Results and Effectiveness

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.

Creative Execution

First, we knew that we couldn’t spend much money on media on a project that asked for donations. So with the cooperation of three home interior chains (Tokyu Hands, IDÉE, and Gallery Shuno), we decided to utilize space that wasn’t usually used as media for advertising or messaging—specifically, suitcases and drawers of furniture displayed at the stores. We created unique-looking POPs that visually depicted foreign currency in a state of sleep and hid them inside the suitcases and drawers with the aim of getting the target (i.e. travel-lovers) to discover and learn that a startling amount of foreign currency remained “dormant” and unused.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

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. In this campaign, we leveraged unique media to awaken travel-lovers to this startling fact and to propose a new way to make good use of this untapped resource—specifically to send in the money to UNICEF’s little-known foreign currency donation.