Effective Japanese TV commercials: DoCoMo

This past June, NTT DoCoMo won the gold medal at the All Japan TV & Radio Confederation (ACC) Awards for a series of three commercials that focused on the video chat functionality of their new cell phones. All of them are effective and funny. I discuss two of them below.

In the first (which you can watch here), a businessman arrives at an important meeting only to discover that he's forgotten some important files back on his desk. He steps out of the meeting and gives his assistant a call, telling her to switch over to video chat. She then uses the phone to scan his desk so that he can tell her which file he needs. This gets the main message of the commercial across right away—this video chat feature can be darn useful! Everything that follows in the commercial is pure entertainment. At first she can't find the file and businessman is freaking out, telling her "no, not that one, the other one, the one to the right—the yellow one!" Finally, having found the correct file, she starts poking around uninvited through other things on the desk, and her boss—who is obviously high-strung (and perhaps a bit anal-retentive) starts wailing "No, no, no! Don't touch anything else! Don't touch anything!" Just then, the client comes out and starts asking him what's wrong and he finds himself torn between hiding the predicament of the forgotten file and trying to keep his assistant from further messing up the important papers on his desk.

In the second ad (here), the same businessman is sitting in a lunchroom with two phones on the table in front of him. Immediately it's clear that he's having two conversations—but these aren't just any conversations— he's using the video phones to act as referee between a couple who are clearly having a lover's quarrel. Again, the functional benefit of the video chat feature comes across right away, and the rest is comedy. The referee keeps switching sides, agreeing with one while imploring the other to be more reasonable, only to switch back when the other party makes a good point. Frustrated, he faces the phones to each other, telling the couple they ought to speak directly— Only to have both parties poutingly refuse! During the whole conversation, the owner of the second phone—the same assistant from the above ad—is telling him to stop playing around because she wants her phone back. Now he's on the defensive, telling her that he's engaged in serious business—To which the arguing couple chimes in on his side agreeing "yeah this is serious." The ad closes with the assistant telling all of them to just give her a break. . .

* Need more information on this subject? Click here.