The Brief

Our mission was Introducing Ultimate Fighting Championship, the biggest cage fighting event in the world to Japan. The budget was too small to use mass media. We needed an innovative idea to reach the target audience, the young people who're quick to catch on to a trend.

Creative Execution

Bookshop is the place where we can easily reach die-hard sports fans who might be interested in UFC, since the most influential media to sports fans is sports magazine in Japan. And for Japanese sports fans, the most recognizable symbol of UFC is the cage, not the fighters. So it was appropriate to use Cage shopping bag, instead of ordinary posters featuring fighters.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

In bookshops, where people susceptible to new cultures gather, the plastic shopping bags distributed to shoppers became the medium. They were printed with the UFC symbol of wire netting, and if a magazine was inserted, the celebrity on the cover would appear inside the wire netting.The headline reads "This February, the cage will take everyone prisoner."　The ticket information is printed on the bottom. We needed to sell more than 20000 tickets to fill the stadium.

Results

As the shoppers walked out on the streets, the story of the bags was spread by word of mouth, and on social media. Followers of the official twitter rose to 7000 from 6000. UFC was successfully conveyed as a major sport surpassing other hand-to-hand combat sports. After the distribution of the 500 bags, more than 2000 tickets for the Japan Tournament were sold in one week. More than 20,000 spectators were attracted in total. The Japan Tournament was a great success.