There are adverts everywhere in Japan, on the trains, on the buses, in magazines, television, billboards, tissue packets, take-away food wrappers and so on. It is probably true of most cities that adverts seem to dominate the landscape.
Once thing I have noticed about Japanese adverts is that a lot of them show the search-word required to find their site on the web. I haven’t seen this in other countries and wondered what other people had seen around the world?
Some of the adverts I have seen on television and trains don’t even bother carrying the actual url website address. Is this a trend where eventually the url address may become redundant, or is this just a Japan trend, encouraged by the advertising agencies who are maybe getting a few dollars off Yahoo?
In this series of Japanese magazine adverts showing the web search box and the keyword to search on for their product or service. The adverts on the train are more prominently showing this with some of them even having the Yahoo mark against the search box. Free advertising for Yahoo. nice work!
and the long copy for this Sony broadband advert
For most of these adverts I would find it easier to remember and search the company name, than the product, but maybe the target market are having trouble finding the address bar, and find it easier just to search first rather than go direct to the page.
How are things in your country/city for adverts. Is the internet featuring heavily on everyday adverts?
13 comments
Hee I noticed this too. More after the GYAONEXT advertisement in the Gundam00 S2 episodes. Kinda unique.
After writing this post and watching TV tonight, I kept seeing it pop up on various adverts. It's strange how often it appears. It has become a real trend. Next step, hook the TV directly to the browser and "just click"
Konnichiwa, shibuya san.
You see it more and more these days every where you go. every company seems to have it's website listed at the bottom of the screen. Paid cms are the worst,every product has one. As far as national companies their adverts …like Kraft at the bottom of the screen, just enter the keyword , then use yahoo search. when you do that it takes you to their website for coupon offer, or cooking tips.
Also seeing sponsor websites on the Nascar Racing Circuit, kinda hard to read when cars are whizzing around the track but it's there,lol. Like you said…Next step, hook the TV………
What's next 3-D??
Well till conbini monday,
ja mata ne.
If the search was more memorable than the actual web address, then I may see some value in this!
I see some value here as well. I just wonder how this shift might end up changing how we browse the met? Is the search bar becoming more important than the address bar?
I remember seeing this a lot in Japan when I was there a couple of years ago too.
I have also noticed that they do it here in Korea. Mainly because the Korean interweb works out of their two main web portals Naver or Daum. Because of this most adverts have a Naver or Daum search term on them that you can use.
The problem that I can see though is that if you use another browser of the company slips in the search rankings it can be hard to find. I prefer to try and stick to web addresses
I am also in favor of the name address, however the domain name address was supposed to be instead of remembering ip address numbers.
Are we know seeing search as a possible replacement, in the future, for the domain address names?
How do companies that paid a lot for memorable .com names view this trend? Is it decreasing the value of domain names?
Is this a paradigm shift for the web on a larger scale or just limited to countries where the roman script is hard to remember?
What do Yahoo do? Search for us under the name Yahoo? That may not be as dumb a suggestion as it sounds.
Domain is a replacement for an IP address but both of these are unique identifiers which isn't true for search keywords as the position of you site may change without your control (ex. every time when Google updates it's PageRank algorithm)
IMHO what we need is IPv6 with support for localized domain names (in kana, kanji, cyrillic etc.). This trend of using search keywords instead of the actual URL is incorrect and very dangerous both for the company (changes in the search ranking) and it's customers (phishing). Another problem I see here is that it promotes Yahoo's monopoly as it's basically bound to one selected search engine.
very true. IPv6 may change the market significantly. It seems strange that companies/advertising agencies would take the chance of using search keywords in Yahoo as a way to find the sites. They must really believe its worth the risk and that more customers can find the product that way than just by trying to remember the url.
I look forward to see what happens over the next few years.
very true. IPv6 may change the market significantly. It seems strange that companies/advertising agencies would take the chance of using search keywords in Yahoo as a way to find the sites. They must really believe its worth the risk and that more customers can find the product that way than just by trying to remember the url.
I look forward to see what happens over the next few years.
I'm sure this trend is because you can't type URLs in Japanese (i.e. kanji, hiragana or katakana). Us discussing in English why such-and-such a search term is less easy than the romaji-based URL is kinda dumb, when we're clearly not the target market at all. Ask a bunch of unilingual Japanese (i.e. almost all of them), and I'm sure you'll find it's much easier to remember and use a search term than it is to remember and use an all-romaji URL.
Much easier to say, "Search for <nani-nani>" than it is to say, "daburu-daburu-daburu-dotto-uebusaitononamae-dotto-shii-oh-dotto-jei-pii."
@Karyudo Of course, you're absolutely right. I feel so stupid now..
I agree with you on this, but in the examples above, half of the adverts are romaji and the other half hiragana/katanaka/kanji mix. Even the Sony ad says [So-net 光]
For those who don't regularly use the internet the http:// and www, not to mention ". something" are the hardest things to explain to them, in any language.