmental concern, unless of course they are using rare hardwoods from the Amazon or something. And, I assume, even they could be replaced many times over, before the radioactive elements being spilled decay to safe levels.
April 22nd, 2011 at 12:17 pm
You are all wrong and are missing points as usual, which is good, because that indicates you have something to learn.
If you fly in to Japan, you will notice the islands are covered by green. About 80% of lands are forest in Japan. Some of those forests are healthy, but others are not. There is a reason why most of those forests are not healthy. Over the thousands years, Japanese people interacted with forest. They have been planting trees and removing elements which are not good to keep trees healthy. In other words, maintaining the forest has always been the essential part of Japanese culture. In Japan, people live in house made of wood, and we love wooden furnitures. The point is we need to remove some elements from forest to maintain its health. For example, if trees grow very close to each other, we need to remove some of them to let others grow healthy. One problem is that maintaining forest incurs cost. In order to support the cost, someone has to buy the trees removed from the forests, i.e. the byproduct of the maintenance. Traditionally, we used those byproducts as fuel or to make chopsticks and other wooden products. Due to the global economy, the imported wood is now a lot cheaper than the byproducts of maintaining Japan’s forests. And, we no longer use wood as fuel. As a result, no one buys those byproducts of the forest maintenance, and we are no longer able to support the cost of maintaining our forests. That’s why many of Japan’s forests are now not so healthy.
NTT’s CM is meant to promote the use of forest maintenance byproducts simply to keep Japan’s forest healthy. Their true intention is to position the company as a guardian of the Japan’s forest, i.e. a good corporate citizen in Japanese society. Their wooden cell phone is just a symbol of that message.
Sustainability is very important in agriculture. I now understand why Westerners cut forest trees to make bold mountains everywhere and consume too much subterranean water to make desert everywhere. Unlike Japanese who have been living on the same island for thousands years, Australians and Americans are basically all immigrants, and they will move to other places once their lands turned into desert or bold mountains.
April 22nd, 2011 at 1:52 pm
The was rather beautiful. It left me quite serene when the payoff hit.
@KJ,
I think the message was this:
Use wood to communicate something beautiful
April 22nd, 2011 at 3:11 pm
“What is the benefit of wood to a cellphone? None. There is no real message…”
This commercial is by and for Japanese so we Gaijin should perhaps realize we ought to translate the card at the end before we decide we know this is somehow insufficiently pro Earth Day, as Foehr et al speculate above.
http://www.lbhat.com/advertising/ntt-docomo-touchwood-how-ads-get-viral/ reveals that the cell phone in question involves recycling wood by-products in an ecologically helpful manner promoted by a well known musician.
“The mobile phone is made with the surplus wood of trees culled during thinning operations to maintain healthy forests. The prototype was created in collaboration with Sharp Corporation, Olympus Corporation and “more trees,” a reforestation project founded by musician Ryuichi Sakamoto and others.”
Also, how does this fail as branding (“A great example of useless product differentiation”)? Anyone who hasn’t had the kid burned out of them watches the whole thing entranced, speculating about the hows and whys and then passes it on. I didn’t know this phone before but I do now.
April 22nd, 2011 at 3:25 pm
“I think the message was this:
Use wood to communicate something beautiful”
Interesting. Yes, I see that — just as they used wood to communicate a beautiful piece of music.
However, a wood shell on a cell phone has nothing to do with its communication function. So maybe we can simplify it to this, “Use wood it’s beautiful!”
I wonder if its even real wood at all, or just plastic.
April 22nd, 2011 at 3:41 pm
Common man:
“Use wood to communicate something beautiful”
This is a commercial I will definitely have to show my wife then… :)
I agree with snap, long and irrelevant.
April 22nd, 2011 at 4:26 pm
I think the message was this:
Use wood to communicate something beautiful
——
I’ll buy that. I was just in a pissy mood this morning.
April 22nd, 2011 at 8:31 pm
So three minutes of a video that took 8000 hours to make (give or take a thousand hours) and nobody knows what it means? Gives me a woodie.
I want to believe that the whole thing was a digitally created joke.
April 22nd, 2011 at 9:43 pm
I actually wasted three minutes of my life watching that?