Sensory Overload in Tokyo: How Not to Get Attention

Or at least good attention as far as I'm concerned. How do most advertising agencies try to get your attention in a city like Tokyo that has ads on every wall and building you look at? Easy, buy as much space as possible and contribute to the problem even more. Today I experienced the epitome of this concept on the train coming home from school and work.

I spend about an hour and a half on the train and another 40 minutes walking round trip to school five days a week so I've become fairly jaded to the 1,000s of signs and videos I see from point A to point B except for when I'm intentionally seeking them out to practice my Japanese reading skills. This afternoon was an exception:

On the way to work I saw a muted version of this commercial on one of the many screens in the train



After that I noticed all these

Any wall space that's normally reserved for a handful of ads was taken up by Turkish Airlines and I soon noticed they bought what seemed to be the entire days worth of train screen time. After leaving work six hours later and getting on this new train home I noticed the same commercial was looping and Turkish Airlines had about 85% of the train advertising real estate space.

This completely ruined it for me. Originally, I thought to myself, "Hmm, I usually like Kevin Costner and that ending has been used before, but I still like it. Maybe I'll check out Turkish Air next time I fly." By the time I got off the train to get home I never wanted to see any Turkish Airlines branding again.

Thanks for taking away everything I could practice reading from and the six or seven commercials I usually zone out with to make my trek home a little less tedious, I owe you one. Please grab my attention with something that peaks my interest next time rather than repeatedly bashing me in the face with it.

A little trivia: Coca-Cola comes out with a new product in Japan on average of every 21 days to compete with the over saturation here.