A new breed of young people have outdone the tricksters of advertising.
This article appeared in issue #113, now available in our Blueprint for a New World Series Box Set.
They don’t want cars or brand name handbags or luxury boots. To many of them, travel beyond the known and local is expensive and potentially dangerous. They work part-time jobs—because that is what they’ve been offered—and live at home long after they graduate. They’re not getting married or having kids. They’re not even sure if they want to be in romantic relationships. Why? Too much hassle. Oh, and too expensive.
In Japan, they’ve come to be known as satori sedai—the “enlightened generation.” In Buddhist terms: free from material desires, focused on self-awareness, finding essential truths. But another translation is grimmer: “generation resignation,” or those without ideals, ambition or hope.
They were born in the late 1980s on up, when their nation’s economic juggernaut, with its promises of lifetime employment and conspicuous celebrations of consumption, was already a spent historical force. They don’t believe the future will get better—so they make do with what they have. In one respect, they’re arch-realists. And they’re freaking their elders out.
Critics of the satori youths level the kinds of intergenerational accusations time-honored worldwide: they’re lazy, lacking in willpower, potency and drive.
Having lectured to a number of them at several universities in Tokyo, I was able to query students directly. “We’re risk-averse,” was the most common response. We were raised in relative comfort. We’re just trying to keep it that way.
Is this enlightened, or resigned? Or both?
Novelist Genichiro Takahashi, 63, addressed the matter in an essay 10 years ago. He called the new wave of youth a “generation of loss,” but he defined them as “the world’s most advanced phenomenon”—in his view, a generation whose only desires are those that are actually achievable.
The satori generation are known for keeping things small, preferring an evening at home with a small gathering of friends, for example, to an upscale restaurant. They create ensemble outfits from so-called “fast fashion” discount stores like Uniqlo or H&M, instead of purchasing top-shelf at Louis Vuitton or Prada. They don’t even booze.
Fujiwara’s research leads her to define a global trend—youth who have the technological tools to avoid being duped by phony needs. There is a new breed of young people, she says, who have outdone the tricksters of advertising.
The new reality is affecting a new generation around the world. Young Americans and Europeans are increasingly living at home, saving money, and living prudently. Technology, as it did in Japan, abets their shrinking circles. If you have internet access, you can accomplish a lot in a little room. And revolution in the 21st century, as most young people know, is not about consumption—it’s about sustainability.
In America and Europe, the new generation is teaching us how to live with less—but also how to live with one another. Mainstream media decry the number of young people living at home—a record 26.1 million in the US, according to recent statistics—yet living at home and caring for one’s elders has long been a mainstay of Japanese culture.
In the context of shrinking resources and global crises, satori “enlightenment” might mean what the young everywhere are telling us: shrink your goals to the realistic, help your family and community and resign yourself to peace.
What Takahashi called “the world’s most advanced phenomenon” may well be coming our way from Japan. But this time it’s not automotive or robotic or electronic. It’s human enlightenment.
Roland Kelts is a half-Japanese writer based in Tokyo and New York. He is the author of the bestselling JAPANAMERICA: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the US, and a contributor to enlightened media worldwide.
Tom Goodwin, a director of the Tomorrow Group, explains how he thinks the iWatch will change advertising forever.
It will take a tiny screen to finally wake the industry up to what the digital medium really means – a bright future of the new, and not the mindless misappropriation of advertising platforms of the past.
It’s amazing how many opportunities we’ve missed mindlessly layering old techniques onto new media. We’ve got excited about better ad targeting, improved measurement, or the opportunity to do real-time marketing, but the vast majority of digital advertising innovation today still comes from the placement of ads and not the message. What an incredible waste.
When the worldwide web presented us with space to convey brand messages, we did what we knew best: we mindlessly copied newspapers ads, digitised them and in a moment of genius, made them clickable.
When websites allowed page takeovers, we filled those pages with what we knew best (direct marketing) but we made it clickable.
The first brand websites became online brochures, but digitised and made clickable.
When bandwidth made branded videos possible, we just put on TV commercials.
Despite having access to over $10 billion of R&D budgets from new media owners like Facebook, Yahoo, and Twitter, we still see print ads in digital editions of magazines, we see flyers used as ads on Instagram, TV ads in Facebook feeds, and mobile ads that are essentially just tiny, electronic versions of newspaper ads from the 1750s.
The only thing we’ve invented is new terminology. We now have advertorials online, but we call them native ads, we have advertiser-funded TV, but we call it content marketing. We have had tactical print ads, but we now call it real-time marketing. Every single tool in advertisers’ arsenal today has been available since the 1960s.
The digital world is a world of incredible abundance – it’s got the biggest creative canvas, the most incredible technology, huge optimism and boundless funding.It’s the best thing that could ever happen to advertising, and yet we all started lazily with what we knew best. Things will soon change. For the first time ever we will start to do what we do best, to think originally and to solve problems with creativity.
We’ve now reached a stage in which new technologies are forcing a paradigm shift, and it starts with the iWatch. When the digital medium becomes an extension of our senses, our minds, and our bodies, as [Canadian philosopher Marshall] McLuhan predicted, we have to consider not what we have, but what is possible.
When we’re faced with a new platform, with a set of unique characteristics, we have to rethink our approach to advertising: from pushing messages out to consumers based on past models of communication, to finding ways to add value and service, based on behaviour, needs and habits, and enhance their lives.
How do you work with route guidance apps or GPS?
How do you link with data from social networks, based on proximity?
How should you use audio signals, NFC capabilities, or health inputs?
How are you leveraging real-time data like current, the news or the stock market?
How are you incorporating mobile coupons, or integrating with our calendars?
What becomes of the rise of the invisible app, how can your brand run as an assistive, typically invisible layer?
Maybe it’s about providing the information that you are located near a train station when the traffic is bad.
Maybe it’s the flash sale in the store you are passing, the beer voucher as your friend is close by, the suggested happy soundtrack to your can of Coke, the Gatorade after your gym session.
SmartWatches may or may not be here soon, and they may or may not work, but regardless, as a concept, they stand for what advertising becomes when the true power of technology, new media opportunities and creative thinking come together.
The future of digital advertising won’t look like advertising.
Imagine being able to make your own gorgeous, high-quality makeup at home, using any colors you choose.
That’s the future envisioned by Grace Choi, who made a huge splash this week when she presented a product that can 3-D print makeup at TechCrunch Disrupt.
TechCrunch reporter Colleen Taylor asked Choi some more questions about Mink after her ground-breaking presentation to get a better idea of how the product will work.
Here’s what the final Mink could look like.
Although the prototype is currently the size of the average at-home printer, Choi says that the final product will be about the size of a Mac Mini and will sell for about $300, at least at first. There are two key features to this printer: It uses a cosmetic-grade dye that’s FDA-compliant, and, instead of printing on paper, it will print its colors onto a powder substrate that is like the raw material of regular makeup.
“It comes from the same sources as those products that you see on store shelves,” Choi told Taylor.
Choi’s product would let users find a color online, use a tool to find that hue’s hexadecimal number, and then print it. Every color has a unique hex number so you could literally print out any color.
She says that Mink will be targeted toward 13- to 21-year-old girls who are still experimenting with their makeup habits. That period is also when girls build confidence, she says, explaining that when she was growing up, she would sometimes have trouble finding beauty products suited for her skin.
When stores didn’t have any products targeted toward Asian women, she says she felt alienated. Similarly, when stores didn’t carry the more-exotic colors she was looking for, it made her feel like her ideas were abnormal.
“If they didn’t have a green- or black-colored lipstick that made me think that there was something weird about the way I was thinking,” Choi said. That thinking damaged her self-esteem, and she says that she stopped speaking up in class because she started believing that all her ideas were strange.
She wants her products to encourage young women to test out lots of different looks and have complete freedom over the colors that they choose, without ever feeling like their ideas were weird.
She says that the reaction to her product so far has been completely amazing.
Editor’s Note: Expect many new and exciting products to come to market as 3-D printing takes off. This will revolutionize the retail industry over time as many OTC products can be replaced with a 3-D printer and their basic ingredients.
Loads of angry kids are looking for music with attitude as expression of their mood.
Modern punk styles are emerging in London telling raw stories from the street and what it is like being poor and white. With band names like The Meat and Onions Gang, Balkan Chavs, Skets and Run Shebeen delivering music that reflects the frustrations of the times.
For more mainstream music, the genre of music produced by pretty teenagers singing about their love life is giving way as negative social mood intensifies and the minor keys are emphasised with more arty, downbeat music. Lyrics that reflect anxiety and socially conscious themes will emerge with the times.
This cartoon picture “I Am Free” by Frode Johannessen going viral on social media at the moment reflects the social mood of our time. Compare this with the mood of the 90’s and 00’s when going to work was viewed as a positive experience. Social mood is always in flux, constantly moving towards a polar opposite in every area of human endeavour. Indeed this is very much the movement of the yin and yang observed by Taoist seers long ago.