The ili wearable translator seems to be a pretty impressive consumer tech product. Billed as the “world’s first wearable translator,” it sees users able to utter a sentence into its microphone, with it then playing a translated version of that sentence in Japanese, Chinese or English. So far, so promising.
But then you get around to the small matter of its commercial. Titled ‘Kisses in Tokyo,’ it focuses upon a man who looks like a waxwork model of a particularly shit-eating Disney prince using the device in order to request a kiss from female passers-by in the Japanese capital. It’s essentially one of those painful viral YouTube videos in which a nasally walking haircut like Sam Pepper forcefully accosts women on the street, only this time it’s been greenlit by an entire company who apparently didn’t see anything wrong with it. This makes it worse, something which I hadn’t previously considered a possibility.
The video follows this unnamed guy around as pesters women for a kiss, leading to one instance of a woman hitting him with her purse, and another of a woman running away from him while he chases her. Again, this is promotional material that has been officially sanctioned by a tech company looking to promote their product. Let’s let that sink in for a moment.
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Typically when a company releases such an obviously atrocious commercial it’s a result of their product being awful, but taken at face value the ili wearable translator appears to be quite useful. This makes it even more baffling, then, that its creators decided to significantly harm their public image by basing their commercial campaign upon a pervert harassing women in the street.
I hope that ili eventually invests in a marketing team that doesn’t make their product look like the spawn of a group of bumbling idiots, and that the guy tasked with playing the role of the pervert makes some better life decisions in the future.
Watch the video below:
