The Brief

In Japan, traveling overseas has become an established leisure pursuit and some 17 million Japanese people engage in it every year. According to one data, unused foreign currency brought back to Japan after such trips and that remain “dormant” in homes amount to a total of approx. 3.8 billion USD each year. We took notice of this untapped resource and aimed to make use of it for UNICEF.

Creative Execution

In this campaign, we utilized suitcases and drawers of furniture as media to ensure that our message reached Japanese people who love to travel overseas. By creating unique-looking POPs that visually depicted foreign currency in a state of sleep and placing them inside suitcases and drawers, we were able to convey, in a strong, impactful way, that a startling amount of foreign currency remained “dormant” and unused.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

With the cooperation of three home interior chains (Tokyu Hands, IDÉE, and Gallery Shuno), we utilized space that wasn’t usually used as media for advertising or messaging—specifically, suitcases and drawers of furniture that were being displayed and sold inside the stores—to ensure that our message reached Japanese people who love to travel overseas.

Results

Without spending any money on media, we were able to roll out the campaign in some of Japan’s most high-traffic locations, such as Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ikebukuro, Roppongi, and Nihonbashi in Tokyo; Umeda in Osaka; and Hakata in Kyushu. The POPs were placed in a total of 500 locations within 10 stores. Based on media contact rate at each store, the campaign succeeded in reaching a total of some 1.2 million people. In addition, 40,000 envelopes especially made for sending the foreign currency to UNICEF were made available at the stores, which were freely taken home by store visitors.