Dekotora & things that made last week

1 minutes estimated reading time

Apple’s team in Japan hit it out of the park with this iPhone XS ad that tells the story of a dekotora lorry christened Lady Misaki. Dekotora is a culture of truck modification, turning the humble Hino or Mitsubishi cab into a LED and burnished stainless steel sculpture. Dekotora is a loan word from the English ‘decorated truck’. It came out of a Japanese TV series shown in the 1970s called Truck Rascals that was based on Smokey & The Bandit. Drivers thought that they might appear in future productions, it then became a way of life. More on Japanese life here.

Sky and Cassetteboy put their opinion over on whether Die Hard is a Christmas film or not… Bruce Willis doesn’t think that its a Christmas movie, but is instead a movie that happens to occur in the run up to the Christmas holidays

Nvidia shows off a ‘style based generator architecture for generative adversarial networks’ or star power in Hollywood could be disrupted pretty soon….

Ad for Shopee featuring K-pop band Blackpink pulled off air in Indonesia – Mumbrella Asia – hallyu or Korean culture started to do really well in the Middle East and Indonesia over a decade ago as their dramas lacked the kind of sexual scenes that you saw in Hollywood productions. However as K-pop has stylised itself around modern R&B it has become progressively more sexualised and both Indonesian and Malaysian Islam has started to look more like the Arab interpretation of the religion rather than the historical live-and-let-live attitude. So it was inevitable that something like this was bound to happen.

Publicis Groupe’s annual holiday message has made a tongue-in-cheek reference to the unpopularity of its artificial intelligence-powered platform Marcel. The claim about it’s timesheet capabilities is interesting. I do wonder if the adoption figures aren’t great, this ad could backfire.