Co-occurrence network of TV advertisements revealing Japanese lifestyle

Abstract

The relationship between culture and the appeals in TV advertisements has been extensively studied. We attempted to reveal the image structure produced by TV commercials in Japan, which may show the cultural features of the country, and to evaluate its temporal change. For this purpose, we constructed and analysed a co-occurrence network of keywords related to TV commercials by using immense data that include the records of all TV commercials aired in the Kanto area in Japan including Tokyo for a period of 15 years. We found a strong heterogeneity of the co-occurrence relationship, where a few keywords, e.g., ‘woman’, ‘man’, ‘animation’, and ‘logo’, co-occur with a huge number of other keywords every year. A community on a co-occurrence network can be regarded as a set of keywords that are mutually associated with each other through TV commercials. We examined the characteristics of the communities by associating them with categories of advertised products and found a temporal change in which the relationship between the communities possessing the image of entertainment and children and the category of PC and A/V gradually increases in strength. However, there was a consistent tendency in the examined period for the product categories related to communities that include ‘man’ to be less associated with those that include ‘woman’ and vice versa, which implicates a gender role inequality underlying the various appeals in TV commercials.