The Campaign

In Japan, popular public competitive sports are as: “Horse racing”, ”Bicycle racing”, ”Auto racing” and “Boat racing”. Promotions for these kinds of sports have been much controlled as not to mislead the youngsters. Moreover, the images of these sports are usually negative so promoting for “Boat Racing” is like starting from a minus number. Even though there are many kinds of promotion like using emotional story, filming as a documentary, they had not been able to make the viewers pay much attention.

Results

The biggest problem of “Boat Racing” is that the fan’s demography is aging so it was a must to attract youngsters as much as possible. However, there were many failures in the past so it is time we thought of a creative way to promote the game. By using only one famous person and 5 unknown talents, the commercial with the title 「GUESS WHO?」 has been broadcasted on television for 1 year round. It is human nature to want to see who is behind the mask and after making them guess the person they want to appear, we betrayed their prediction. This proved to be effective in creating much attention. First, as a teaser, all of the talents were shown at once to make viewers think it as a guessing quiz. After that, the second CM was released to reveals one of them as a very famous talent in order to raise expectation for other CMs. With each of the CM released, the answer for the people dancing behind the mask was shown with their profiles. Of course, these talents or not well-known at all. After one year, we had been able to gain pretty much attention from all kinds of viewers.

With “Guess who”, we purposefully use non-famous models to betray the viewer’s expectation. By doing so, instead of realizing that they have been cheated only, they will just laugh at it and begin to pay attention to the Boat Racing more. For existing fans, they will take this way of promotion the game as a new and creative approach. For youngsters, they will reconsider about the game and think of it as a new game. Furthermore, since the 「Guees Who」was very impact and unique, female viewers and children have also got to like the commercials.

Annual sales increased by US $ 281,000,000 / Number of visitors increased by 4,240,000 people / CM favorability rating increased by 4.9 times (CM preference research by CM RESEARCH CENTER) / WEB site visitors increased by 470 percent compared to last year/ Search influx number increased by 2,654% compared to last year (Google Analytics) / CM image evaluated as "NEW!" "FUN!" "IMPACTFUL!" (2014 "TV-CM KARTE" by VideoResearch) / Number of PV of Japan’s famous NAVER reached more than one million PV

There have been many ways to promote public competition sports like Boat Racing. For example: hiring famous talents to act in drama stories, expressing the game in an emotional way or just simply informing the game’s date and time. However, these did not gain much success in acquiring new participants. With “Guess Who” project, we promoted the game in a very “playful” way which successfully helped it gain much attention, leading to a great leap in popularity. Youngsters, many of them, joined in conversations discussing who is in those costumes and they get to know more about Boat Racing. As a result, the number of people going to see Boat Racing significantly increased as well as the total sales.