Dentsu is Japan's biggest advertising agency. In fact, it's one of the biggest in the whole world. It was started in 1901 and has 15,000+ employees who work in the 11th tallest building in Tokyo, the Dentsu Building, in Minato-ku. It has a lot of history—the first ever newspaper advertisements and TV commercials in Japan were all produced here.
I've only been there once, to interview someone for a Wired,com story about 2-channel. The reception looked like an alien landing gate; the rest of the office was pretty normal.
Japanese ads are awesome. A lot of them feature catchy tunes that people all over the country sing when they get drunk. I'll dig up some YouTube vids and post them a little later.
Someone told me that the story behind Densha Otoko, which was supposedly started as a message discussion on 2-channel was in fact a manufactured project of Dentsu. Has anyone ever investigated this?
Posted by: Greg | May 27, 2008 at 05:42 PM