While work continues on upgrading this website to reflect the focus on technical copywriting, here are two amazing videos set in Tokyo that capture some of the sights and sounds around this incredible city.

A tweet by Robert Fransgaard about egawauemon’s YouTube channel had me hooked for the next thirty minutes. It’s almost like being there.

My favorite’s Tokyo Cruise 2009 because there’s more of nighttime Shinjuku and Shibuya, two districts I often visit.

If you’ve time to spare, then check out egawauemon’s ‘cruise videos’ from other locations in Asia and Europe.

And here’s Tokyo Cruise 2010.
Cherry blossom time was late March / early April.
The view of Tokyo Tower from Roppongi Hills at night is breathtaking.

- Mark McClure

Are you making it easier for your customers to find you and order?

By way of example from Japan, here’s something I see a lot while riding trains or reading the flyers that appear in my mail box most days.

Look at the Kanji characters inside the Google search box.

This is a Sushi home-delivery chain and the brand’s name – ginsara – plus CM, meaning ‘commercial’, are all you need remember to find them on the web.

For people who are not comfortable with website addresses (and there are many!), this makes it real easy to locate their zany commercials and their website, since they’re at the top of the page for that keyword phrase.

(By the way, these ads don’t infringe on Google’s copyrighted image because all that’s shown is a rectangular box with the keyword phrase and a computer mouse arrow hovering over the Kanji equivalent for the ‘search’ button.)

For the more tech-savvy customers there’s a web site listed for people using computers with a standard screen display and another for those accessing the Internet via a mobile phone, which is very popular in Japan.

I’ll keep an eye out for high tech companies doing similar ads on the train – don’t get any flyers from them in my mail box!

- Mark McClure

PS – Click on the google box above to see a YouTube example of one of their ‘CMs’. It’s obviously culturally-tuned to Japanese humor but I smiled at the tongue-in-cheek bizarreness and have a much stronger impression of the brand (and that’s no small thing, since Japan has gazillions of Sushi delivery shops and chains.)

Or maybe I’ve just been here too long (~_^)

Back in the 1960s I can remember my father referring to our Black and White TV as the “goggle box”.

Those were the days when getting a fourth channel was revolutionary and we’d wait impatiently for each afternoon’s BBC Testcard and associated muzak to suddenly become a world of children’s TV, before the news ended our fun at 5:40 pm.

Although I feel some nostalgia for that period and the ‘innocence’ of controlled choice, looking back now it seems all very predictable and well, downright boring.

Our goggle box was practically a member of the family, holding court like a stuffy old relative who’d bore one and all with jokes and tall tales told once too often.

Now you’d think that the arrival of ‘interactive’ cable TV with its proliferation of channel choice might change how goggle box and gogglers got along together.

Not a bit of it!

Sure, you can choose from more of the same but once chosen, the goggling (abusive?!) relationship proceeds as planned. Because behind this flimsy curtain of choice hide magicians of interrupt advertising who can simply not be denied their pounds and dollars of viewing flesh.

Until, of course, the curtain’s unexpectedly pulled away and people see the smoke and mirrors for what they are.

I think today’s Internet is the digital equivalent of Dorothy’s dog, Toto, snapping at the heels of advertising folly and leading the engaging way ahead. You only have to observe young people to know that getting attention is a two-way process, not a command-and-control (TV) executive order.

And as marketers of technology solutions to more and more people who will have grown up immersed in the world of engagement entertainment online, we would be well advised to pay attention. Not the other way round!

I doubt that TV is dead as an entertainment (and advertising) medium but its influence is certainly changing and waning. How long before the nursing home of the airwaves beckons?

Television is a drug. from Beth Fulton on Vimeo.

I found the clip above in a post by Tom Chandler at his wonderful copywriter underground blog.

The post’s title?

“Television is a drug“.

Yeah, years of goggling will do that!

- Mark ‘Jackanory’ McClure