First and foremost, “CM” means “Commercials” in Japan. This post is made for people who think that the Grand Funk Inc.’s official website bites.

To start off, please visit http://grandfunk.net. You will see this screen:

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There are 4 main sections in the website: The CM Music, the Artists, the CDs, and the Movies section.

Now click the “CM Music” section, and you will be brought to this page:

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At the top of the page, you will see the navigation pane, containing the four main sections of the website: CM Music, CD, Artists, and Movie OSTs. Below that, you will see a horizontal line with the heading “Archives”. And the big box at the bottom left is the list of the most recently published CMs of the studio. You could click one of those images, and you will see the detailed view at the right side.

Now, let’s head over to the older published CMs of Grand Funk. For the purpose of this tutorial, try clicking “Sa” in the Archive panel. You will see a page that looks somewhat like this:

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You are now viewing the page of all CMs old and new, whose companies start with “Sa”. Note that they are not ordered in the English alphabetical way, but rather in the Japanese way. So you will see the Toyota ads under “Ta”, Canon (Kanon) under “Ka”, and so on.

If you click an ad on the left panel, you will also get a detailed view at the right panel.

The site also has a dedicated page for each of their artists. Choose “Artists” at the navigation pane, and you will see this:

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The left side contains photos of their artists, at the middle is information about the artist, and to the rightmost is their most recent CMs.

Now moving on to the CDs section in the navigation pane, you will see this:

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The CD section contains all the CDs of all artists, be it TV shows, movies, or CMs. It provides information at the center, and a tracklist at the right side.

And lastly, the Movie Soundtrack section, where you could see the movies whose OSTs the studio produced.

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Well, why do they have a CDs section and a Movies section? My guess is that this is because some of the Movies didn’t have CD releases. (boo)

Now for your homework, find the Tombow Pencil CM sang by Gabriela, and the two Shiseido CMs where Kanno is credited for the vocals. For your reference, Kanno’s name is 菅野 よう子 is Japanese writing

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• THE Kanno Microsoft Ad (and other notable ads)

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