Taiwan Advertising History: The Product Is Forgotten, But We Still Hum the Jingle

30-second overview: The advertising memories shared by people in Taiwan are almost all lines you cannot help but finish, or melodies you can hum even when you no longer remember what they were selling: “Fuqi la!”; “Only fresh enough dares to speak loudly”; “Tatung, Tatung, domestic goods are good.” This capacity for “all of Taiwan to remember in sync” depended on an era with no real alternatives, when only three television stations existed: TTV (1962), CTV (1969), and CTS (1971). They bound an entire generation’s attention to the same channels. After two ruptures, the Cable Radio and Television Act took effect in 1993, and digital advertising spending first surpassed television in 2016. The age of nationwide advertising was over.

In 1968, a 56-character song sounded on television: “Tatung, Tatung, domestic goods are good; Tatung televisions are the most reliable...”¹ Half a century later, many people in Taiwan can still keep humming the whole passage, yet almost no one remembers that the song was not originally meant to sell Tatung electric cookers.

It was originally a Sanyo advertising tune. Because the copyright negotiations failed, “Sanyo, Sanyo” was changed to “Tatung, Tatung.”² The credited lyricist was Wang An-chung, but the person who actually wrote the words was Lin Ting-sheng, Tatung’s former chairman. He did not want to be known for it, so he borrowed the name of the designer of the Tatung Baby mascot.³ An advertising song whose author no one remembers, whose trademark was changed, and which has been sung for nearly 60 years has outlived any electric cooker it ever sold.

This is the deepest paradox in Taiwan advertising. Advertising exists to sell things. But Taiwan’s most remembered advertisements often leave the products they sold forgotten, while preserving the sound of an entire era.

The Years of Only Three Stations, When All of Taiwan Remembered the Same Line

To understand how one advertising line could become a generation’s shared memory, we first have to look at what television looked like in that era.

TTV began broadcasting in 1962, CTV in 1969, and CTS in 1971.⁴ For 26 full years, people in Taiwan had only these three choices when they turned on the television. It was not until FTV launched in 1997 that, in the Taipei Times’ formulation, “the era of only three stations” ended.⁵ Before that, families across the country were watching almost the same set of programs and the same set of advertisements in prime time. In 1979, the number of color television sets surpassed black-and-white sets for the first time, and television penetration exceeded 90 percent.⁶ By the mid-1980s, Taiwan had nearly five million television sets.

This scarcity of media produced something that would never again be possible: all of Taiwan remembering the same advertising slogan at the same time. It was not because creativity in that era was especially divine. It was because attention had nowhere else to go. Once a commercial was scheduled into prime time on the three stations, it was almost the same as sending it into every living room. Green Oil adapted the melody of the English nursery rhyme “This Old Man” and played it repeatedly on television from 1964 onward.⁷ The line for S.S. cold syrup, “Use S.S. for colds, use S.S. for coughs,” used echo-like repetition, with a four-beat plus two-beat design to create a memory hook and hammer the brand name into people’s heads.⁸ These jingles could burrow into an entire generation’s memory because that generation had no channels to switch to.

📝 Curator’s Note
We are used to attributing “old advertisements were especially memorable” to creativity. But that explanation reverses cause and effect. What first made all of Taiwan remember the same sentence was a media structure with only three stations and no real alternatives: creativity was a necessary condition, but monopoly over attention was the sufficient condition. Later, when channels fractured into hundreds, and then fractured again into different algorithmic recommendations on each person’s phone, even the strongest creative work could no longer summon the spectacle of “the whole island humming together.” The invisible author of memory was the era itself.

There was another, more uncomfortable fact beneath this premise of “the whole island watching together.” During the martial-law period from 1949 to 1987, the three television stations were nominally privately run but were substantively controlled by the party, state, and military.⁹ In a 1990 study, communication scholars Lay and Schweitzer noted that lifting the 30-year newspaper ban in 1988 did not bring any dramatic change.¹⁰ The information space had already been disciplined into a particular shape over the long term. So that golden age of “everyone watching the same advertisements” was built on a regulated information space, not on cultural choice in a free market. Acknowledging this does not weaken the reality of “collective memory.” It makes it more honest: we remembered the same sentences partly because those were the few sentences we had been permitted to hear.

“Dialects Should Be Reduced Year by Year”: The Tâi-gí You Could Not Hear in Advertising

The few sentences people were permitted to hear shared another feature: most were in Mandarin.

Article 20 of the Radio and Television Act, promulgated in 1976, stated directly: “Broadcasting languages used by radio and television stations for domestic broadcasts shall primarily be the national language; dialects should be reduced year by year.”¹¹ The Legislative Yuan did not delete this provision until July 1993.¹² For 17 years, the survival space for Tâi-gí, the Taiwanese language, on television was explicitly squeezed by statute. Taiwan Panorama’s retrospective noted that the three public television stations scheduled Tâi-gí programs at noon or 6:30 p.m., time slots whose audiences were mostly housewives and older people.¹³ Tâi-gí was officially treated as a “local dialect” and could not enter prime time.

Advertising naturally followed this linguistic order. Mandarin was respectable, modern, and belonged to television’s main stage; Tâi-gí was pushed to the margins. That is why the explosion of Tâi-gí advertising after the lifting of martial law was a linguistic reversal. The market was merely its entry point.

Looking further back, the roots of Taiwan advertising actually grew in the print media of the Japanese colonial period. Writer Chen Rou-jin excavated more than 100 products and over 500 images from 600,000 to 700,000 advertisements in Taiwan Nichinichi Shinpō and wrote them into Advertisement Display.¹⁴ Researchers Sun Hsiu-hui and Chen Yi-fen found that after 1937, commercial advertisements in Taiwan Nichinichi Shinpō defined consumption as an indispensable means of practicing patriotism.¹⁵ Buying things was therefore tied to the rhetoric of war and imperialization. The imagery of Japanese colonial-period print advertising carried a strong Japanese style and exerted a long-term influence on modern advertising in Taiwan.¹⁶ From the beginning, Taiwan’s advertising history was entangled with “whose language, whose politics.”

Fuqi La: After Martial Law, Tâi-gí Grew Loud in Advertising

Once the gate of martial law opened, Tâi-gí advertising burst out first by occupying the least respectable corner: energy drinks for laborers.

Whisbih began using Chow Yun-fat as its endorser in 1987, and the line “Fuqi la!” was later even registered as a sound trademark.¹⁷ Around 1996, Paolyta B brought in Wu Nien-jen to make annual advertisements in his grassroots Tâi-gí and plainspoken vocabulary.¹⁸ On screen were the faces of workers battered by wind and rain; the voiceover spoke of the hardship and strength of working people. The Central News Agency described Wu’s repeated voiceovers as having “warmed the hearts of people in Taiwan.”¹⁹ One quoted line was “Bîn-á-tsài ê khuì-la̍t, kin-á-ji̍t hōo lí tsuân piān-piān,” meaning: tomorrow’s strength is prepared for you today.²⁰

By 1998, Taiwan Beer pushed this force of Tâi-gí to its highest point. The Taiwan Tobacco and Wine Monopoly Bureau made the unprecedented move of budgeting NT$48 million to recruit Wu Bai for a commercial campaign. In 1999, Taiwan Beer sold NT$25 billion worth of beer, and its market share rose from 70 percent to 80 percent.²¹ In the slogan “Only fresh enough dares to speak loudly,” the character “青” is written etymologically as “鮮”; in Tâi-gí it is pronounced ts'ĩ and means fresh.²² Only beer fresh enough dares to speak loudly.

✦ “Bîn-á-tsài ê khuì-la̍t, kin-á-ji̍t hōo lí tsuân piān-piān.”

Why is it that Tâi-gí in advertising so often carries “true feeling” and “grassroots” authenticity? It is not that Tâi-gí is inherently more emotional. It is the result of history. When a language has been ordered by law to “be reduced year by year” and kept out of prime time for decades, its return carries the distinctive explosive force of the repressed. Mandarin advertising spoke of modernity and progress; Tâi-gí advertising spoke of land and labor. This division of labor is the scar left by language politics inside advertising, etched into the ears of people in Taiwan.

Taiwan Beer's recent official image advertisement. Wu Bai's original 1998 “Only fresh enough dares to speak loudly” version has no official digital release; this advertisement continues the same Taiwan-flavored line. Taiwan Beer official channel.

The Godfather of Advertising and the People Who Wrote the Words

If Tâi-gí advertising grew up from below, then another force entered from the opposite direction during the same period: foreign advertising agencies landed with the tools of globalization.

Ogilvy Taiwan was founded by Song Chih-ming and Chuang Shu-fen in 1985, and JWT entered Taiwan in 1988.²³ Westernized strategic frameworks, production techniques, and creative methodologies arrived together. Yet what is intriguing is that the most moving advertisements ultimately produced with these foreign tools were often the most local: PX Mart’s money-saving aesthetics and Paolyta’s Tâi-gí voiceovers both had Ogilvy standing behind them. Westernized tools grew a local soul.

Tools can be westernized, but the authors of advertising language are people. If Taiwan advertising history is reduced to a list of products, it is because we have paid too little attention to the people who wrote the words. Sun Ta-wei (1951–2010) was Ogilvy’s executive creative director. The line for Vedan’s More Water, “When nothing’s wrong, drink more water; drink more water, and nothing will be wrong,” came from his hand.²⁴ The title of his book This Student’s Quality Is Too Poor came directly from a comment a Fu Jen Catholic University teacher wrote on his report card. According to reports, Sun did not like the title “godfather of advertising,” but he left behind this sentence: “Creativity may be plagiarized, but it will not be stolen a second time.”²⁵

Yeh Ming-kuei was Ogilvy’s chief strategy officer, and Left Bank Café, Pure Tea, and PX Mart all passed through his hands. He described advertising very plainly: “In the end, it comes down to producing a few words (advertising lines), and they are words everyone agrees on.”²⁶ An entire process of strategy, research, and creativity is condensed into a few words everyone nods to. Fan Ko-chin, meanwhile, pushed the role of the advertising person to its extreme. During Chen Shui-bian’s 2000 presidential campaign, he led a team that produced 21 television commercials and 46 print advertisements in three months.²⁷ Later he said something wildly confident: “I was the first person in the advertising world to become a product myself.”²⁸

📝 Curator’s Note
Yeh Ming-kuei’s line, “producing a few words, and they are words everyone agrees on,” contains the advertising industry’s most invisible power. We think we remember the genius of creative people, but “everyone agrees” means those few words must first pass through a brand, through the market, and through an entire persuasion machine. An advertising line looks like a flash of talent from one gifted writer, but in essence it is the greatest common divisor of collective consensus. The most remembered line is often the one no one in the room objected to.

Shopping Is a Carnival, and Also a Form of Persuasion

Among these people who wrote words, Hsu Shun-ying and Cheng Song-mao took the path that least resembled selling things.

In 1987, Hsu Shun-ying and Cheng Song-mao jointly founded Ideology Advertising.²⁹ From 1988 to 1999, they handled Chungyo Department Store’s advertising for 12 years. They wrote department-store advertisements like manifestos of contemporary art. For the 1997 autumn fashion bookstore campaign, the copy read, “Go to a clothing store to cultivate refinement; go to a bookstore to display clothing,” along with the line still passed around today: “After you have breasts, what else do you need? A brain.”³⁰ A period, not an exclamation point: a sentence closed coldly. Even earlier, Stimorol chewing gum launched its “I Have Something to Say” series from 1985 onward, turning chewing-gum advertisements into teenage declarations of attitude.³¹ Advertising shifted from “selling goods” to “selling attitude.”

This is one of the periods in Taiwan advertising most admired by intellectuals. But this same period also hides the question that most needs asking: is an advertisement that packages consumption as avant-garde aesthetics an anti-establishment creative breakthrough, or a more sophisticated machine of consumerist persuasion? “Shopping is a carnival”: the ones swept into the carnival are consumers; the one that profits is the department store. Hsu Shun-ying herself in fact kept some distance from this mythologized posture. She once said, “Basically, I really dislike being interviewed, because I don’t know whether I’m just too honest.”³²

Ideology Advertising also ran into its other side: gender. In 1996 and 1997, the slimming and beauty company Mary Kay Bodyline won the Advertising Golden Sentence Award two years in a row with “Trust me, you can make it!”³³ But in a 2008 study, communication scholar Chyong-Ling Lin pointed out that Taiwan print advertising favored images of classical beauties and girls next door, and that these images connected with and reinforced conservative Confucian beliefs.³⁴ The encouraging phrase “Trust me” presupposed that women’s bodies needed to be corrected, slimmed, and remade. Women’s groups later summarized the common scripts of such advertisements: the people managing household chores are almost always women, and fathers are always the breadwinners.³⁵ Advertising does not merely reflect society’s gender order; it also helps produce that order.

A Song No One Remembers Was Selling Anything

Advertising people write lines, but what often lives longest is melody.

One key turning point in Taiwan advertising history was that advertising songs, in reverse, made singers famous. HeySong Sarsaparilla’s television advertising began with the 1974 “Desert Shadow” commercial.³⁶ In 1988, Tom Chang’s “My Future Is Not a Dream” became its advertising song, the first time in Taiwan that a singer became famous through a commercial song.³⁷ Later, HeySong Sarsaparilla’s advertising songs strung together a timeline of Taiwan popular music: Oriental Express in 1991, Ukulele in 1992, Phil Chang in 1994, and all the way to Mayday’s “Song of Laughter and Forgetting” in 2008.³⁸ One can of soda sang out more than 30 years of Taiwan’s sonic history.

Tatung electric cooker. The 1968 “Tatung Song” was singing about this cooker. Half a century later, the melody has outlived any single electric cooker. Photo: Thankqall, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Return to the Tatung song from the opening. Its story is the strongest reversal in this article. According to reporting on a court judgment, the Tatung Song was completed by Li Shou-cheng in February 1968, the 57th year of the Republic of China calendar, and the full song had 56 characters.³⁹ But the lyricist listed in the registration, Wang An-chung, was only a name on paper. The real lyricist was Tatung’s former chairman Lin Ting-sheng; because he did not want to become known for it, he borrowed someone else’s name.⁴⁰ And the song was originally a Sanyo advertising tune; it became Tatung only because of copyright issues.⁴¹ Later, Li Shou-cheng sued over copyright, but because the law at the time followed a registration-based system, he lost.⁴²

📝 Curator’s Note
The reversal in the Tatung song is moving because it turns the whole concept of “advertising author” inside out. The composer went to court and lost. The chairman who actually wrote the lyrics deliberately hid his name. Even the melody had been moved over from another brand. A song that entered the memories of tens of millions of people has no clear author who wanted to be remembered. This is precisely the core of this article: Taiwan’s most remembered advertisements belong, as memories, to the whole island, but their authors are often absent or forgotten. The product is forgotten, the author is forgotten, and only the sound remains.

The Advertising Golden Sentence Award, organized by Brain Magazine beginning in 1994, happened to pin the golden tail end of this nationwide advertising era into specimens year by year. In 1994, the winner was Maxwell House Coffee’s “Good things are shared with good friends.” In 1995, it was Solvil et Titus watches’ “I don’t care about forever; I only care that I once had it.” In 1996 and 1997, it was Mary Kay Bodyline’s “Trust me, you can make it!” In 1998, it was Kirin Beer Taiwan’s “Drink it dry!” In 1999, it was CTBC’s “We are family.”⁴³

Hidden inside this Golden Sentence Award list is a very Taiwan story. The 1995 winner, “I don’t care about forever; I only care that I once had it,” was actually a Hong Kong advertisement for Solvil et Titus, with copy written by Lo Yuen-yee.⁴⁴ A Hong Kong advertisement won Taiwan’s Golden Sentence Award, showing that memories of Chinese-language advertising circulated across regions in that era. Kirin Beer’s “Drink it dry” was even more of a chain reaction: in 1996, Hou Hsiao-hsien directed the first beer commercial of his life, with Wu Nien-jen as endorser; in 1997, the commercial’s theme song “Wandering to Tamsui” became the top KTV request; by 1998, “Drink it dry” had become a nationwide catchphrase, and brand awareness surged to 99 percent.⁴⁵

Tom Chang’s “My Future Is Not a Dream,” the advertising song for HeySong Sarsaparilla’s 1988 “Modern Hero” commercial, marked the first time in Taiwan that a singer was made famous by an advertisement. Rock Records official channel.

Mr. PX Mart and the Advertisements That Made People Cry

Entering the 21st century, the three stations’ monopoly over attention had already been scattered by cable television. Advertising began to play a different card: emotional impact.

Beginning in 2006, PX Mart worked with Ogilvy to reposition what had originally been a “dark and smelly” civil-servant welfare store into a brand where saving money had its own logic.⁴⁶ Its 2015 “PX Mart Economic Aesthetics” later became a repeatedly cited, almost divine-level case study. In 2007, 7-ELEVEN launched CITY CAFE with Guey Lun-mei as spokesperson. Its line, “The entire city is my café” — “is,” not “all are”⁴⁷ — redefined convenience-store coffee as a posture of urban life. Around 2011, Ta Chong Bank adapted the Hondao Senior Citizen’s Welfare Foundation’s story of the Grandriders into the “Dream Rangers” advertisement.⁴⁸ A group of older people averaging over 80 years old rode motorcycles around Taiwan and drew tears from across the country.

This is what Taiwan advertising is best at, and what foreign researchers have also noticed. In 1997, Taiwan Panorama described Taiwan’s advertising industry as “a kind of new folk enlightenment movement.”⁴⁹ In the same year, a study in the Asian Journal of Communication compared advertisements in Taiwan and the United States and pointed out that Western values were not fully adopted in Taiwan advertising; advertisements in Taiwan tended more toward narrative appeals.⁵⁰ In other words, Taiwan advertising favors storytelling and sentiment. A 1996 Taiwan Today report identified the industry’s overall turn: Taiwan’s advertising market had shifted very rapidly from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market.⁵¹ Consumers began to have choices, and advertising had to learn how to please and how to stir emotion.

When Channels Shattered into a Thousand Pieces, Nationwide Advertising Became Impossible

The golden age of emotional marketing was in fact the last sunset of the nationwide advertising era.

The attention structure of Taiwan advertising underwent two ruptures. The first came on August 11, 1993, when the Cable Radio and Television Act was promulgated and more than 600 operators obtained temporary licenses.⁵² Channels instantly grew from three into hundreds. Museum.tv records that since 1994, the combined audience share of all cable channels had already surpassed the combined share of the three terrestrial stations.⁵³ The second rupture occurred in 2016. According to DMA data, in the first half of 2016, Taiwan’s digital advertising volume reached NT$11.1 billion, surpassing television advertising’s NT$11.0 billion for the first time.⁵⁴ It is important to note that this measurement compares digital with television as a single medium, not with the total of the five major traditional media.

資料來源：DMA Taiwan digital advertising volume report

Behind the numbers is a fact that cannot be reversed. When every person’s phone has a different set of algorithmic recommendations, and when the advertisement at the start of a YouTube video can be skipped after five seconds, the physical conditions for “all of Taiwan remembering the same sentence at the same time” have disappeared. KOLs and segmentation have replaced the unified channels of the three-station era, and attention has shattered into a thousand pieces. Today, no matter how much money is spent or how strong the creative idea is, it is difficult to produce another advertising line that the whole island can finish together.

The one ritual that still resembles that era is Paolyta B’s annual Lunar New Year commercial. The Central News Agency described Wu Nien-jen’s New Year advertisements as “seeming already to have become a ritual that must be performed every year; as soon as it airs on television, people always fix their eyes on it.”⁵⁵ It has no precise ratings data to prove its “nationwide” character; this is a qualitative perception in the industry, not a measurement. But it really is one of the last forms of advertising that “all of Taiwan watches together.” A working person’s Tâi-gí voiceover guards a way of viewing that is disappearing.

Paolyta B’s 2023 Lunar New Year commercial. Wu Nien-jen’s Tâi-gí voiceover appears punctually every Lunar New Year; after more than 20 years, it has become one of the few advertising rituals that can still bring all of Taiwan to watch together. Paolyta official channel.

As for advertisements that make people cry or ignite controversy, they have continued to appear in the digital era. In 2009, the online game Kill Online by 30 Digital Technology invited Yao Yao to shoot the “Kill a lot, kill for free” advertisement, triggering controversy over the objectification of a baby-faced, large-breasted image. The National Communications Commission (NCC) issued a warning statement on April 2, 2009, but ultimately imposed no fine.⁵⁶ Controversies can spread virally, but they no longer belong to the whole island’s shared memory. They belong to a particular community, or to a group of people sorted together by an algorithm.

You Can Hum It, But You Forgot What It Was Selling

The next time you unconsciously follow with “Fuqi la,” or hum “Tatung, Tatung, domestic goods are good,” stop and think for one second: do you remember what it was selling?

Whisbih is an energy drink. The Tatung song was originally meant to sell something from Sanyo. You remember the melody, the line, and the face of the worker battered by wind and rain, yet you forget the product itself — because the product was never the point. It was an era with only three television stations, binding an entire generation’s attention to the same channels, that left behind these sonic fossils. The things they sold have long since gone out of date, gone off shelves, or been forgotten, but the melodies are still at the edge of your mouth.

Advertising exists to sell things. But Taiwan’s most remembered advertisements leave the sold product forgotten while the advertising song is still hummed. When channels have shattered into a thousand pieces, and when every person’s phone plays different advertisements, this kind of sonic fossil shared by the whole island probably will not grow again. That is not because people today lack creativity. It is because there is no longer one channel that can make all of Taiwan fall quiet at the same time and listen to the same sentence.

Further Reading

• History of Taiwan’s Television Industry — From the old three stations and cable television to OTT, how the screen that carried advertising itself evolved
• PX Mart — From a dark, smelly welfare store to the king of retail, the commercial background of Ogilvy’s “economic aesthetics” campaign
• Taiwan’s Music Industry and the Streaming Era — From advertising songs making singers famous to the shift toward segmented music consumption through streaming

Image Sources

This article uses two CC-licensed images, all cached in public/article-images/culture/ to avoid hotlinking source servers. It also embeds three advertising videos from official channels via iframe:

• Tatung 100th Anniversary Cooker — Photo: Solomon203, 2019, CC BY-SA 4.0 (hero)
• Tatung electric cooker, traditional green model — Photo: Thankqall, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Videos: Tom Chang’s “My Future Is Not a Dream” (Rock Records official), Taiwan Beer annual image advertisement (Taiwan Beer official), Paolyta B Lunar New Year commercial (Paolyta official)

References