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Imagining and Imaging the Other

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Imagining and Imaging the Other: Japanese Advertising International

Brian Moeran

This chapter examines the build-up to a competitive presentation for the inter- national division of the audio-visual manufacturer Frontier1 by a Japanese advertising agency, which was asked to prepare a single coherent campaign for both Germany and the United States. It traces some of the problems involved in Japanese ‘imagining the West,’ looks at the agency’s solutions to these problems, and describes the role played by myself, as an anthropologist, in some of the campaign ideas that, eventually, met with success when Frontier awarded the agency its international audio-visual account. As such, the chapter is designed to build on pioneering anthropological work that has focused on the production, rather than reception, of advertising images.2 In particular, it is concerned with the social relations constituting the client–agency partnership and their direct effect on creative ideas and, by depicting one company’s imaginings of the other, shows how an imagined world or community underpins business relations in the advertising industry.3

Orientation

Advertising industries everywhere are structured around accounts – the sums of money put aside by advertisers and allocated to agencies for the purpose of selling a particular brand or product group, sometimes through a selected medium. It is an advertising agency’s job to persuade an advertiser that it (rather than its comp- etitors) is best suited to take on a particular account. This it does by actively soliciting a prospective client, with the aim of being asked to participate in a competitive presentation or ‘pitch’ in which, together with other agencies, it will put forward marketing and creative strategies based on the advertiser’s initial orientation of its needs.4

Whenever an advertising agency is asked to make a presentation to a (would- be) client, it finds itself having to learn – often extremely rapidly – as much as it can about that client’s business. This learning process includes all there is to know

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(or all that the client chooses to let the agency concerned know) about its products, sales, targeted consumers, and so on. But the agency is not limited to the market in which the client operates (or to the ‘field’ in which it is located along with its several competitors). As Timothy Malefyt shows in his chapter in this book, it also tries to find out about how the client company is itself organized – in particular, the power structure that determines who are, and who are not, decision makers in its managerial hierarchy. It is mastery of this combination of market, field and organizational factors that enables an agency to win accounts and grow in size.

In the case discussed in this chapter, the agency was asked to present several sets of advertising ideas. It had, first, to find ideas that would meet and satisfy prevailing, but rather different, market conditions in Germany and the United States; and second, to include common language and visuals that would appeal to two national groups of consumers whose cultural backgrounds and expectations were very different. This meant that the agency had to construct an image for the foreign other.

But the agency also needed to know who in Frontier’s Tokyo headquarters was going to make the final decision about whether its pitch was appropriate. This meant, third, that it needed to construct an image for a Japanese ‘other,’ since it had to take account of one or more particular Japanese managers’ personal likes and dislikes, and their ideas of what might be the best way to appeal to Germans and Americans. This rather more abstract nature of the agency’s work was complicated by the fact that – just as Europeans and Americans tend not to distinguish between the Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, mainland Chinese (themselves divided into different groups), and so on, but to see them all as ‘Asians’ – the Japanese tend to lump together all those living outside Asia and Africa as ‘Westerners.’ At the same time, moreover, their images of themselves as Japanese have very often been subject to ‘Western’ depictions of the other. In short, the agency found itself in a complex situation where the objective realities of the market tended to be confused with the subjective tastes and preferences of individual personalities, and, as we shall see in the final commentary, occidentalism was at times indistinguishable from orientalism. The problem facing advertisers here is that of all those actively involved in the making of myths. They are ‘unable to imagine the Other . . . How can one assimilate the Negro, the Russian? There is here a figure for emergencies: exoticism. The Other becomes a pure object, a spectacle, a clown.’5

It is these confusions that this chapter sets out to address as it follows the agency’s attempt to appeal to two rather different ‘Western’ audiences, as well as construct a Japaneseness about Frontier that would ‘work’ in the West.6 At the same time, however, it seeks to link the twin professions of advertising and anthropology in two complementary ways. First, it describes how, as an anthropologist doing fieldwork in what has since become a rather large Japanese advertising agency, I was able to make a contribution to that agency’s pitch to its prospective client and

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so came to be seen as an ‘advertising man,’ rather than just a ‘professor.’ Second, it suggests that those working in the Agency might themselves be seen as applied anthropologists. This is not just because they make a living by convincing their clients that they understand how ‘the natives’ think,7 but because they also have to analyze and deconstruct the social organization and power hierarchy of those whom they are trying to convince of their abilities. The other is at home as well as abroad.

Entering the Field

In the spring of 1989, the international division of Frontier’s headquarters in Tokyo asked its contracted agency, J&M, to prepare an advertising campaign that would elevate its brand image in both the United States and Germany. At the same time, because the agency in which I was conducting my research was already success- fully handling one of Frontier’s domestic accounts, and because it had learned that certain people in the client company were not entirely satisfied with the work currently being done by J&M, it managed to persuade Frontier’s international division to invite it to participate in a competitive presentation.

In its own orientation to the agency, Frontier made it clear that it had decided to manage its overall marketing strategy through three broad geographical areas: America, Europe and Asia. Its sales covered a broad range of products from laser disc software to car navigation systems, by way of computer CD Roms, CD players, multi-cassette players, projection TV sets, and so on. Some of these (e.g. laser disc players) were better established in the United States than in Europe.

Three problem areas had to be dealt with by the agency.

1. Brand image: Frontier was not seen to be as technologically advanced as Sony, in spite of the fact that it was the originator of laser technology, and was thus in danger of being relegated to the position of a ‘mini Sony’ in consumers’ estimations.

2. The market situation: Frontier’s targeted consumers were generally seen to be limited because there was an overall impression that they were older than Sony’s customers. However, the reunification of Germany and the forthcoming unification of Europe (EU) provided the company with an opportunity to rejuvenate its overall brand image in Europe at least, even though the amount of advertising hitherto done in Germany did not measure up to that put out by Sony. Market potential was also seen to exist in the distribution of the company’s software through the expanding rental markets in both the US and Germany.

3. Products: Most consumers saw no fundamental differences in the qualities of the products put out by Frontier and its competitors.

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Following this orientation, the agency calculated that it was necessary to take account of a number of related points.

1. Corporate image: The client should emphasize its brand name – its strength as a ‘Frontier’ in audio-visual technology. It should also highlight its actual leadership in laser technology (it was the first company to produce laser discs, compatible LDs, and multi-CD players).

2. Brand prestige: It should emphasize its role as a technological innovator both in the past and in the future, as well as the reliability and high quality of its products (already established in the audio field), and the superiority of its laser technology in terms of density of information, durability, access, digitalization, ‘re-writability,’ and so on.

3. Aspirational value: It should develop a broad corporate concept that pursued an emphasis on personal freedom and the idea of entertainment as a means towards enriching consumers’ lives. Ideally, this concept should be a unified ‘one brand, one voice’ that would function globally and be reinforced by a set of coherent creative ideas (that hitherto had been absent from its advertising campaigns abroad).

To achieve all these aims, Frontier had to address two main target audiences.

1. An outer audience group, consisting of twenty- and thirty-year-old men and women in Germany and the US, who were in an upper-middle socio-economic bracket. This group also included those who already owned entertainment- oriented VTR players, and were influential in the development of information technology, as well as steady, rather than just trend-conscious, consumers.

2. An inner audience group, consisting of those employed in Frontier itself, at its headquarters in Tokyo, as well as at sales outlets and in branch offices abroad in Germany and the US. This group also included those working on Frontier accounts in American and German advertising agencies.

The campaign’s immediate external purpose, then, was to improve Frontier’s corporate image, brand prestige and aspirational value. Its mid- to long-term aim was to create a unified global umbrella brand image (‘one brand, one voice’) that would cover particular product advertising campaigns in individual countries around the world. Its internal purpose was to boost morale within the client company and ensure that employees appreciated the initiative being taken by headquarters management in creating Frontier’s new image strategy.

This kind of information given by an advertiser to its selected agencies (and their response thereto) is crucial to the practice, and thus to the academic dis- cussion, of advertising, since it acts as a ground plan on which competing agencies

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base their market analyses and creative work. In this respect, knowledge of a client’s marketing strategy, problems and aims is akin to that gained by an anthro- pologist from reading around a particular subject prior to entering ‘the field.’ Such marketing and intellectual orientation permit both advertisers and ethnographers to formulate hypotheses that can then be tested prior to the presentation of material to the client and academic community respectively as part of the final ‘pitch.’

Brand Concept and Pre-presentation

Having arrived at this analysis of the market and Frontier’s position therein, the agency needed to come up with a basic brand concept, corporate slogan and communication strategy that included one or more sets of print advertisements illustrating the approach it was proposing that Frontier adopt. It was here that as an anthropologist I entered the game.

As part of my fieldwork in the agency, I was placed in different divisions – print media buying, television advertising, marketing, merchandising, and so on – for a month at a time in order to learn how employees went about their jobs. In due course, I found myself in the accounts services office, a particularly opaque part of the agency because of the extremely intimate relations developed by account executives8 with their opposite numbers (product managers, advertising managers, directors, and so on) in client companies. I had heard about the existence of ‘presentations,’ but had little idea of when or where or how often they took place; of who attended them, or of what they consisted of in substance. It seemed likely that this part of the agency’s business would be extremely difficult to observe because of the recurrent problem of ‘client confidentiality.’

One evening, however, the head of the account services office called me at home and asked whether I would be free to help with the agency’s preparations for its presentation to Frontier. The following morning, a Friday, I found myself in one of the agency’s small, windowless meeting rooms, surrounded by half a dozen men – all smoking – and gazing at several large placards on the tables in front of us. Boards with ads by rival companies were placed on a thin shelf along one wall of the room in front of me. I was given the briefest of orientations (as described in more detail above) and was asked to give my opinion on six series of ads that the agency had prepared for a ‘pre-presentation’ to one of the Frontier managers that same afternoon. The real pitch would take place the following Tuesday.

I was then shown several series of pictures, all with headlines, dummy copy,9

the client’s name and slogan. These were named as follows:

1. Perspiration – because of the series’ visuals consisting of stark black and white photographs of perspiring musicians (a flamenco dancer, jazz drummer and classical violinist).

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2. Nature – consisting of slightly greenish-grey tinted photographs of what was almost certainly an American desert.

3. Home Entertainment – depicting various combinations of laser and compact disc outlines with photographs of different entertainers performing.

4. Musicians – consisting of photos of three men with musical instruments. 5. Young Women – featuring attractive young models asking which company

made the first laser disc player and other Frontier products. 6. Creativity Quotient – taking its title from one of the series’ headlines, had yet

to arrive from the agency’s international subsidiary down the road.

I did my best to say something about each and made various (perhaps ill-considered) comments. The Perspiration series might do better in Germany than in the US since it seemed to be aimed more at ‘intellectual’ than ordinary music lovers. Also, ‘Performance (or Dance) is my soul’s voice’ might be a better headline than ‘Music is my soul’s voice’ for the flamenco dancer, if only to avoid repetition of the word ‘music’ that was being used for the picture of the classical musician. The Young Women ads seemed fairly sexist (one model was standing by a doorway with a come-on look that reminded me of London prostitutes back in the 1960s) and might therefore cause offence in America and/or Germany. Both the Nature and Musicians series had some ‘orientalist’ headlines that were styled as if they were haiku poems (‘Nature speaks / loudest / when silent’ and ‘A month of filming / five minutes / on the screen’). These would probably appeal to Japanese – in particular, the Nature ads – but I was not convinced that they would persuade the targeted American and German consumers of Frontier’s merits. The Creativity Quotient series, when it arrived, I found hard to grasp. Ad mock-ups showed Jimmy Hendrix with his guitar, Walt Disney with a drawing of Mickey Mouse, and Orson Welles gazing down at Citizen Kane on stage (described in the body copy as the ‘Kane Mutiny’!). What was the connection? Each picture, came the answer, showed Frontier’s pioneering spirit. Was it a spirit, then, that existed only in the past?

The Frontier tag line, too, caught my attention: ‘The pulse of entertainment.’ I asked how this idea in particular had been arrived at, but was told that Frontier itself had given the agency this phrase to work with at its orientation two weeks previously. A second choice had been ‘The art of entertainment’ which seemed to be only marginally – if at all – better. A third alternative, much liked by a senior Frontier director, was ‘The light of joy and creativity.’ None of these tag lines seemed entirely right for the client’s needs and aims.

By this time, it was well after midday and someone brought in some bento-

packed lunches. I was being pressed to say which series I liked best. I went for the Perspiration series, mainly because of the immediate effect of the stark, black and white visuals of the flamenco dancers, jazz drummer and classical violinist, but I knew that this was a choice based on a combination of personal

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cosmopolitan eclecticism and (upper-?) middle-class taste. The Home Entertain- ment series seemed to be direct and to the point – something that both Americans and Germans might appreciate. The Creativity Quotient series was interesting, but not immediately understandable in the context of Frontier’s future-oriented marketing strategy.

The pre-presentation took place early that afternoon. Those present included three members of Frontier’s international division, and, from the agency: the account team; a creative team from its international subsidiary (including an American copywriter); the head of the account services office; the head of the international division; the agency’s executive director and vice-president; and myself. During the best part of the following two hours, three different account executives explained the agency’s marketing and communications strategies. There were some sharp questions from Tanaka, the chief Frontier executive present, who asked the agency to explain, for example, why it was using red rather than standard blue for his company’s logo; and why it had not made use of the ‘light’ (hikari) tag line, even though it had been emphasized by the managing director of Frontier at the agency’s orientation two weeks previously. He asked more detailed questions about the agency’s media plan and budgeting, before wondering how the six series of ads presented were to be taken. Was the agency going to recommend a particular approach? Or was it going to leave Frontier to fumble around on its own (to Tanaka’s mind, a fatal strategy)?

The senior account executive was clearly at a loss. Hesitating a few long seconds, he finally suggested that the Perspiration series would be the agency’s recommendation – followed by the Creativity Quotient series with Jimmi Hendrix and his guitar. Tanaka did not seem that impressed. So far as he could judge, the Home Entertainment series would benefit sales, while the Nature ads would probably help Frontier’s corporate image. Perhaps the agency should check consumer reactions to these series by Tuesday? Moreover the agency had made no attempt to distinguish between American and German cultural differences. This was a problem for Frontier’s head office since it had to persuade its people in Germany that what it was doing was right; it needed back-up reasoning for its choice.

Symbolic Interaction

It was late afternoon by the time Tanaka and his colleagues took their leave. Once they had been seen off at the elevators, everyone reassembled in the same room for a post mortem. This kind of meeting – almost always held after visits from clients to the Agency – was extremely important because, first, it allowed all those present to give their own personal interpretations and assessments of what may have gone

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on in the meeting with the client; second, it then allowed them to form a strategy for further action; and, third, it gave them the opportunity to discuss and analyze the organizational structure of their client’s company.

In these respects, advertisers can be likened to practitioners of symbolic inter- action theory. Both are concerned with the meanings that things take on for human beings – meanings that involve an interpretive process, on the one hand, and that derive from, or arise out of, social interaction, on the other. Like symbolic inter- actionists, advertising people adopt a down-to-earth approach to the understanding of group behavior and human conduct. During the preparations for, and execution of, a client’s advertising campaign, they are obliged to fit their own actions into the organized activities of other people (in the client company, media organizations, and within the agency itself). It is the ways in which such people define, interpret and meet different situations at various points in the advertising process that advertisers seek to explain. For them, as for symbolic interactionists, ‘large-scale organization has to be seen, studied, and explained in terms of the process of interpretation engaged in by the acting participants as they handle the situations at their respective positions in the organization.’10

In this particular post mortem meeting, the head of the international division suggested that, if the presentation proper was to go smoothly, the agency had to have no more than one presenter. This would ensure continuity in the analysis. As a result, a senior account executive, Ueno, was immediately singled out for this job. Next, the head of the account services office argued that the competing agency, J&M, would almost certainly take along at least one foreigner to its presentation. The agency had to do the same, to show its international orientation. But the American copywriter had to be in Chicago the following Tuesday on another job, so I was then asked to act as the agency’s foreign ‘spokesman’ at the presentation. My participation as an observer was moving quicker than anticipated.

The next question that arose concerned the client’s organization. Who was the agency’s target man in Frontier? The head of the account services office needed to know who was going to have the greatest say in whether the agency was, or was not, chosen to represent Frontier in Germany and the United States. The senior account executive quickly mentioned a name, Oba, and added that it was he who was keen on the idea of ‘light’ as an overall concept. The head of account services then said that he would talk to fellow members of the agency’s board of directors and try to find a way to talk informally to Oba in the hope that he might then select the agency to handle the Frontier account.11

The head of the international division took over. The pre-presentation had made it abundantly clear that the agency had to decide which ads Oba was likely to approve or disapprove of and to make its selection accordingly. The account team had better be quite clear, too, about why it had decided not to go for Oba’s tag line, ‘The light of joy and creativity.’

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There followed a long, practical discussion about each of the series presented. Was there a problem of permissions with the Perspiration series? No, the agency had already got permission from the photographer concerned, but there might be a problem with the performers themselves or rather with their managers. Although the performers didn’t have to do anything for the series since the photos had already been taken, and would probably be content with a flat fee of, say, ¥10 million (at the time US$100,000), their managers would want twice that amount and would probably demand backing from Frontier for their protégés’ concerts, once they realized that the ads were for Frontier’s overall brand image. Still, there were more than 100 photos available so the agency could always move to a new artist if one got difficult.

What about the Nature series? This aroused some controversy. Many of those (Japanese) present liked it, but the two (Western) foreigners in the room continued to wrinkle their noses at it for one reason or another – particularly because of the headlines. After some further discussion, the Musicians series was put aside, as was the Young Women series to which Tanaka had reacted in a manner rather similar to myself since he had been overheard muttering ‘prostitution’ to one of his colleagues. This left us with the Creativity Quotient and Home Entertainment series. The latter seemed more promising, given Tanaka’s parting words and its obvious product sales approach. Could its design be altered somehow to fit in with the Perspiration series and so enable the agency to propose ‘Phase 1’ and ‘Phase 2’ stages in its presentation the following Tuesday? With a bit of playing around (first, by peeling off some letters down one side of one series), we found that design-wise they could be made to resemble each other. But Ueno, the account executive who was to make the presentation, did not feel very happy about the idea of ‘phases,’ even though it was clearly important for Frontier. He would have to come up with a rationale for them – starting with a broad theme, perhaps, before narrowing down to particulars – in order to justify why the agency had selected these two particular series of ads.

At this point, there was a long telephone call taken by the account executive in charge of Frontier’s domestic account, already handled by the agency. It seemed that someone somewhere in the agency had already been in touch with Tanaka who had been more than pleased with the Perspiration and Nature series. Still, J&M were due to make their presentation the following Monday, so maybe we should postpone our final decision until we had heard what had gone on there.12

In the meantime, there were things to be done. The tag line, ‘The pulse of entertainment,’ had to be checked in the US by the American copywriter once he got there. He should also try to get feedback from the US on ‘The light of joy and creativity,’ since this was so close to Oba’s heart, and it might be wise if he were to include tag lines used by competitors – like Sony’s ‘The one and only’ – when gauging American reactions. I was to ask my foreign friends in Tokyo what they

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thought of these tag lines and told to try to get an overall ranking of each of the series, as well as survey visuals, headlines, body copy (where used), tag line, design and total impact. Did the separate elements in each of the series inter- connect? Did people actually shift from visual to headline to body copy to tag line? If so, why? And what did they think of Frontier as a result? In the meantime, someone had discovered half a dozen forty-year-old American men with artificial suntans sitting in the corridor waiting to audition for a television commercial. They were brought in and asked for their – as it turned out inconclusive – opinions of the ads propped up against the walls of our meeting room.

Structuring Theory

That evening I met up with friends in a pub, and showed them some of the ad series that I had been given. Not one of them liked the tag line. One – in a passable imitation of Laurence Olivier as Henry V at Agincourt – suggested ‘To the Front- iers.’ Another – who worked in the fashion industry – said that the trouble with Frontier was that it was too frightened of being forthright. ‘Like its name says,’ she said, ‘It’s a cutting edge company.’ This helped me latch onto the tag lines, ‘Like the name says’ and ‘It’s (all) in the name.’ While I sipped my beer, I also scrawled down another phrase that leapt to mind: ‘Entertaining ideas for the future.’

Advertising often advances by means of a process of post-rationalization. I needed to justify ‘It’s (all) in the name’ and found myself going back to principles of structural linguistics read many years previously. The marketing of products and the meanings they took on, I reasoned, seemed no different in principle from Ferdinand de Saussure’s discussion of how ‘the value of any given word is deter- mined by what other words there are in that particular area of the vocabulary.’13

Thus every product (walkman or discman, video or tape recorder, laser or compact disc, and so on) took on meaning in association with those other products with which it was marketed. Moreover, a parallel could be drawn between products and their manufacturers, on the one hand, and syntagmatic and associative relations in language, on the other.14 Products might be made by the same or different manufacturers, in series that were related to one another diachronically (different versions of a VTR player put out over time by Frontier) or synchronically across space (simultaneously competing VTR players manufactured by Frontier, on the one hand, and by Sony, Hitachi, National, GE, Phillips, and so on, on the other). Together, like components of a language, they formed a system.

I had my post-rationalized theory. The following morning I found myself explaining to Ueno over the phone how Frontier needed to set itself apart from its competitors by ensuring that its tag line did not have any associations with those of rival companies. ‘The art of entertainment’ ran into trouble with Aiwa’s ‘The art

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of Aiwa,’ while any allusion to the ‘future’ would run foul of JVC’s ‘Founders of the future,’ and a focus on technology would clash with Sanyo’s ‘The new wave in Japanese technology.’ By focussing on ‘entertainment,’ I reasoned, Frontier would merely be falling in line with a set of associations (art, technology, future) that did not really differentiate one company from another, in the way that Sony had been able to do with its ‘The one and only.’ Frontier needed to be incomp- arable. It had to adopt a tag line that was distinctive and timeless, not subject to fashion. By going for something like ‘It’s (all) in the name,’ ‘The name says it (all)’ or ‘Like the name says,’ Frontier would be able to re-enforce its image and turn back on itself in a never-ending cycle. Frontier produced cutting edge products at the ‘frontier’ – a descriptive noun that was also the company’s name, and so on ad infinitum. In short, ‘Frontier = Frontier.’

Ueno listened politely, but did not sound particularly enthusiastic. I had the distinct impression that he had a sound grasp of both the theory and practice of structural linguistics and had already done this kind of reasoning for himself. Nevertheless, he asked me to write it all down for a Monday morning meeting. In the meantime, I tried to get friends’ reactions to the ad series dreamed up by the creative team, and added my own tag line for comment among the others given to the agency by Frontier. Although there was no clear-cut favorite so far as the series were concerned (the Perspiration and Creativity Quotient ads were generally preferred to the Nature and Home Entertainment series), a resounding majority of the two dozen or so people I asked picked out ‘Like the name says’ and/or ‘It’s in the name’ as their preferred tag line (provided I drop the ‘all’).

On Monday morning I presented my findings to Ueno who was by then more preoccupied with other, seemingly more urgent, matters. So little time, so much still to do. The creative people had been working through the weekend and all the previous night, trying to get everything right. The media planner had been faxing back and forth between Tokyo and the agency’s offices in Los Angeles and Frankfurt, trying to get the necessary information on costs, reach, frequency, gross impression and the other imponderables of audience reception. These would enable Ueno to answer any nasty questions about the proposed campaign budget when the agency’s presentation was made the following afternoon. There did not seem to be much that I could do, apart from pointing out one or two spelling mistakes and misprints, so I went off and did other things about the agency. Maybe I had been a bit over optimistic about my own potential usefulness as both foreigner and academic in the creation of the Frontier campaign.

Tournament of Value

Or had I? The next afternoon we took a train down to Frontier’s headquarters in Meguro, heavily loaded with slide and overhead projectors, a couple of dozen

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bound copies of the presentation proposal, ad story boards, and so on. We were sent up to the twelfth floor and prepared ourselves for the ritual event that was about to take place.

As I have had occasion to point out elsewhere, competitive presentations have been likened to what Arjun Appadurai, in a different context, has called ‘tourn- aments of value.’ These he describes as ‘complex periodic events that are removed in some culturally well-defined way from the routines of economic life.’15 It is by means of competitive presentations that the central tokens of value in the advertising industry – accounts – are usually distributed. Like all ritual events, presentations are marked by special kinds of space, performance and language – in particular by ‘the pitch’ that is made by an agency’s designated speaker.

Frontier had assigned a room on the top floor of its office normally used only by the company’s board of directors, with an anteroom for the actors to prepare in and retire to. The performance, which went through a number of carefully staged phases, brought together sponsor and supplicant in a rite of persuasion.16 The agency fielded ten people all told (three of them senior executive directors who had not been involved in preparations for the presentation), while Frontier brought in almost two dozen – ranging from senior executives to middle- and low-ranking managers. We sat along one side of a long oval table, they along the other and at the end of the boardroom. Proceedings began with the usual greetings on each side, and the reason for our being there together was made clear before Ueno was invited to give his ‘pitch.’

He started off on points made in Frontier’s orientation to the agency, moved to a market analysis and then embarked upon the agency’s proposed communication strategy. Making use of slides, he outlined the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ target audiences, the campaign aims and basic brand concept, ‘Towards new frontiers in enter- tainment,’ before shifting to a discussion of the tag line. After outlining reasons for adopting ‘The pulse of entertainment,’ he suddenly flashed on the screen as an alternative, ‘Entertaining ideas for the future.’ My tag line, he said (without attributing authorship), had been very favorably received in the United States because it attracted one’s attention,17 gave off an impression of creative products, resonated well, was future-oriented and suitable for entertainment-related products.

To my astonishment, Ueno then introduced a new slide proposing a second series of tag lines – ‘Like the name says,’ ‘The name says it all’ and ‘It’s in the name’ – under the umbrella concept of ‘Frontier = Frontier.’ He then proceeded to justify the agency’s reasoning along precisely the Saussurean lines that I had used over the phone to him the previous Saturday morning.

The creative recommendations that followed were divided into ‘depth’ (‘Frontier = Frontier’) and ‘scope’ (‘Entertaining ideas for the future’) approaches. The Perspiration series was recommended for the depth approach (with ‘Perf- ormance is my soul’s voice’ as the headline for the visual of the flamenco dancer),

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and the Nature series as back up. For its scope approach, the agency recommended the Home Entertainment and Creativity Quotient series in that order. Noticing my surprise, the head of the international division, who was sitting beside me, leant over and whispered in my ear: ‘Very good ideas, Professor!’

But would they be good enough to persuade Frontier to choose the agency over its rival, J&M? We found out soon enough. The very next afternoon, Tanaka arrived (by appointment) to inform us officially that Frontier had decided to award the agency its international account. Apparently, those present at the two present- ations the previous afternoon had been involved in fairly lengthy discussions over the de/merits of each of the agencies’ proposals. Two things had had to be decided: the brand concept and tag line, on the one hand; and the communication strategy and ad campaigns to be used, on the other.

While younger members of Frontier had felt more inclined to support J&M’s vision of ‘Power Technology,’ older members had felt that the agency’s Persp- iration and Home Entertainment series were closer to Frontier’s vision. However, all agreed that the agency had potential and it was this potential – exhibited in its ability to come up with new tag lines in particular – which decided Frontier to award the agency its account. The ‘pitch,’ too, had been a contributing factor and Tanaka commented favorably on the way in which Ueno had clearly given every- thing to the presentation – so much so that he had more or less collapsed at the end.

Apparently everyone present had initially agreed that the tag line to go for was ‘It’s in the name.’ This, they felt, expressed exactly what Frontier was all about. But those at the top – and, remember, Oba was still keen on his ‘light’ idea – had felt that it was perhaps a little too ahead of its time (twenty to thirty years ahead in fact) and that it was a mite too close in concept to Sony’s ‘The one and only.’ And the last thing Frontier wanted was to be seen as a ‘mini’ Sony. So, reluctantly, they had decided to shelve ‘It’s in the name,’ even though the tag line remained consciously in their minds. Instead, it was agreed that they should go for ‘The art of enter- tainment,’ turn down all communication strategy ideas and ask the Agency to come up with new ad campaign ideas.

Imagining and Imaging the Other

What does this brief account of the agency’s preparations – and my own role therein – for its presentation to Frontier for an advertising campaign aimed at American and German markets have to tell us? First, following on from what has just been said, we should realize that presentations serve to define, maintain and reaffirm organizational roles in the advertising community as a whole. Con- sequently, as a number of contributions to this book point out, it is usually people rather than agencies who are selected to handle clients’ accounts18 – a point made

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clear by Tanaka in his comment on Ueno’s ‘all or nothing’ performance at the presentation. Accounts themselves then legitimate an agency (and the person or persons singled out therein by the client). Every time an account changes agencies, it is given a new identity (because of the ‘personality’ given to the product or corporation which is the focus of the account) and builds up a history or proven- ance which includes such details as the account’s monetary value, the names of agencies associated with it (and for how long), successful (and failed) campaigns, and so on. This provenance accompanies an account during its circulation which, as shown by the very existence of the provenance, is not fortuitous. Rather, like the products that advertisers market, accounts operate within a system of distinction that includes products and advertisers and advertising agencies, in the process reproducing markets, player positions and collective wisdom.19

The reproduction of collective wisdom comes to the fore here in the agency’s imagining of a Western, as well as a Japanese client, ‘other.’ The former concerns Japanese understandings of those who are not Japanese, the latter business relations in the Japanese advertising industry. It is to these two related general issues that I will devote the rest of this discussion.

Generally speaking, the Japanese distinguish between themselves and other Asians (extending as far as India and the South Asian continent); between them- selves and Africans; and between themselves and ‘the West’ (seiyo-). They also make less general classificatory distinctions between the ‘Middle East’ (chu-kinto-), ‘Europe’ (yo-roppa), the United States (beikoku), South America (nanbei), and so on, but the (predominantly white) people who live there – with the exception of indigenous populations such as American Indians and the Inuit – are categorized as ‘Westerners’ (seiyo-jin). In this respect, they promote the same sort of difference between ‘us’ (the familiar) and ‘them’ (the strange) that Edward Said has noted of Westerners (or orientalists) writing about the East. They also indulge in the same kind of essentialism and absolutism, since the Japanese – like those writing about Japan – define what is notable about the other by resorting to features such as non/individuality, non/hierarchy, dis/harmony and ir/rationality. In general, we may say that, as a result of their economic success in the second half of the twentieth century, the Japanese have been able to recharge images applied to them by ‘Western’ orientalists and now successfully propagate a form of ‘counter- orientalism’ as a new hegemonic discourse.20

An important point to note about the continued efficacy of orientalist and counter-orientalist images is that it is the media which are most active in their dissemination to mass audiences that have immediate access and reaction to such images throughout the world. In this respect, media have, perhaps, far greater influence than ever was exerted by the scholars and administrators discussed by Said in his exposition of orientalist practices in earlier times. Part of the reason for the media’s adoption of these grossly contorted views of ‘the other’ is to be found

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in the constraints of time and/or space under which they operate. They can only offer mouthfuls of exotica to be consumed by means of rapidly masticating media bites.

Clearly, advertising also suffers from such constraints. It needs to get across a particular set of images that reflect a marketing need and appeal to a particular group or groups of people in a single printed page or television commercial that, in Japan, usually lasts no longer than fifteen seconds. To this end, advertising is obliged to make use of existing classifications that are readily understood by its targeted audiences, while ensuring that these classifications set advertised products apart from other similar products. It is thus likely to avail itself of existing orientalist or occidentalist images in order to achieve its aims, since it does not have the space or time for complicated, or for complicating, issues. In this respect, we may say that at one level the relentless dichotomy of orientalist and occid- entalist images found in advertising indicates stylistic differences – which are compatible and comparable, rather than opposite and irreconcilable.21 At a second level, as can be seen in the chapters by Kemper, Mazzarella and Miller, these common differences are not suppressed but promoted and structured by an advert- ising system that is now becoming global in its forms.22

In preparing for the Frontier presentation, the agency adopted as stylistic differences the general structural principles by which the Japanese classify for- eigners. Americans and Germans were both ‘Westerners’ (in other words, not ‘Japanese’) and therefore more or less the same. If pressed, those concerned could fall back on secondary clichés. Americans were only interested in a ‘hard sell’ (hence the account team’s preference for the Entertainment series, which was backed up in discussion by Tanaka when he visited the agency to award it the Frontier account). Germans worked hard and had a tradition of ‘musical culture’ (hence its choice of the Perspiration series, featuring flamenco, jazz and classical musicians).23

That these differences were also reflected in my comments as a European on the agency’s creative work shows how much we all rely on this structure of common differences. After all, I pointed out that Germans probably valued their musical tradition more than Americans (in spite of the fact that one of the ads in the Perspiration series featured a black jazz drummer). I had no difficulty in accepting my Japanese colleagues’ expectations that Germans would link the Perspiration series with their own (essentialized?) self-image as a hard-working people (making them akin to the Japanese themselves). And I could readily see how the straight- to-the-point Home Entertainment series would probably appeal slightly more to an American audience.

There is support here, therefore, for James Carrier’s argument that there are two kinds of occidentalism: one existing within academic anthropology; the other used by people being studied by anthropologists. Just as anthropologists’ constructions

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of the West are often shaped by their study of the non-West, so do Japan’s advert- ising people construct stylised images of the West that are based on their own image of themselves as Japanese. And this image, of course, has been formed in the light of what – among others – anthropologists have written about them in the spirit of orientalism.24

At the same time, the example given here shows just how these orientalisms and occidentalisms (of both the agency and its client) tend to be shaped by political contingencies. Here we are concerned with that other ‘other’ – the agency’s Japanese client. Throughout its preparations for the presentation, the agency did its best not to make a selection from its six main campaign series (until ordered to do so by Tanaka). In a way the account team wanted to avoid making a distinction between two audiences – one in Germany and the other in the United States – which were, in the normal course of things, not clearly distinguished, but lumped together as ‘Western.’ At the same time, though, because it was trying to win its client’s account, the agency needed to find out precisely how those in Frontier themselves defined ‘the West,’ and what images they would use to differentiate between Americans and Germans. More specifically, members of the account team had to find out who in particular was responsible for the decision to award, or not to award, the agency the Frontier account. The final images – the final orientalisms and occidentalisms – used by the agency in its presentation, therefore, depended in large part on the individual interpretations of what constituted ‘German’ and ‘American’ by two members of Frontier’s senior management (Tanaka and Oba).25

As a result of these contingencies, the agency eventually put forward four main ideas.26 By then it had a pretty good idea that its two main choices – the Perspiration (musicians) and Home Entertainment (entertainers outlined against laser and compact discs) series – were approved of by Tanaka, if not Oba. But each of these series also reflected other aspects of the Japanese discourse of the Western other. The Perspiration series was proposed for ‘depth’ in the agency’s com- munication strategy because Europe is seen by the Japanese as a repository of ‘high culture,’ and thus of cultural ‘depth.’ Similarly, the sheer geographical expanse of the United States was reflected in the agency’s choice of the Home Entertainment series for ‘scope’ (hirogari), which was also epitomised by the supporting Nature series that made use of visuals of vast expanses of uninhabited American desert.

At the same time, having discarded the Frontier managing director’s idea of ‘light’ (hikari) in both its choice of tag line and campaign ideas, the agency’s account team had to find something that it knew would appeal to the client’s decision makers. Thus, against the advice of its resident European anthropologist and American copywriter, the Nature series was included because the agency knew that it would appeal to both major decision-makers in Frontier (Oba and Tanaka). Why the appeal? Because it invoked an essential Japanese orientalism of

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‘naturalness’ that not only posits a trinity of nature, harmony and race, but sets these against ‘the West’ in numerous different ways, often relating Nature to technological superiority.27

In other words, in trying to isolate and express corporate and commodity differences, the agency tried to narrow its client’s gaze to particular kinds of difference. Rather like beauty pageants in Belize, therefore, advertising campaigns can be said to:

Organise and focus debate, and in the process of foregrounding particular kinds of difference, they submerge and obscure others by pushing them into the background. They standardise a vocabulary for describing difference, and provide a syntax for its expression, to produce a common frame of organised distinction, in the process making wildly disparate groups of people intelligible to each other. They essentialise some kinds of differences as ethnic, physical and immutable, and portray them as measurable and scalable characteristics, washing them with the legitimacy of objectivity. And they use these distinctions to draw systemic connections between disparate parts of the world system.28

What this discussion shows us is just how difficult it is to separate the elements that go into our own and others’ constructions of others (and ourselves). As Lise Skov and I have argued more generally elsewhere, the fact that Frontier and the agency were embarked upon a global campaign strategy merely complicated the way in which a proposed advertising strategy participated in cultural reproduction. Campaigns addressed at American and German target audiences had little choice but to adopt a lingua franca of consumerism which acted as a visual shorthand for specific places, dramas and meanings. In spite of the structure of common differences, therefore, orientalist and occidentalist images become focal points in a global stylistic continuity and tend thus to be the same, whether they are produced in Japan, Europe, or the United States.29 They both integrate the other and are integrated in the other.

Finally, as a coda to this discussion of imagining the ‘other,’ I want to turn to the issue of global advertising. There was a splendid irony in Frontier’s decision to go for a single advertising campaign in both Germany and the United States, in spite of the clear economies of scale involved. I say ‘irony’ because Japanese corporations have during the latter half of the twentieth century promulgated a philosophy of distinctively ‘Japanese’ managerial practices that have made out successful firms like Frontier to be substantially ‘different’ from their rivals in Europe and the United States.30 At the same time, the Japanese advertising industry, in conjunction with its clients, has – like many other local advertising industries around the world (see chapters by Kemper, Mazzarella and Miller) – long argued that the Japanese market is distinctive, unique even, because of the

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cultural proclivities of its consumers who cannot, or will not, readily accommodate global advertising campaigns and their images. An impenetrable aura has been drawn around both the culture of production and the culture of consumption in Japan.

In his discussion of the global and the local in Trinidad, Danny Miller has argued that both local advertising agency and local transnational office collude against the global firm by arguing for the distinctiveness of their local market and for the production of local advertising campaigns to sell global products. This enables them to grow at the expense of head offices and to establish a viable local advertising industry.31 Although the Japanese economy is, of course, on a somewhat different scale from that of the Caribbean island discussed by Miller, we should note that the (extremely successful) branding of the Japanese market has enabled domestic advertising agencies to eclipse the influence of foreign mega- agencies like JWT, Saatchi & Saatchi, and so on.

What is interesting is that when a ‘uniquely Japanese’ firm like Frontier wanted to market abroad, it made use of a local advertising agency that had – in part, at least – built its success upon orchestrating unique selling propositions in a ‘uniquely Japanese’ market. Thus, we find a globalizing Japanese manufacturer and globalizing Japanese advertising agency trying to create and market a global advertising campaign that specifically ignored the cultural differences that exist between Germany and the US, on the one hand, and between Japan and each of these two countries, on the other! This suggests that business strategy and profitability are stamped on both sides of the global–local coin. On the one hand, they help the Japanese strengthen their economy at home and protect it from foreign incursion (at least, until the 1990s). On the other, they contribute to preventing other domestic local economies from becoming stronger (which they would do, by Miller’s analysis, if local advertising campaigns were conducted by local agencies and local branches of local firms). In both cases, the ‘local identity’ of employees is at stake. In this sense, therefore, globalization is not a matter of internationalism, transnationalism or multinationalism, but rather of plain old- fashioned nationalism.

In another sense, however, globalization does not seem to be about any of these four types of nationalism. What the evidence suggests is that there is little, if any, systematic difference in an advertising agency’s approaches to global and local advertising campaigns. That is to say, the agency set about a ‘global’ advertising campaign for a Japanese client in more or less the same way as it did for local campaigns for a European client’s imported product (Moeran 1993) and a Japanese client’s Japanese product (Moeran 1996a). In all three cases, it was the agency’s estimation of what particular individuals within the client companies might think of particular images that counted. The account team’s decision as to whether to go for ‘global’ or ‘local’ images in the advertisements presented depended on the

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perceived personality of the client’s decision-maker, and not on any ‘intrinsic’ product or consumer value in the ads themselves. This indicates that, in the advertising industry at least, globalization is as much – if not more – about the interpersonal relations between individuals representing different corporations, as about the strategic development of those corporations themselves.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Timothy Malefyt, Barbara Olsen and John McCreery for critical comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

Notes

1. All names of people and organizations mentioned in this paper have been changed from their original forms. The advertising agency concerned was Asahi Tsushinsha, or Asatsu, now ADK, Japan’s third largest advertising agency.

2. See, for example, Moeran (1993, 1996a, 2001), Lien (1997), Miller (1997), Kemper (2001), McCreery (2001), and Mazzarella (2001, forthcoming).

3. Anderson (1983) and Appadurai (1990). 4. See Moeran (1993, 1996a: 71–98). 5. Barthes (1972: 151–2). Of course, I refer here not to the actual West (whatever

that may be), but to those aspects of the West (real and imagined) that the Japanese incorporate into their version of occidentalism (cf. Tobin 1992: 4).

6. I will sometimes use the phrase ‘the West’ as shorthand for Germany and the United States because Frontier’s aim was ultimately to create a global advertising campaign that would be carried in other parts of Europe and the Americas.

7. Kemper (2001: 4). 8. Or account planners. In Japanese, they are called by the rather more down-to-

earth title of ‘salesmen.’ 9. ‘Dummy’ copy is often used in presentations since a competing agency is not

usually given all the information required for it to write the body copy of an advertisement. In other words, what is usually presented by an agency to its client at a competitive pitch is one or more series of visuals, headlines and slogans.

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10. Blumer (1986: 58). In his account of preparations for the re-launch of a Trinidadian drink (also discussed in his chapter in this book), Miller (1997: 182–7) comments on how an experienced advertising executive knew exactly how to read between the lines spoken by her client’s marketing director and product manager at an orientation. But, while she ignored the substance of their discussion, the creative team preferred to make use of what was said to back their approach to the campaign in question.

11. As Miller (1997: 96) points out – and I myself have noted in my discussion of a Japanese advertising agency (Moeran 1996a) – it is these ‘small worlds’ of business contacts that continuously interfere with the logic of profitability.

12. It was abundantly clear that the agency had an extremely good communication channel, or ‘pipe,’ to someone in Frontier (cf. Moeran 1996a: 87–8).

13. Saussure (1983: 114). 14. Saussure (1983: 121–5). 15. Appadurai (1986: 21); cf. also Moeran (1993) and Lien (1997: 267–73). 16. And note that in advertising, as is shown in this book by Barbara Olsen and

Timothy Malefyt, the real persuasion takes place between agency and client, and not between advertiser and consumer.

17. I later learned that he actually had had the tag line checked in the US. 18. Lien (1997: 271). See also Moeran (1993: 83) and Miller (1997: 189). 19. Moeran (1993: 84). 20. See Said (1978) for the definitive outline of orientalism, its history, practices

and consequences. On Japan’s counter-orientalism, see Moeran (1996b). 21. Moeran and Skov (1997: 182). Such ‘stylistic reference points’ have also been

discussed more generally by Marilyn Ivy (1989). 22. See Wilk (1995: 118). 23. O’Barr (1994: 198) also looks briefly at Japanese fantasy constructions of

America and points out how Japanese dreams of the United States parallel American dreams of Japan. Lien (1997: 174) gives a nice example of how a Norwegian food manufacturer resorted to such visual clichés as the stars and stripes flag, the Statue of Liberty, a cowboy on bucking bronco, jazz musicians and so on, in order to promote its Pan Pizza as ‘American.’

24. See Carrier (1995: 8–14) and Moeran (1996b). 25. They also had to cater to decision-makers’ self-image of what Frontier was as

a company. The Home Entertainment and Creativity Quotient series openly stressed and implied, respectively, the historical role Frontier had played in the development of new audio-visual technologies.

26. Carrier (1995: 8). These contingencies also included the agency’s own need to adapt creative ideas to its market analysis of Frontier’s situation and an Anglo-Irish anthropologist’s views on what made sense to himself as a European (after living a dozen years in Japan and having to struggle with orientalism during most of his academic life).

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27. See Moeran and Skov (1997: 182–5). In fact, by openly advocating Frontier’s technological superiority in the Home Entertainment series, the agency was in danger of playing into the hands of ‘techno-orientalists’ who use the assoc- iation between technology and Japaneseness ‘to reinforce the image of a culture that is cold, impersonal and machine-like, an authoritarian culture lacking emotional connection the rest of the world’ (Morley and Robins 1995: 169).

28. Wilk (1995: 130). 29. Moeran and Skov (1997: 191–4). On occidentalism in Japanese advertising,

see O’Barr (1994) and Creighton (1995). 30. In Europe (and also in Brazil) there was a consolidation of national advertising

markets in the 1970s that helped establish local cultural identities vis-à-vis US advertising networks by successfully competing through ‘creativity’ (Mattelart 1991: 34–6, 41–3).

31. See Miller (1997: Chapter 3).

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