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49:03 2022, Victory Gundam producer Ueda Masuo tweeted a photo from the now defunct Space World Amusement park in Kyushu, a park most famous internationally for the time. They unveiled a new ice skating rink with 5000 dead fish entombed in the ice for guests to skate over. They closed this controversial attraction after two weeks, apologized, and promised to hold an appropriate religious service to memorialize the fish. The park closed down entirely a month later, on New year's Day 2018. They blamed the declining birth rate and the depopulation of provincial cities in favor of Tokyo, as well as competition from a popular new Netherlands themed amusement park in Nagasaki. But the fish thing probably didn't help. The photo Ueda tweeted depicts spaceworld in happier pre fish rink times. The photo shows a bunch of victory staffers with Tomino in the center making v for Victory hand signs while standing in front of a five meter tall statue of the victory Gundam erected to promote the show. Uweda then shared a few recollections about what it was like working on victory. Most of it is stuff you've heard me talk about before, how they lowered the age of the protagonist to appeal to a younger target demographic, that the working environment for the animators was difficult, that the whole project was strongly influenced by St. Gundam's popularity. But then he started talking about two companies essential to the production of Victory whose roles are rarely discussed, the advertising agency Densu and the broadcaster TV Asahi Uweda, wrote Aratani star Tosuru TV Shirizu Gandamua wakudori no tame erabareta Dairy ten densua Animega Hajime Tedata Tivi Asahide Hajimata Sono Shirizua Kyoksan Niwa Kange Sarate Nakata this part is relatively easy to parse. Translated roughly, he wrote Densu. The advertising agency chosen for the time slot of the newly launched Gundam TV series had never worked with anime before. Though the series started airing on TV Asahi, the station did not welcome it. Then, he explained. Dairy ten mochikomi no egyo kikaku kakono fast ta tv Gundamwa Keretsuno Nagoya Terabi daihitono onkeo ukatanai kyokutoshtewa shikatanai toyukuki this part is somewhat harder to parse, but Uda seems to be saying that densu was able to convince. We might even editorialize a little and say strong arm TV Asahi into putting victory on their schedule. Despite the station's misgivings. By alluding to the success of past Gundam shows and playing on their fear of missing out on another big hit, I would translate it as the agency brought their business plan to the station in the past. First, and the other Gundam TV shows had aired on their affiliate, Nagoya Television, and the feeling was that TV Asahi, who had not enjoyed the benefits of the big hit, had no choice but to accept the show. When he was interviewed about his work on victory in 1994, Koizumi Yoshiaki, the producer who represented TV Asahi, was somewhat more polite. But he too made it clear that the station was not thrilled with the new Gundam show that they had just bought. As translated by Mark Simmons, Koizumi said they'd already completed three episodes worth of rush film when I came in as producer, and the development of the story was more or less decided. Saying, this may sound like I'm making excuses, but in that kind of situation, the meddling of a station producer would only create confusion in the studio. Since director Tomino himself was the original author, the story was also skillfully constructed. I didn't really participate in the story decisions. Actually, where our station is concerned, it's usually customary for us to be deeply involved from the start of production, so this was a pretty irregular situation. I thought it was very well made. But a good work doesn't necessarily equal a good program. It's only when the broadcast time slot and the content align with the target that it becomes a good program. We station producers are the ones who manage that. But with this work, the production had already progressed pretty far, so it was too late for me to say anything. I think we had a problem there from the outset. How did this irregular situation come to pass? Why did Victory air on TV Asahi instead of in the same Nagoya television time slot used for all prior Gundam shows? Why did TV Asahi join the production so late? How did Densu convince them to take the show at all if they were so unhappy with it? And why assign it to a time slot that did not suit its content? I think we can answer some of those questions, but we need to know more about the complex web of business relationships that connect production studios like Sunrise, sponsors like Bondi, and broadcasters like TV Asahi. But most of all, we need to understand the role played by the advertising agencies like Densu, which place themselves at the center of that web, the indispensable nexus of all strands. This week I want to talk generally about the history of advertising in Japan and the state of the industry in the early 1990s. Next week, we'll focus on television and television ads and the part played by the ad agency in tv programming. Finally, in part three, we'll look at the specific circumstances surrounding victory's production, the advertising agencies, sponsors, and tv stations involved, and how the relationships between these various companies dictated, at least in part, the form and the fate of Victory Gundam in 1990, the anthropologist Brian Moran spent a year embedded within the Tokyo offices of a major japanese advertising agency, and in 1996 he published his monograph, a japanese advertising agency, an anthropology of media and markets, in which he describes in detail the structure and operations of that agency and the japanese advertising industry as a whole. It is a fascinating work that addresses both the formal practices of the industry and the equally important networks of informal social relations amongst its participants. And because you can't talk about fish without talking about water, it also offers a rare perspective on the early, heady days of the bubble economy from within a major japanese corporation. Moran's book describes the state of the industry in very nearly the exact moment that is most relevant for this investigation. But it has been almost 35 years since he conducted his research. Every industry has changed massively in that time, and I don't know how much of what he describes about ad agencies is still true today. Many bits certainly are not. I'm fairly sure, for example, that the people who handle advertisement scheduling for newspapers no longer use pencil and paper to do so. When Moran was doing his research, no one had even begun to dream of Internet advertising. The hot new technology threatening to change everything was a system that would connect your landline telephone to your tv set so that you could place an order for whatever product was being advertised at that exact moment, simply by picking up the receiver. But some things endure. Account executives still whine and dine current and prospective clients. Writers still dream up catchy taglines that worm their way into the parts of your brain where precious memories are supposed to be stored, and popular celebrities still endorse everything from cars to contact lenses. Indeed, much of what Moran describes about the industry in Japan as of 1990 will be familiar to anyone who has watched an episode of Mad Men set 30 years earlier or read Dorothy Sare's murder must advertise set 30 years before that, the agency sent its account executives out to make presentations to wouldbe clients to win their business. Its writers and artists collaborated with market research experts to develop comprehensive advertising campaigns, and its media buying department secured the space and time in the popular media, newspapers, magazines, radio, and television in which to run those ads. And, of course, there was all the generic business of business. Copies had to be made, bills had to be sent and paid, data had to be entered into the mainframe, and young women, for this was still 1990, had to make and serve the office tea. Advertising, loosely defined as some kind of text or graphic display meant to attract attention and improve business, is attested in Japan as far back as the early 8th century in records of laws concerning signs erected by shopkeepers to advertise their products. But ad agencies, as discrete and specialist concerns, first started to appear in Japan during the 1880s and 1890s. A little more than ten years into the Meiji era, during a period of nation building, rapid industrial growth, and enthusiastic modernization, the economy and the population were booming. Railroads made it easier than ever to move goods and people around within the country, and newspapers were popping up everywhere you looked. Newspapers, too, go way back. The first proto newspapers printed on carved wooden blocks appeared as far back as 1615. Modern style newspapers started appearing from the 1860s with the country's first daily newspaper, the Yokohama May Nichi, in 1871. Many of these early newspapers were funded by political parties as propaganda mouthpieces for their positions. The independent papers, without that kind of outside funding, focused their coverage on the tabloid grotesque true crime, sensational accidents, gossip, anything that might catch a reader's attention. As their audiences expanded, they soon discovered that advertisements could bring in even more money than subscriptions. This coincided with the emergence of the first ad agencies, and they proved so successful that by the end of the 1890s, even the political papers had started relying on ads to fund their operations. But wouldbe advertisers didn't want to send their employees traipsync across Japan to negotiate ad deals with dozens or hundreds of different newspapers every time they wanted to place an ad. Nor did the newspapers want to send their employees around to knock on doors and ask companies whether they'd like to buy ad space in today's issue. So in Japan as elsewhere, the advertising agency emerged as a kind of brokerage, working for both sides, helping newspapers find advertisers, helping advertisers find newspapers, and pocketing a commission based on the price of any ads purchased. One of the main benefits they provided from the beginning, and still in 1990, was as insulation against credit risk. Agencies, as a rule, paid upfront with their own cash and then collected from their clients later. That meant the media companies didn't have to worry about advertisers, who could be quite precarious flybynight operations, going bankrupt and failing to pay for an ad after it ran. Advertisers loved the system too, because it meant they could enjoy the benefits of the ad today while deferring payment until tomorrow, so to speak. It was on the agency to vet potential clients and make its own arrangements to protect itself from the risk of default. This exposed the agency to substantial risk, and agencies could go bankrupt if they made a bad bet. But the system offered enough advantages to everyone involved that was still standard practice a century later. It was one of the ways that agencies made themselves indispensable, and as a rule, businesses that operate as middlemen are always looking for ways to become indispensable because on some level, all of their clients are always wondering why they're paying so much for something that they could theoretically do themselves. I think already you can maybe see how the actual practice of the industry is starting to diverge from the formal relationship between the three parties. In principle, the agency is placing an ad on behalf of their client, passing the client's cash to the publisher and retaining a commission. But when the agency is paying upfront in cash and then only collecting later, in practice, it is starting to look like the agency is buying space and reselling it to their client with a markup. Speaking of which, the bigger agencies like Densu soon got into the business of space wholesaling, in which the agency, acting on its own behalf, would reserve a large block of ad space from a publisher at a preferential wholesale rate, especially if they were paying cash upfront. And then the agency would parcel that space out to its clients, especially the smaller advertisers who couldn't afford to pay full price or buy a whole ad block on their own. Thanks to the discount from the newspaper, the agency could charge their clients a below market rate while still pocketing a tidy profit over and above their commission. Over time, some of the biggest agencies, densu especially, were able to negotiate exclusive relationships with particular publishers, meaning that the agency would buy out all the ad space in certain magazines and newspapers. You can see how this might lead to sharp dealing and other ethical challenges for such monopolistic agencies. Imagine for a moment a hypothetical lifestyle magazine, let's call it the thrifty vegan, a quarterly collection of inexpensive, animal free recipes and articles about how to save money by texturing your soy protein at home. Imagine you want to advertise your new line of extra filling, high calorie rice. You've dreamed up a great advertising campaign and a slogan, the rice that fills your belly and your pocket. The readers of Thrifty Vegan magazine are your ideal customers. But the magazine has an exclusive relationship with a particular ad agency, and now you have no choice but to go through them to place your ad, and they get to set the rate. But maybe you're not selling low cost, high yield rice. Maybe you own an ultralux gourmet steakhouse and you want help promoting your upcoming limited time, all you can eat, bountiest beef buffet special event only it seems that your ad agency has already paid for the whole year's worth of ad space in thrifty vegan, and they've been having real trouble filling those spots. I don't want to oversell the power of the agency in both of these examples. Both the advertiser and the publisher do still have to approve the ad. Publishers can refuse to run an inappropriate ad even if the space has already been reserved, and advertisers might refuse to pay if they think they're not getting the services they're owed. But there are pernicious incentives at play. The interests of the agency and of its individual employees rarely align 100% with those of its partners, especially in the short term. As Moran puts it, agencies are not really agents at all, but businesses acting in their own interests as intermediaries between advertisers on the one hand and media on the other. Besides acting as brokers of space and time, the ad agencies developed specialized skills in the creation of advertisements. They, or specialists working under contract for them, write the text from the catchy tagline to the list of product features. They draw the art, design the logo, select the celebrity spokesperson, hire the locations, take the photos, and in the case of radio and television, they record or film the commercial. Then they package it all together into a usable format and send it off to whichever mass media companies have agreed to run the ad. This is the conventional or above the line business, and it accounted for roughly 65% of advertising expenditure in Japan in 1990. The remainder, or the below the line business, included everything else, from those direct mail catalogs that clog up your mailbox and somehow follow you from address to address, no matter how many times you tell them to stop, to sales displays erected in retail shops, to billboards, subway ads, corporate sponsorships for things like sports tournaments or art exhibitions. That five meter tall victory statue in the QSHU space Park probably started its life as a line item in the below the line advertising budget for Victory Gundam. The below the line business also includes merchandising for certain special accounts, sporting events, music shows, and of course, tv programs. We'll come back to this point in future weeks when we talk about the ad agency most closely associated with Gundam Sotsu an account is the basic building block of the ad business. It is a budget set by the client and given, or more like promised to the agency on an annual basis to spend in the promotion of some objective. In the US and Europe, it was and may still be customary for advertisers to assign all of their accounts for all of their advertising needs to a single agency. So if back in 1990, the Ford Motor Company had decided to hire the New York based advertising agency of mobile suit and breakdown, then we would be designing the advertising accounts for the 1990 models of the Ford probe, Festiva and Taurus, plus maybe a little corporate pr to promote the company's then recent acquisitions of prestigious UK brands, Aston Martin and Jaguar plus anything else they wanted to advertise. And if somebody at Ford came to their senses and realized that mobile suit breakdown is in fact a niche anime podcast from 30 years in the future and not a chic Madison Avenue ad agency, then they would move all of those accounts as a block to an actual agency. But in Japan, those accounts would be assigned piecemeal. One agency would handle the ad campaign for the probe, another for the Taurus, and so on. In the euro american system, agencies are not supposed to handle the accounts of directly competing clients. An agency working for Chevrolet and bidding for the account of Chrysler would know that winning the latter would mean losing the former. But in the japanese system, with every big company spreading their advertising business across multiple agencies, this kind of exclusive relationship was neither possible nor desirable. Thus, an advertising agency like Sotsu. A lot of these agency names end in Tsu. It's because they're using the same kanji, which means an expert or an authority. Anyway, Sotsu could work with toy maker Clover on Trider G seven and combat mecha Zabungle while also working with Bondi on the mobile suit Gundam movies at the same time. One of the reasons that companies preferred splitting their counts ties back to what I was saying about agencies negotiating special sweetheart deals with particular media outlets. If an agency negotiated a 50% discount on ads purchased in a certain newspaper, it might then go to its clients and offer them a 20% discount or 10%. They might not offer any discount and just pocket the difference, plus their normal commission calculated on the basis of that higher rate. And if the client only worked with a single advertising agency, and if that agency offered them something close to the newspaper's standard rates, well, the client might never realize that the agency was leveraging its position to enrich itself at the client's expense. But if the client employed two agencies, or three agencies, or four agencies, and if those agencies all worked with the same newspaper but offered the client different rates, well, then the client has learned something and they can go back to that first agency and say, thank you so much for all of your hard work. We really appreciate it. We do think you can give us a better rate, though. The other major difference in the japanese advertising agency world, at least for our purposes, was the role that agencies played in television program development, which is where we'll pick up next weekend.

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