The Campaign

The goal was to promote the second generation of the head mounted display, Sony HMZ-T2, which immerses someone in the world of his favorite image. Although the first generation was sold out due in part to curiosity, It was hard to promote the second generation because the price of it was a 10,000 yen higher than one of the first generation despite minor changes and a feeling of hope for it was decreasing as someone's fever went down. We aimed to topicalize it and to stimulate the desire of people to experience it under this adverse circumstances. The rabid fan of this product included many from tech geeks who enjoy own modification, painting the product at choice and looking for an entirely-new way to enjoy the product, and so on. And more, on analyzing the first generation buyer frofile, the main target of the product is the older crowd in their 30's and 40's, who loves movies, games, and animations.

Results

22 August 2012　Prototype Testing in the Laboratory for Adaptive Intelligence, BSI, RIKEN 7 August - 3 September 2012　Remodeling 5 September 2012　Technology Direction 7 - 14 September 2012　Image Production 18 - 19 September 2012　Tokyo Game Show 2012:Building up the booth and Image Adjustments 20 - 23 September 2012　Tokyo Game Show 2012:Demonstration Focused on a lot of fans who love converting the first generation product,we started up the bold plan which we convert the second generation before its release as the campaign with its client. By putting our challenge and experimental results on Facebook, we developed our activities into the formulation of the engagements and real communications between fans and us. Our solution was to arouse someone's interest about the category of 'head mounted display' not through appealing only the product's spec but through showing the potential of its market. The uniqueness of the product was maximized by newly introducing a spherical all-round camera and gyro sensors. Such a conversion enabled devise to offer flexible image angles responding to the face orientation of the audience, instead of a fixed image. In Tokyo Game Show 2012, by demonstrating this product, we offered new interactive visual experiences to make the audience feel as if they were taken into another world. The contents of our demonstration was that a woman in front of a tester suddenly became the living dead,and came just beside him. And more, we came up with the content which a famous musician, being not supposed to be there, started to play for the tester. The number of the tester was restricted by lot, but we show our demonstration to many visitors in Tokyo Game Show by screening it with the large screen of our booth. As a result, the promotion was reported as the ambitious approach to quest for new entertainments by domestic and international media in addition to usual articles in game media reached to main targets. We succeeded in achieving a lot of favorable media exposures.

On analyzing the first generation buyer frofile, the main target of the product is the older crowd in their 30's and 40's, who loves movies, games, and animations.We selected Tokyo Game Show 2012, which attracts them, as the perfect opportunity to demonstrate our new device. We called much attention to our activities previously by announcements on Facebook and the teaser movie put on YouTube. We planed to reach a lot of people as possible as we can, by taking aim at Web PR and inviting news media during the period of Tokyo Game Show.

The products were sold out only four hours after the launch of pre-order sale. If you figure out what PR result would be worth in advertisement expences, it would probably be about two billion yen, about ten times of the fabrication cost. The total number of 'Tweet' about this product reached 19,965.(Most of their tweets gave a favorite review and there are hardly any negative tweets about minor changes and price increases.) The referral traffic reached 16,913,669. We are respectfully encouraged to develop the original games with this new device by some game companies.