Cute vs. Cool (my proposed topic)

The idea that I presented in class on the 4/21 was me comparing the advertising of Coca-Cola in the US and Japan. I am most likely going to open that up to the advertising of soft drinks in general or possibly the implementation of the Western world on Japanese advertising.

When I first looked up Japanese advertising my search returned numerous sites saying that Japanese advertising was generally done with Western actors pushing the products. Since I have never been to Japan and am not familiar with Japanese advertisements I wasn't sure if that was true or not so I consulted my "Japanese experts"- people who went abroad to Japan. They told me that there were many campaigns that did have Western actors and athletes as spokespeople but there was much more than that that actually included Japanese people.

I primarily want to look at the differences with the styles, American companies tend to make their commercials and advertisements more cool or hip instead of cute. I believe that Japanese commercials and ads are primarily cute instead of cool.

My first example of the vast differences between the two...
Japanese Coca-Cola website's main page::


The American Coke website::


The Japanese page is very colorful and playful with a very cute undertone. The American homepage has very mellow colors and psychedelic theme.

The same difference in themes can be seen in Japanese commercials in comparison to their American counterpart.

Japanese: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cDNDWg5Brg

American: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROEfC5-OA4w&feature=channel

They both have video game themes but the American one shows a tough-guy with the typical Fonzie-kind of character. The Japanese commercial is very child-ish with playful monsters and characters.

I'm kind of leaning towards the westernization in Japanese advertising, but I'm not really sure. I'd appreciate any feedback or ideas. Thank you!!