Badvertising

Eat, Turn, Uncho! Greedily! Thank you!

Of course there’s no nation on Earth with a monopoly on baffling, pointless, annoying, off-putting and inept advertising. The advertising industry as a whole is one of the things that the planet would be better off without, the unscrupulous deceiving the unwary. In my experience, though, there’s no inexplicably bad advert like an inexplicably bad Asian advert. As I’ve mentioned previously, it’s often because the product being advertised is a solution to a problem that nobody in their right mind thinks is a problem. That’s the case in the following advertisement, for the “Unchoken Lucky Dog” money box. Tortured puns are quite common in Japanese product naming. This one doubles up on kanji for “lucky saving dog” and “unko” (poo). Yes, basically the dog eats your coins and then craps them out into a hole. I’m not sure where we’re meant to understand the luck coming into play. Is it lucky to save coins in a money box, or is it lucky for the dog that it’s able to safely and painlessly excrete small change?

This doesn’t work with real dogs. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

Recipe for a Japanese promotional video: too much text (include some mangled Japlish to confuse native English speakers and Japanese people alike, obviously), show the same action over and over again, random Street Fighter sound effects, hi-NRG music bed from the mid 1990s. All present and correct here.