Pixels of Persuasion

AKSE 2025

Aron van de Pol

Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities & Department of Korean Studies

2025-06-20

Morinaga Milk Caramels

Figure 1: Morinaga advertisement from Korea & Japan. Left: Tonga Ilbo, November 6, 1922. Right: Ōsaka mainichi shinbun, November 2, 1922, 4.

For example, a reporter at the Tonga ilbo later recalled that in the 1920s and 1930s he often saw the staff at the advertising department “cutting out advertising copy [written] in Japanese and replacing it with Korean,” on design layouts sent from Japan

Morinaga Milk Caramels

Figure 2: advertisement for Morinaga maeil sinbo, july 7, 1930, 4

• Change in rhetoric
  • For twenty million people in the country
  • The seventy million compatriots
• Highlight on product rather than modern life
• Logo in Han’gŭl highlighted
• Step further in localising

Morinaga Milk Caramels

Figure 3: advertisement for morinaga Tonga Ilbo, February 14, 1931, 7

• Localisation
• Visuals more prominent
  • Saektong Chŏgori Hanbok
  • Kite tradition with New Year (Sŏllal)
  • Despite supression of the tradition
• Can be read as..
  • Imperial perceptions
  • Acknowledment of Korean Cultural Identity

Example of Morinaga taken from Chun,¹ who has done much work on the study of advertising and branding in Colonial Korea.

1. “Becoming Imperial Brands”.

Why Ads?

• Chronicle the marketplace itself¹

• Mirror and shape social norms²

  • How to look, What is modern?

• Stage the empire–consumer encounter³

• Preserve everyday experience⁴

• brand launches, prices, and marketing tactics that formal ledgers never record. — picturing what “modern” should look, dress, and behave like. — Japanese firms persuading Korean households in real time. — turning fleeting desires and anxieties into dated, citable evidence. colonial readers felt a persistent anxiety that their access to modern goods and images was “fragmentary” and “incomplete” under Japanese rule

1. Marchand, Advertising the American Dream; Oh, “An Analysis of Ginseng Advertisements in 1920-1930s Newspapers During Japanese Colonial Period”.

2. Studies on Colonial Korea: Chun, “Becoming Imperial Brands”; Chun, “Displayed Modernity”; Sŏ, Sidae ŭi ŏlgul: Chapchi p’yoji ro ponŭn kŭndae 시대의 얼굴: 잡지 표지로 보는 근대 [The faces of magazines in modern Korea: Iconography, history and politics]; or for this occuring in South Korean Society see: Fedorenko, Flower of Capitalism.

3. Chun, “Becoming Imperial Brands”; Chun, “Displayed Modernity”.

4. Marchand, Advertising the American Dream; Yoo, “Embodiment of American Modernity in Colonial Korea”; Ha, “Singminji siki manhwajŏk p’yohyonŭi chŭngŏnhyŏng sinmun kwanggoe nat’anan kŭndaejŏk salmui ŭimi kusŏngae kwanhan yŏn’gu 식민지 시기 만화적 표현의 증언형 신문 광고에 나타난 근대적 삶의 의미 구성에 관한 연구 [A Study on the Meaning Construction of Modern Life in Testimonial Advertising of Cartoon Style in the Colonial Period]”.

Searching for visuals?

Methodology

Figure 4: Samples from YOLO detected illustrations

1. Label 1000 newspaper pages
2. Train YOLO Model to recognise advertisement illustrations¹
3. ‘Cut Out’ detected illustrations
4. Use CLIP model to generate ‘embeddings’²
5. Work with embeddings to examine and search through visuals

1. Redmon et al., “You Only Look Once”.

2. Radford et al., “Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision”.

Embeddings Visualised

Clustering

Use Clustering Algorithm to form groups of visually similar illustrations

Figure 5: Embeddings Clustered using K-means

Clusters

(a) Cluster 16

(b) Cluster 22

(c) Cluster 41

(d) Cluster 51

(e) Cluster 28

(f) Cluster 24

Figure 6: Samples of images in a given cluster

Temporal Trends

(a) Samples

(b) Trend

Figure 7: Cluster 0 Visualization

Temporal Trends

(a) Samples

(b) Trend

Figure 8: Cluster 0 Visualization

Temporal Trends

(a) Samples

(b) Trend

Figure 9: Cluster 28 Visualization

Word Driven Search

Search for keywords or concepts such as woman

(a) Cluster 16

(b) Cluster 22

Figure 10: Samples of images in a given cluster

Repeating Ads

Figure 11: Glass illustration repetition

Problem

• Metadata
• What are we detecting?

Parsing with SAM

(a) 1. Original Image

(b) 2. Binarization

(c) 3. Pixel morphing

Figure 12: Pre-Processing

Segmentation (multimodal)

With SAM (Segment Anything)¹

(a) Segmentation Map

(b) Bounding Boxes

Figure 13

1. Kirillov et al., “Segment Anything”.

Boxes can be cutout…

(a) box 1

(b) box 2

(c) box 3

Figure 14: Box Cutouts

LLM (Large Language Model) transciption

Figure 15: box 1

{
  "is_ad": true,
  "company": {
    "name": "朴德裕洋靴店",
    "type": "Western-style shoe store"
  },
  "address": "京城寬助洞",
  "product": "Western-style shoes and accessories",
  "illustration_keywords": [
    "businessman in suit",
    "hat",
    "briefcase",
    "walking with purpose",
    "early 20th-century lineart"
  ],
  "keywords": [
    "洋靴店 (western-style shoe store)",
    "割引 (discount)",
    "附屬品 (accessories)",
    "紀念曆 (commemorative calendar)",
    "新舊曆 (new and old calendars)",
    "歲暮割引 (end-of-year discount)",
  ],
  "promotional_details": {
    "discount": "歲暮割引 (end-of-year discount)",
    "offers": [
      "product catalog and accessories",
      "one-year commemorative calendar",
      "new and old calendars"
    ]
  },
  "location_context": "京城 (Gyeongseong, modern-day Seoul)",
  "era": "Colonial Korea (early 20th century)"
}

Morinaga’s ads?

• When we Cutout boxes, Detect Ads, Extract Metadata

Tracking as of yet unseen changes becomes easy

Explaining these is a second

Thank you

Referenced Works

Chun, Yongkeun. “Becoming Imperial Brands: Japanese Advertising in Colonial Korea, 1920–1932.” Journal of Design History, December 2023, epad050. https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epad050.

———. “Displayed Modernity: Advertising and Commercial Art in Colonial Korea, 1920-1940.” Thesis, Royal College of Art, 2020.

Fedorenko, Olga. Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads. Hawai’i Studies on Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press Center for Korean Studies, 2022.

Ha, Jong-Won. “Singminji siki manhwajŏk p’yohyonŭi chŭngŏnhyŏng sinmun kwanggoe nat’anan kŭndaejŏk salmui ŭimi kusŏngae kwanhan yŏn’gu 식민지 시기 만화적 표현의 증언형 신문 광고에 나타난 근대적 삶의 의미 구성에 관한 연구 [A Study on the Meaning Construction of Modern Life in Testimonial Advertising of Cartoon Style in the Colonial Period].” Ŏnlon’g kwahak yŏn’gu 22, no. 2 (2022): 48–99.

Kirillov, Alexander, Eric Mintun, Nikhila Ravi, Hanzi Mao, Chloe Rolland, Laura Gustafson, Tete Xiao, et al. “Segment Anything.” arXiv, April 2023. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2304.02643.

Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920 - 1940. 1. paperback print., 9. [print.]. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985.

Oh, Hoon-Il. “An Analysis of Ginseng Advertisements in 1920-1930s Newspapers During Japanese Colonial Period.” Journal of Ginseng Culture 4, no. 1 (2022): 103–27. https://doi.org/10.23076/jgc.2022.4.103.

Radford, Alec, Jong Wook Kim, Chris Hallacy, Aditya Ramesh, Gabriel Goh, Sandhini Agarwal, Girish Sastry, et al. “Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision.” arXiv, February 2021. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2103.00020.

Redmon, Joseph, Santosh Divvala, Ross Girshick, and Ali Farhadi. “You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection.” In 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 779–88. Las Vegas, NV, USA: IEEE, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2016.91.

Sŏ, Yuri. Sidae ŭi ŏlgul: Chapchi p’yoji ro ponŭn kŭndae 시대의 얼굴: 잡지 표지로 보는 근대 [The faces of magazines in modern Korea: Iconography, history and politics]. Seoul: Somyŏng Ch’ulp’an, 2016.

Yoo, Sun-young. “Embodiment of American Modernity in Colonial Korea.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 2, no. 3 (January 2001): 423–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649370120010939.

Supplimental Slides

Data

Gathered scans of Tong-a Ilbo (81,084) and Chosŏn Ilbo (77,192)

(a) Tong-a Iblo

(b) Chosŏn Ilbo

Figure 16: Data coverage 1920-1950