Category: 日本 | japan | 일본

Things that caught my eye this week

Post author By admin
Post date April 3, 2020
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Upcycling a Tokyo Metro train into a coffee vending machine. Suntory Coffee collaborated with Tokyo Metro on a one-off vending machine based on parts of a decommissioned train. The level of detail that they put in is amazing. Trains have a big part of modern Japanese city life. Japan has more railways and more train travel than most other countries. It was part of a concerted post war strategy that saw the creation of the bullet train and a wide range of commuter railway lines. It stands in stark contrast to a post-Beecham report train system in the UK. More Japan-related posts here.

via Sora News 24

Chipotle hosts virtual lunch hangouts amid pandemic | Contagious – Chipotle tapped into the widespread use of Zoom to develop virtual lunches. They might do food but they also realise that work lunch has social aspects. As far as I know this was the first consumer marketing campaign on Zoom and shows what an agile marketing team can do. It would be interesting to see if there is any marketing effectiveness data around the campaign in the future.

Adidas GMR tech combines sport and gaming | Contagious – interesting combination of wearable, gaming and locative technologies. It also shows the potential of what Nike Plus could achieve with this arguably wider existing customer base.

Lil Mariko’s ‘Where’s my Juul?’ blew up for a second time. The first time was due to the anxiety of jonesing for that nicotine fix. The second time is because it perfectly expresses cabin fever. Mariko Zhang is the full package in this video. The song slips somewhere between EDM and BabyMetal.

Channeling cabin fever

The guys over at Zak have launched a new video series of interviews and episode one covers young people around the world coping with lockdown.

Things that caught my eye this week

Post author By admin
Post date March 28, 2020

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I’ve been listening to My Analogue Journey which has got an amazing selection of Japanese music as part of his videos. Check this out

Streaming Up From Boston – Info on how to watch here | Dropkick Murphys – what really surprised me is that enterprise software company Pegasystems stepped up to financially support this. Its an amazing concert by the Dropkick Murphys.

I am a big fan of SIGGRAPH demo videos. They are are an amazing amalgam. Reality and Daliesque surrealism. This video is very much in that SIGGRAPH vein. The physics of this video is amazing, but has a distinct otherworldly quality.

Huggies candid campaign takes on parent-shaming | Canvas8 – Procter & Gamble have built a stable of expertise in mixing ads with social purpose. This reminded me a bit of Brooklyn Brothers work for Water Wipes which hinged around authenticity around the parenting experience. More posts related to Procter & Gamble here.

ICYMI: Vanilla Ice apologises for crimes against music in this campaign from Virgin to ‘Right Music… | Creative Moment – using celebrities and getting the balance right is always a tough one. In this particular case Virgin seems to have done a better job rebuilding up the brand of Vanilla Ice than its own brand. It was an interesting insight that consumers no longer know about Virgin’s musical heritage that gave it its original cool factor. I do wonder if Vodafone had a similar but less extreme issue with its ads that revolved around Martin Freeman.

Things that caught my eye this week

Post author By admin
Post date March 20, 2020

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Really interesting extension by Nordic Choice Hotels. How do you build loyalty and revenue from customers when they aren’t at their hotels? Nordic Choice Hotels, is building on a concept pilot project it has named Hotellkänslan (Hotel Feeling).

The project, launched in October 2019, has seen two dozen members of the hotel’s Nordic Choice Club loyalty programme who live nearby to the Clarion Hotel Amaranten in Stockholm presented with housekeeping services in their homes. The hotel chain has two million members in total.

Christian Lundén, director of future business at Nordic Choice Hotels, has stated in the campaign video that the brand is thinking about what would be best for its guests in relation to loyalty. ‘If our most frequent guests are visiting us maybe 60 days a year,’ he says, ‘That’s a great frequent guest – what happens with the other 305 days? How can we become a bigger part of our guest’s life in their own town and not just when they are travelling?’
Contagious

An overly emotional but stepwise analysis of where Microsoft’s Xbox went wrong versus Sony’s PlayStation.

Gene Kelly was usually associated with the golden age of Hollywood. With amazing song and dance routine. Kelly also had a seldom seen serious actor side to his work. His best performance came during the second world war. Kelly was the main protagonist in a film on PTSD.

Apple has spent over 30 years doing product placement in film and television. Apple Japan put together a film showing Apple laptops in anime. This takes a different slant on product placement programmes that Apple used, but didn’t go public on. More Japan-related posts here.

Knix aims to celebrate the bodies of women over the age of 50. With this film they make Dove’s work seem crass and money grasping. Dove didn’t embrace race as part of body positivism in the same way that Knix have.

ICYMI | 万一你错过了| 당신이 그것을 놓친 경우에 대비해서

Post author By admin
Post date March 17, 2020

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Chinese attitudes to immigration. Some really interesting interviews done by Inkstone. Inkstone is part of South China Morning Post. Whilst the attitudes seem shocking, you do see them mirrored in other monocultural countries.

Marketing in times of upheaval | LinkedIn – cites Beeston’s Law and then fulfils it

The 1970 Osaka Expo: Looking back at the past to gauge where Japan sits in the present | The Japan Times – some of these pictures are fascinating

SMS In Emergency Situations: SF COVID19 Updates Via SMS | Forrester Research – mature platforms work well

Coronavirus Is A Headwind For Search Advertising, But The Outlook Remains Promising – not a terribly surprising analysis given Baidu’s recent financial performance in the Chinese New Year period

Innovation of the Day | Heineken – alcohol free beer aimed at drivers without running the risk of drunk driving

Augmented-Reality Startup Magic Leap Is Said to Weigh a Sale – Bloomberg – interesting that Johnson & Johnson are mulling an investment in Magic Leap

Introducing Fluent Devices – System1 Group – is it fashion or is it a lack of effectiveness?

cyberpunk « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! – great series of posts on cyberpunk and its impact on culture

Innovation of the Day | Time – letting exhiibition attendees get some sense of the experience involved in the 1963 civil rights march on Washington DC and experience Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I have a dream speech’. VR’s real power to engage audiences is emotional experiences rather than storytelling in the way that we usually understand it

Persona Spotlight: Generation X – GlobalWebIndex – While younger audiences are actively trying to regulate their digital activity – nearly 3 in 10 millennials and Gen Zs track their screen time each month – only 1 in 5 Gen Xers have done the same. Another possible reason is that, compared to Gen X, younger age groups are now using social media more passively. When on these sites, 4 in 10 Gen Zs fill up their spare time or search for funny content, while Gen Xers still flock to their social accounts with a greater emphasis on socializing. – this bit feels like they’re throwing hypotheses against the wall, planners pick your favourite

In February Smartphone sales in China Crashed more than 50% – Patently Apple – not terribly surprising, Apple’s increase in iPad sales probably didn’t compensate for the drop

The Public Interest and Personal Privacy in a Time of Crisis (Part I) – Google Docs – translation of a Chinese blog

Is busy the new stupid? – hustle porn etc.

SoftBank Vision Fund’s Rajeev Misra: 18 months will prove I’m right | CNBC – it will be interesting to see how this plays out

Measure your distinctive brand assets | Ehrensberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science – well worth downloading and reading (PDF)

Things that caught my eye last week

Post author By admin
Post date March 16, 2020

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Whilst the world is becoming ever more digital, the book publishing industry has remained print focused due to customer demand. This is a great segment from CNBC that goes into it in more depth.

Dina Amin’s stop-motion assembly and disassembly video of everyday objects caught my eye. I would be surprised if this doesn’t show up in future ad agency work concepts.

What’s inside by Dina Amin.

Even my lack of expertise in gaming means that I have heard of Crash Bandicoot. What’s interesting in this video is how the development of Crash Bandicoot for the original PlayStation is similar to getting software to work on early PCs. Crash Bandicoot was one of a handful of titles that drove PlayStation popularity.

How Crash Bandicoot hacked the original PlayStation from Ars Technical’s

I did some initial work on dental health campaigns in APAC. It fell apart due to politics within my own agency, making us unable to collaborate with our colleagues at Red Fuse. Our agency was appointed for social media marketing work; but we couldn’t get anything out the door. During that time I came across some really smart people working in this space. This is why work like this: Colgate Ice Cream and Candy – The Inspiration Room made me smile. Great insight, simple execution in collaboration with confectionery companies ensuring a win-win outcome.

Greg Girard’s street photography from Tokyo in the 1970s feels like postcards from the future – check out these previews from a forthcoming book of his work: Rare 1970s Street Photography from Tokyo Published in New Photo Book. You can see more Japan related posts here.

I’ll be working from home for the foreseeable future, but will be working hard to try and keep this blog as free of coronavirus-related content as I can.

I am not a virologist, so my expertise doesn’t matter. I do know about the media and social platforms. You will see contradictory information, confusion and uncertainty. A classic example is the way hoarding toilet paper became a self-perpetuating meme.

While I am working from home, I don’t imagine that it will be too much of a trial as the office environment itself has become ever more digital. I am going to use the time that I’d have spent commuting to improve my reading. I have a stack of unread books that won’t read themselves. I may even explore the ideas from them here with you my reader(s).