Culture Targeting

In March Iain Tait posted 9 reasons why Japanese interactive work is awesome. I'll leave it to you to drop by his blog and check them out, but I would like to point to a trend in Iain's list. The Japanese culture takes great enjoyment in fashion, gaming, technology, and comics. It seems to me that the success of interactive agencies in Japan is likely due to an understanding of this national set of cultural trends which enables them to target a culture in addition to an audience. Currently advertising has a heavy focus on audience information such as income, ethnicity, gender, and age. Couldn't we benefit from understanding people's sense of humor, their taste in fashion, and their value systems as well? It seems to me that there is alot of room in the digital space for this sort of exploration of targeting beyond demographic information into the more personal and cultural. What do you think?