Here's a newspaper ad that won a prize in the 2005 Mainichi Design Awards. It's for a publishing company called Shinchosha.
The ad is tremendously simple but is difficult to explain without providing some linguistic background. In Japanese, quantities of various items are specified with "counters" that differ with the subject being discussed. For instance, if you're telling someone that you own three bottles of wine, you'd tell them you have san-bon. If you're telling them you have three pairs of shoes, you say you have san-soku. If you're explaining that you have three sheets of paper, you describe them as san-mai. In Japanese, san means "three." The suffixes in each of the previous examples are what clarify to the listener the type of item that you have three of.
Now, getting back to the ad, the headline says "I am _____ satsu," where in this case, the word satsu refers to a number of books. The reader, seeing this, will pause for a moment before the light goes off. Literally, it says "I am [blank number of] books." In other words, if the girl in the photo has 46 books stacked next to her, she's saying "I'm 46 books."
The cleverness of the copy is found in the fact that the stack of books can be looked at as kind of a growth chart (which it visually resembles).
The viewer of the ad—if he or she is an avid reader—gets it immediately. "I'm _____ books" is like saying "I'm _____ inches/centimeters tall."
On a subtle level, the ad challenges the viewer: We've read this many. How many books have you read?
In other words, the message is meant to promote reading. And since Shinchosha is a publishing company, they're hoping you'll buy their books.
Can you believe it took all of that to explain a three word headline?
Welcome to the crazy world of cross-cultural communication!
* Need more information on this subject? Click here.
** Check out other Mainichi Design Award winners here.
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