A Japanese flip phone advertisement from 2010 has cemented itself as one of the most disturbing commercials ever broadcast, proving that creative ambition and audience comfort do not always align. The SoftBank commercial features anthropomorphic jelly beans in scenarios so bizarre and unsettling that viewers report permanent psychological damage to their relationship with candy.
Key Takeaways
- SoftBank’s 2010 flip phone ad features jelly beans emerging from phones in a surreal space-like environment.
- One jelly bean character loses its underpants to the phone mechanism, turns pink, and explodes on screen.
- The ad contains nudity depicted through jelly bean characters, classified as disturbing by fan communities.
- The commercial has been labeled a cursed commercial due to its bizarre and haunting imagery.
- The ad remains available on YouTube, preserved as a cultural artifact of extreme advertising creativity.
What Makes This Japanese Flip Phone Advertisement So Unforgettable
The Japanese flip phone advertisement does not follow conventional marketing logic. Instead of showcasing features or highlighting why consumers should upgrade, SoftBank chose a surreal narrative involving sentient jelly beans floating in what appears to be outer space. The jelly beans pop out of the flip phones themselves, defying physics and good taste simultaneously. Most advertisements aim to inspire confidence in a product. This one inspires existential dread.
The commercial’s centerpiece involves one jelly bean character experiencing a catastrophic wardrobe malfunction. The flip phone mechanism catches the jelly bean’s underpants, strips them away, and leaves the character exposed and pink before it explodes. This sequence combines body horror, nudity, and candy-based trauma in ways that marketing textbooks explicitly warn against. Yet here it exists, preserved on YouTube as proof that someone greenlit this vision.
Why This Japanese Flip Phone Advertisement Became Iconic for All the Wrong Reasons
Advertising typically follows predictable formulas: establish a problem, present the solution, show satisfied customers. The Japanese flip phone advertisement abandons every convention. By rejecting normalcy entirely, it achieved something most commercials never manage—genuine memorability. Viewers do not forget this ad because they want to. They forget it because they cannot.
The ad earned classification as a cursed commercial within fan communities, a designation reserved for content that disturbs rather than persuades. Cursed commercials occupy a strange space in internet culture—too weird to ignore, too uncomfortable to recommend, yet impossible to stop thinking about. This SoftBank spot exemplifies the category perfectly. It does not sell flip phones. It sells psychological unease wrapped in candy-colored imagery.
The cultural impact of this Japanese flip phone advertisement reveals something about human psychology: we are drawn to things that make us deeply uncomfortable. The ad went viral not because people wanted to buy the phone, but because they needed to share their confusion and horror with others. It became a rite of passage—watch the jelly bean ad and understand what true advertising chaos looks like.
How Does This Japanese Flip Phone Advertisement Compare to Normal Marketing?
Standard flip phone advertisements from the same era featured sleek designs, fast processors, and user testimonials. They promised productivity, style, and connection. The SoftBank commercial promised none of these things. Instead, it offered jelly beans in existential crisis. Where competitors focused on rational benefits, SoftBank embraced surrealism so extreme it became its own form of marketing genius—or perhaps its own form of marketing disaster.
The advertisement’s approach contradicts every principle of consumer psychology. It does not build desire for the product. It does not establish trust or reliability. What it does accomplish is unforgettable brand recognition, though perhaps not the kind marketing departments typically celebrate. People remember SoftBank because of this ad. Whether that memory translates to sales remains unknowable—and possibly irrelevant to understanding its cultural significance.
Has This Japanese Flip Phone Advertisement Influenced Modern Advertising?
The SoftBank commercial remains an outlier even in the landscape of deliberately weird Japanese advertising. Most brands, even those pursuing unconventional strategies, maintain some connection to their product’s actual value proposition. This ad severed that connection entirely, creating something that exists purely as spectacle. Modern advertisers have learned from this experiment—sometimes by studying what not to do.
The commercial’s legacy demonstrates that shock value alone cannot sustain a brand message. Yet it also proves that absolute originality, however uncomfortable, creates lasting cultural artifacts. In an era of algorithmic content and predictable marketing, the SoftBank jelly bean ad stands as a monument to pure creative chaos. It did not need to make sense. It needed to exist, and existence alone made it legendary.
What exactly happens in the SoftBank jelly bean commercial?
The ad features a group of jelly beans emerging from flip phones and floating in a space-like environment. One jelly bean character’s underpants become caught in the phone mechanism, get stripped away, and the character turns pink before exploding. The sequence is brief but deeply unsettling, combining nudity and destruction in ways designed to confuse rather than persuade.
Why was this Japanese flip phone advertisement created?
The exact creative reasoning behind the ad remains undocumented in available sources. SoftBank’s motivation for choosing surreal jelly bean nudity over traditional product benefits is not publicly explained. The commercial stands as a mystery—a piece of advertising that exists without clear justification, which may be precisely why it endures.
Where can viewers watch this Japanese flip phone advertisement?
The commercial is available on YouTube under the title Jelly Beans Softbank, with all rights reserved to SOFTBANK CO., LTD. The ad remains preserved as a cultural artifact, accessible to anyone curious enough to witness one of advertising’s strangest moments. Fair warning: watching it does not erase the image from memory.
The SoftBank jelly bean commercial represents a fork in the road that advertising could have taken but ultimately rejected. It proves that maximum weirdness and maximum memorability can intersect, though at the cost of consumer comfort and rational product messaging. Whether viewers buy the phone is secondary to whether they ever look at jelly beans the same way again—and based on widespread reports, they do not.
Edited by the All Things Geek team.
Source: Creativebloq
