On Instagram, Tokyo-based entrepreneur, Aziz Nishanov talks about the deliciously weird Japanese ads we keep on seeing online. He says the reason they’re so weird is not because Japanese people are any weirder than anyone else but because the Japanese media landscape is by far the most brutally competitive in the world. Japanese ads have to be really unusual to stand out. And it works. These weird ads are apparently 2.5 more effective than their more vanilla counterparts.
This world where we’re at war for attention is the world Korean artist, Naim June Paik, predicted in the 1960s.
Paik is most famous for the sculptures he built using old TV sets, creating huge walls of screens that flashed hundreds of images at you every minute. Art critic, Robert Hughes, said it “turns the brain to cornflakes.”
Paik called it the “Electronic Superhighway,” his vision for our hyper-connected, screen-saturated future.
He was right. We live there now.
The trouble is, in this world it gets increasingly difficult for anyone or anything to stand out. Hence Nishanov’s point about the weirdness of Japanese ads. But even that breaks down eventually. When everything is weird and getting weirder, that becomes the norm and stops being noticeable. We have to disrupt ourselves again.
Brand strategist, Eugene Healey, has an answer for this: Friction. When everything is literally a mouse click away and we’ve removed nearly every barrier, friction is what carries weight.
No friction, no meaning. No imagination. You become a pure consumer – a king on a throne, overstuffed and bored.
Psychologists call it “effort justification.” We value things less when they come too easily.
So while Japanese ads get weirder to get noticed, the smarter move may be to create boundaries. Ask something of people. Make them work a little.
When Tyler, the Creator releases a new album with password-protected Instagram reels and online puzzles, the reward is belonging to something you earned your way into.
What Healey calls “purposeful inconvenience.”
The algorithm promised we could kill tastemakers and discover what we like ourselves. Instead, everything looks the same.
Our customers don’t want effortlessness. They want earned.
Friction means asking people to come toward you. But if you ask, there better be something worth the walk.
