Japan Says: Have a Coke (and an Ad) and a Smile!

Posted by Mike Richard on May 11, 2007
Filed under: Japan, Odds + Ends

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Remember when I professed my love for Tokyo and all things Japanese? Of course you do - it was about an hour ago. Further proof of why the Japanese are leaders in global innovation and I love them for it:

TOKYO - Thirsty Japanese will soon be able to drink coffee or other non-alcoholic beverages at a low price or even for free — as long as they watch a 30-second advertisement on the vending machines.

Vending machine operator Apex Corp. will start a service next month to turn its machines into a new medium for advertisers, who will pick up the partial or full cost of drinks.

Apex runs 35,000 vending machines across Japan that serve drinks in paper cups, generally priced at 70 to 120 yen (60 cents to one dollar) a cup.

Under the ‘MediCafe’ project, the vending machine will play an advertiser’s video for around the 30 seconds it takes to pour the drink and dispense a paper cup with an advertisement printed on it.

‘We will select the locations of vending machines which would best suit the customers targetted by advertisers,’ said an Apex
company official.

Via Khaleej Times

How cool is that?

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Vagabondish editor, Mike Richard, lives in Rhode Island - a spit of land in the northeastern U.S. He is a professional web designer and travel junkie with an unhealthy addiction to backpacking, camping, hiking and seeing the world. He enjoys knit hats, small, declarative sentences and speaking in the third person.



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Comments

Ben
May 11th, 2007 - 4:07 pm

But is it worth it?

Not to be the overly-political downer, but the high concentration of advertising the world over gives me a headache.

I’ll pay my 50 cents for a coke, if only for the sake of keeping the mental environment a little cleaner.


Mike
May 13th, 2007 - 8:12 pm

Oh absolutely, Ben. From a consumer perspective, the ridiculously low levels to which corporate marketing agencies will stoop to plaster ads on anything is despicable.

But as a professional marketing/design geek myself, I salute the Japanese for their innovative spirit. It’s a weird dichotomy, I know.

Given the choice, I’m with you though: Coke can stuff their ads in a sack and I’ll pay my fifty cents, thank you very much.