Japan Marketing News

Effective Japanese TV advertising: Softbank/Samsung 930SC

This TV commercial from Softbank does a great job selling the Samsung 930SC. Not only is it incredibly eye-catching and engaging, it covers the bases in showing how the device offers a lot of the things Japanese consumers feel are missing from Apple's iPhone (e.g., it lets you watch TV, lets you send mail with emoji*, has a 5.1 MB pixel camera).

Academy award winning composer Ryuichi Nakamoto appears in the spot and composed the music as well.

See the full-motion version on Samsung Japan's website here.

* Emoji are Japanese style emoticons. Apple recently made a number of the graphics available for the iPhone in Japan.

Takara Tomy intros instant digital camera

About six months ago, Polaroid came out with a portable printer that uses Zink (Zero Ink) thermal printing technology, which combines a thermal print head and special paper that contains heat activated crystalline dyes. Think old-school Polaroid-style insta-printing, but updated for the 21st century. Except the camera and printer are separate.

The obvious next step? Why, putting the printing technology inside a digital camera, so people can enjoy printing anywhere, and the ability to store the image digitally for later transfer to your computer.

The surprise is that Japanese toy company, Takara Tomy, rather than Polaroid, is the one releasing this kind of camera first. It comes out tomorrow.

The new Xiao TIP-521, is a fixed-focus, 5 megapixel camera with 16 a  2.48 inch LCD display and a built-in printer that outputs 3x2 inch photos at 313 dpi (maximum digital image size is 2560 x 1920 pixels). Each picture takes about 45 seconds to print. 

The camera weighs 294 grams, comes in three colors and costs about 35,000 yen. 

Some Japanese may dispose of worries with new digital camera

It used to be that you could visit any retailer in Japan and find a broad selection of single-use film cameras. But they've become rare these days since almost every Japanese cell phone comes pre-equipped with a camera of its own. Some have been saying that the disposable camera market is all but dead.

But hold on a minute. Plaza Create, owners of the (once) ubiquitous 55 Station printing chain, recently announced a new kind of single-use device that might inject a bit life into the market—if only for a short time.

Cool Interactive Advertising: Panasonic Viera

If you're into traditional Japanese imagery you might want to explore this award-winning website that Panasonic created to promote its Viera line of flat-panel televisions. Dubbed "experience color," it skillfully employs graphics, live action, color and lighting to create a sophisticated mood and give a sense of the high quality pictures you can expect from Viera.

iPhone in Japan: innovative or insufficient?

Apple caused a commotion last week with the announcement of its newest cool gadget—the iPhone. By now, you've probably heard a lot about this device, which offers a mobile phone, Internet browsing, instant messaging, a scheduler and an iPod in one beautifully integrated package.

I have to admit that I was visually wowed: not only is the iPhone super-slim and slick, it offers a stunning, high-resolution screen and a whiz-bang, fingertip-operated interface with a full QWERTY keyboard (new technology minimizes inputting errors from people who are all thumbs). Additionally, the machine knows whether you're holding it vertically or horizontally and automatically rotates your visuals for best effect. Of course this will make for some great movie-viewing, but it promises to make web-browsing smoother too, since it's a lot easier to check out websites using the horizontal screen. What's more, Apple incorporated a really cool feature that takes advantage of the iPod's ability to track album art. Now when you're deciding which song to play, you can visually "flip" through your cds—and the same goes for your photos, which the iPhone also holds. Cool.

Of course there's more, but you can learn all about it on Apple's site.

Now, the big question is, how is this device going to fare here in Japan?

This is a tough call. I have to believe that Jobs and Co. have got something else up their sleeves.

Why?

For one, Apple has done fairly well in Japan in the past; they must have some sense of what's necessary to succeed in this market. If so, then this can't be the phone they intend to release here. As it is currently configured, the iPhone is well behind local technology. Far from "redefining what you can do on a mobile phone," the current iPhone is designed to work on communications networks that are older and slower than what Japanese consumers are used to.

Moreover, Japanese phones are equipped with plenty of features not available on this iPhone.

For instance, Japanese handsets:

- Contain IC chips that let you charge retail products to your phone and board trains with automatic ticket purchasing.
- Are equipped to read QR codes ("Quick Response" codes: Japanese bar codes that allow consumers to access information like coupons and website data).
- Incorporate safety features like fingerprint scanners to prevent others from using your phone.
- Let you watch broadcast TV.
- Have much higher-resolution built-in cameras.
- Allow conference calling with up to five people.

Consequently, how well the iPhone will do in Japan depends on what the folks at Apple are planning for future versions. According to a report I read in one of the Nikkei papers, Apple doesn't intend to release the iPhone in Japan until 2008.

Presumably, this will give them enough time to catch up with, and hopefully, even surpass many of the offerings that will be available (fingers crossed!)

UPDATE (June 10, 2008):
Apple has just announced that it will release a 3G iPhone in Japan on July 11, 2008. More info here.

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SONY stumbles again

My oh, my. It looks like SONY is getting itself into trouble again. Not only have they lost most of their portable music player business to Apple, they recently also had that PR headache following the recall of batteries from millions of PCs. This time the problem is with one of the company's cameras.

"Sony said on Friday its Cyber-shot compact digital cameras might not work in warm and humid areas and that it would repair any faulty cameras free of charge.

The liquid crystal displays in eight models that went on sale from September 2003 to January 2005 may not show images correctly or the cameras may not be able to take photos at all, Sony said in a statement. . . .Of the more than 1 million models sold, Sony expects 4,000 may need repairs. . ."

From Reuters & CNN

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. . .

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