Assaulted by Akihabara

One of the first things you see when exiting the Akihabara metro line is an advertisement of one kind or another. At first it starts out pretty tame with only a few posters here and there across the walls. But as soon as you leave the terminal it’s a never-ending assault on your senses. The streets echo with the voices of shopkeepers shouting our their special discounts, girls dressed in pretty clothes handing out flyers, flashing neon signs displaying shop stores, and television screens plastered to the sides of buildings informing bystanders of the latest and greatest products. I imagine it’d probably be a lot like going to Times Square.

Unlike Times Square however you’re still surrounded by ads, to the point where they can literally cover the walls and ceilings. You don’t really notice it a first since most of the ads use a lot of negative space, but when you have a moment to look around you notice them. Whether you look left, right, up, or down your eyes are bond to land on some form of ad. While this can make sense form an advertisement standpoint in which you want to provide the younger consumers with as many options as they need to select their own style. Which is the main goal of most advertisement agencies in Japan, because once a consumer chooses their brand chances are they’ll continue to buy that brand for the rest of their life. So the main thing an ad wants to get across to the consumers is that their brand is a brand they can empathize with. It’s much more important for the consumer to relate to a brand then for the brand to actually be functional, and it would appear that the ad companies can be quite aggressive to get their empathic messages across.

Creativity and Conformity

I never viewed the advertising industry as something that could have much diversity in it; it was always, in my mind, this one huge conglomerate with uniform procedures and philosophies. It's true that some commercials and billboards are more brilliant than others, but the fact that this division between the good and the bad could be related to the companies that produced them hadn't registered in my mind. I didn't realize exactly how different it could be.

After our visits to Wieden + Kennedy and McCann Erickson, this division was made very clear. It was incredibly stunning to go to McCann Erickson after our meeting with W + K, and in fact, this second presentation turned out to be much as I predicted the first would be before we visited. I was dreading the W + K visit. But whereas the first visit turned out to be an extremely pleasant surprise, the McCann Erickson visit left me with shivers of disgust. It was their cold presentation, the way they broke everything down to statistics and numbers, that caused my stomach to roll; I could hardly believe it. As an artist, the freedom and creativity of the artistic process is the most important part of art for me, and it has always appeared to me that the more brilliant the process and the idea, the more attention the piece will receive, no matter the science and math backing it. You can't quantify beauty or interest; you just need to put your heart in a piece to make it worth anything. The pieces that I saw hanging on the walls of McCann Erickson as we walked through the building were lifeless and dull. They were the kind of advertising that repulses me.



On the other hand, Wieden + Kennedy seemed entirely driven by creativity and heart. Their commercials were the kind that I always remember, and the ideas that they came up with were so innovative and imaginative that I couldn't help but love them for it. All through their presentation and even through their building itself, there was an energy that is indescribable -- and amazingly inspiring, and it seemed clear to me that this was why their products were so good; they embrace originality and flair, instead of stifling them by the status quo.

Very clearly in my mind, there is a gulf between the two companies, and there is a hell and a heaven on either side. If nothing else, this trip has shown me how diverse and rich the field of advertising is.

Elegant simplicity.

Throughout the course of Japanese art and aesthetics, specifically the two-dimensional works, we often observe how the works are dominated by large amounts of negative space. Even within this negative space we can still find vast amounts of detail. When I was visiting the Tokugawa art museum, several of the scrolls that they had on display depicted a celebration of the Tokugawa daimyo opening up a shrine within a major city. The paintings used vast amounts of negative space, very small subject matter and other artifacts within the painting. Even though the work may be dominated by negative space, within the smaller subject matter lies an incredible amount of elegant detail. The use of patterns gives the art perfect balance between simplism and elaborate detail.

As I’ve traveled through Japan I’ve noticed that many of their logos and emblems contain this same sort of simplicity. Many of the logos contain few words or numbers and are instead dominated by simple images. This tendency ranges from the cities’ symbols to restaurant signs and company logos and so forth. While these current designs lack the elaborate detail of the earlier Tokugawa works, they form a sort of elegance through their use of other western design concepts such as unification, symmetry, and other such ideas. And even though these newer designs lack the same attention to minute detail that their ancient and more formal predecessors possessed they still attain a certain elegance that we rarely see in the western world.