Hi, I like your blog.

Maybe the answer to the bilingual problem is to do a two-column blog like this guy did.

Anyway, about the Gaba ad, I think it's safe to assume that any quote not attributed to a specific person is probably made up. (Same thing goes for American ads, too.)

I don't want to absolve all American ads, but my sister is a copywriter for a big ad firm and I was talking to her about this. Her text gets vetted by lawyers at every step to make sure there is no way it can be construed as "false" advertising or bring on a lawsuit in any other way.

I'm not sure this process happens in Japan, but I'll ask around. It's not fair to say the two countries have the "same situation" although they may both be different shades of "bad."

Interesting co-incidence, I've just been asked to make copy for a Californian wine brand. They want me to create a ficitional character and make up adventures for him. It seems to me that all advertising and branding is a kind of fiction, and people consume advertising (in whatever country) with this firmly in mind.

Re; "truth in advertising" (c'mon guys; famous antilogy!)
As my Japanese friend bluntly put it to me: "Americans are too stupid to figure out for themselves that companies might lie about their products in order to make more money. Outsiders often characterize Japanese as passively accepting consumerism, but we just react to these things in different ways..."
Me: "You mean, like you react to it by just ignoring the problem alltogether and letting yourself get worked up into a shopping frenzy?"
"Yaaa! Stupid Americano! You would pour boiling hot coffee all over your crotch if it there wasn't a huge warning on the cup!"
"No, they don't even serve hot coffee in America anymore. We might use it to scald a Homeland Security Officer... Oh look a plastic bag; I wonder what would happen if I put it over my head..."
"HAI-YA! (translation; Karate CHOP!)"
[Yankee drops dead, terrorists everywhere applaud, Japanese goes off to apply 100% satisfaction guaranteed baby seal oil healing lotion to his sensitive palm skin...]

It seems to me that all advertising and branding is a kind of fiction

It's a "kind of fiction" that most consumer groups petition companies to regulate. I like your meta-textual philosophical philosophy, but back on Earth, Postmodernism isn't solving anybody's problems as much as providing pretty window dressing for total capitalist infiltration into our lives.

If the idea was just fiction, ad firms would admit it. But they don't because they understand that the power is the "image of reality." Just like films that start with "Based on a True Story."

Since I'm such a postmodernist, I can't help making a structural analysis of your comment on my comment, drawing attention to the binaries you set up in your answer.

Consumer Groups / Companies
Truth / Advertising
Fact / Fiction

Those three make one cluster. In your account, companies are putting fiction in their advertising, and consumer groups are campaigning for more truth and more facts. You'll notice that Farley and I accept your Truth / Advertising binary, by the way: Farley calls it an "antilogy", and I concur by equating advertising with fiction.

HOWEVER, whereas Farley and I are happy with maintaining the binary Truth / Advertising, and believe that people are well-protected from misleading claims by their basic understanding that all advertising is essentially hokum, you want to collapse the binary. You want Truth and Advertising to be synonymous.

Have you considered that by collapsing the stable binary which places Truth and Advertising on opposite sides, you would actually only be bolstering the legitimacy of an industry which is essentially nothing more than paid flattery for the corporations who buy it? Your position is far closer to capitalist window-dressing than ours. Why legitimate the truth claims of an industry which has no vested interest in truth, and which people have no vested interest in believing any more than they currently do?

Leave that Truth / Advertising binary alone!

Accurate labels on Products / Companies Wanting to Raise Profit Margins by any means necessary

How dare I suggest that maybe this binary should be collapsed!

That's a sly diversion, switching from advertising to the Ingredients list. But it won't do, I'm afraid. Again I have to wonder why you think it would be helpful to anyone that advertising got a reputation for telling the truth? Would that help consumers ("I want to know the truth about this product -- I know, I'll watch a commercial!") or advertisers ("We really want an accurate assessment of this product to be made public. I know, we'll get an advertising agency to tell the truth about it!")

Ads (or adverts) often contain product information, and in the US, and I would assume the UK also, making false claims about your products is illegal. Ingredient labels are one kind of product information, and ads are another. I find it very cynical to assume that advertisers must lie about their products.

One can create fantasies as part of advertising, but most societies maintain a legal limit. For example, McDonalds has encountered controversy for claiming that its meals are "healthy" but this may not technically be "illegal."

A company trying to sell a Tonic Water mixer that cures cancer would be great fiction and postmodern spectacle, but a terrible leech on public good will.

Now, vigorous consumer education may be better than producer restrictions, but the idea that ads should be full of false information is just more nonsense coming from someone who thinks that every part of the socio-economic world can be aestheticized for hedonic ends.

Defense lawyers also impart information in court. Can I ask if you're also campaigning to make them more honest? And if you needed a lawyer to defend you in court, would you hire one who said "Now, David, I'm an honest man: I'm going to tell the judge and jury everything I know about your case, whether it helps you or not."

momus: ever heard of perjury? once again I call red herring on thee!

Marxy, sorry to tell you that what would be considered sophisticated/well developed advertising (or to be really precise, well developed _branding_ seldom, if ever, contains facts about the product) - at least, not in a central way.

Current advertising of consumer products is all about selling fulfilment or an experience, even if it's a mundane item like cutlery, a pair of shoes, or a sandwich. Cutlery is sold as a part of a sophisticated fine dining experience, with beautiful food, elegant conversation and a well appointed home. Shoes are about peak athletic performance, individuality, nonconformity... sandwiches can be sold as 'a healthy lifestyle', 'time for myself' or a connection with the past...

Although all of those things can be true to a small number of people, I must admit that since I started seeing some of the work analysed for business purposes, my interest in consumer products has waned.

As for your comment about defence lawyers Momus, my understanding is that under the Commonwealth system (no idea how it reflects on Japan, Germany or the US), if someone confesses guilt to their lawyer their only recourse is to advise them to plead guilty.

(Under the Confucian system, however, I understand that people are *expected* to lie)

Marxy, sorry to tell you that what would be considered sophisticated/well developed advertising (or to be really precise, well developed _branding_ seldom, if ever, contains facts about the product) - at least, not in a central way.

Right. I'm not denying that. I'm saying that if in that process, claiming something false to be "real" is legally a problem. If it's just images and feelings, there's no issue but when you claim "real people" to be saying things they never said, it's ethically suspect.