Results and Effectiveness

The show’s revival had noticeable impact. The press release was picked up by various portals such as Yahoo!, and also many bloggers, even prior to airing. The show was aired on Friday, from 1:15AM to 1:45AM. It received the highest rating at that midnight time of 2.7%. The show was evaluated highly that other stations aired the show independently, exposing it to areas beyond the initial plan. As result, the conscious toward tyres increased by 247% for those who were exposed to the content and the target who answered they compared between different tyre brands when buying increased 15%.

Creative Execution

To select the “ENTERTAINMENT” that appealed to the target, and also achieve the right metaphor explaining the difference between the tyre brands, we chose a TV program “Walk to Canossa”. This was aired in Japan for a year from 1990, and it explained the Japanese consumer trend, utilizing historical events as a sarcastic metaphor. The viewers back then were becoming a target group of male 35-49 that we wanted to focus. What we did was to recreate a sarcastic history of tyre market, overlapping it with the history of Japan, as though it happened at that era. We shed lights on the competitors also, to maximize the content’s appeal as an unbiased TV entertainment. With this, we were able to launch a branded entertainment communication, utilizing press releases and TVCM of the show itself, in addition to making original micro sites of the show which linked to the client’s site.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Tyres are a category where the consumer has low consciousness in deciding a brand, and this is more elaborate in the Japan. Our mission was to make the consumer aware of different characteristics in tyre brands. To achieve this, our answer was to elaborate the different brand characteristics through the metaphor of “ENTERTAINMENT”. In Japan, Michelin already had enough awareness, but this not necessarily linked to the product. Since the traditional advertisement was not enough to communicate the brand to the consumer, we chose to search for a new way of achieving both reach and depth by reviving a content which the target can sympathize with. This was a new challenge for the media, the agency as well as for the client. We sketched a framework with “revived TV show” held as the central driving core, and utilizing both interactive and traditional media to wrap the consumer with 360-communication.