Results and Effectiveness

・2 million hits to the Iwate Nippo website since the launch of IWATTE ・151% increase in awareness of Iwate Nippo since the launch of the service according to a survey ・20% increase in young people wanting to join the company compared to the previous year ・100% maintenance of circulation since the launch of IWATTE ・The service was embraced by a large number of readers and created a lot of buzz.

Creative Execution

To create a new bond with readers as a “newspaper loved by local residents,” the newspaper decided to celebrate its readers’ good news. This is how IWATTE was born. IWATTE is a special edition newspaper service that anyone can use to publish their news. Users can easily sign up online and then share their printed newspapers with friends and family. We proposed the IWATTE system in which readers communicate their news to the newspaper, which would then print that news, because to a reader, happy news close to home is just as important as world news. The service was embraced by a large number of readers and created a lot of buzz. After the service was launched, the buzz grew even larger and was eventually a hot topic among the media despite the fact that almost no advertisements had been run in the mass media.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Iwate Nippo, a newspaper company in a rural Japanese town, faced the problems of dwindling circulation and a growing indifference towards newspapers amongst youth. The newspaper needed something to help it break free from these trends and create a new bond with readers as a “newspaper loved by local residents”. Although today’s world is applauded for its globalization, we focused on the local residents who are the newspaper’s clients and created a system in which individual readers could utilize the media power of the newspaper to communicate any type of good news, be it small, everyday types of happiness or huge, life-altering types of happiness.