The published article was much whittled down, and although it may be an easier read, it left out several of the more interesting cultural nuances that makes LINE so appealing, as well as its cultural-hybrid origins, so I have belatedly printed my original draft below.

The Marketing Interactive version can be seen here.

Facebook losing out to LINE in capturing Japanese hearts

On the face of it Facebook have a lot to be smug about when looking at their Japanese footprint.

The original Japanese social network Mixi is in rapid decline, and Facebook now boasts 21m local active monthly users. This has grown rapidly from around four million a couple of years ago, with 86% of users on mobile compared to the global average of 71%. And what’s more Facebook announced in August that it was going to double its Japanese workforce to boost the local advertising business.

All this in a society that many said would never accept a service that does not allow its users to remain anonymous! It just shows how attitudes can change.

Facebook’s user profile is also ideal for many brands, mirroring the demographic bulge of Japan’s population that peaks around the late 30s. The children of the baby boomers are the sweet spot for many brands, and I for one do not see Facebook losing this strength any time soon.

However, exploring the digital landscape a little closer there are some worrying signs for Facebook. Some of which are the same concerns that are levelled everywhere, namely that it never worked out how to monetize mobile, and others which are uniquely Japanese in origin.

Primary among these is the explosive growth of the mobile chat app LINE. Inspired by the wake of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, or so the story goes, LINE has broken all records on the way to 250 million users globally, 43 million of who are in Japan. Underpinning this meteoric rise has been LINE’s cute UI and simple UX, which reduces to a minimum the number of taps required for all the basic social mobile operations, like adding friends, sharing photos with a selected group etc.

But what makes LINE stand out among the handful of other chat apps currently boasting these kind of user numbers, such as WhatsApp, Viber, and WeChat is its phenomenal ability to monetize its user base.

Unlike Facebook which is now more or less limited to advertising, LINE sells digital goods such as the “stamps” that its users converse with in the chat threads, as well as game credits. And it’s working. In the second quarter of 2013 LINE generated $100m in revenue. That’s one reason it’s a model that is starting to be mimicked by competitors across the globe.

For Japan’s users, who were raised on an image-rich diet of manga characters and anime, the stamps are the easiest and most charming way to express those everyday feelings that friends exchange. In fact they were designed exactly for that purpose, each one mapping to a commonly shared feeling like “I’m exhausted”, or “having fun!”, using 4 original LINE characters as the grammar of this visual language.

Starting with the default set of stamps, users can then buy new stamps for around $1.70 a pop, or else download free stamps from the sponsored gallery, in which brands pay for their own characters to be featured. Many of the stamps that Japanese users buy are manga characters from classic titles they read when they were growing up, so when shared among friends who all know the story and hence the context of the shared frame, the communications exchanged become nuanced with more subtle meaning and personality.

Contrast the layered richness of this communication with the “like” on Facebook, its often baffling privacy settings, and the fact that you have to mind what you post since your boss might have friended you, it is no wonder LINE is where friends prefer to hang out together.

LINE’s growth has so far largely come in East Asia where the same “high context, low content” culture predominates, but what is perhaps surprising is how popular it is proving elsewhere. It has jumped to 10 million users in India in the space of a couple of months having hired a top Bollywood actress as its ambassador, passing 15m users in Spain and is now targeting South America. It is likely to hit 300m users this year and there is talk of an imminent IPO.

Some of us wondered whether Japan, so long a hardware juggernaut and console gaming industry heavy hitter, would ever break its duck in the web services arena. In hindsight it makes total sense that it would take a mobile app with a uniquely visual UX that can be personalized to reflect the visual culture of its users, wherever they are, to have universal appeal.

Although made for Japan, it is an offshoot of a Korean company, NAVER, that realised they had already lost their home market to the chat app Kakao, and so targeted Japan, the closest next market, with a copycat that became LINE. Although late to the party, it is interesting that it is LINE that is now challenging the world, while Kakao is hardly in the running at a global level.

It is possible that by having to adapt the Korea-originated smart phone chat experience for Japan, a market that is similar but not identical to Korea in terms of mobile culture, gave LINE enough cultural flexibility to then make the jump to other markets, including beyond Asia. It almost certainly helped in terms of baking a cross cultural mindset into the culture of the company.

As smart phone adoption continues to grow exponentially around the world it is easy to imagine how a native app built around the universal appeal of emotive images, monetized through digital goods will continue to have Facebook’s sushi lunch from Tokyo to the ends of the earth.

The post Why LINE is eating Facebook’s sushi lunch appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

Puchi Bruce Puchi DieHard Episode I

The third post in my “becoming a creative hybrid memoirs” series, describing my experiences growing a hybrid creative company in Tokyo which I co-founded in 2004. This chapter covers the middle of 2007 when we ran a run away hit campaign that was a “culture hack” on Mixi’s burgeoning social platform that played off mainstream media and Hollywood icons by creating a novel Hollywood x Web creative hybrid space.

The first episode of my “becoming a creative hybrid can be read here!

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Tokyo memoirs chapter 3: A “Puchi” viral hit

By the start of 2007 we were starting to get on a role, and then in the spring of that year came our big break: a pitch for a campaign to promote a high profile Hollywood movie Die Hard 4.0, the 4th of the hugely successful series. The brief was as open as you could hope for, maybe too open: create massive buzz leading up to the Japan premier event which would be attended by the film’s main star, Bruce Willis.

We thought long and hard. Although Mixi had dragged Japan’s social web out of the gutter, it was still the ‘alternative medium’ compared to TV, print and cinema. Its users felt it belonged to them, and that they were empowered to create their own second culture, which also commented on and reflected the culture of the mainstream media, and within which anti-hero cults could thrive. We noted the juxtaposition of this culture and its anti-heroes with the visiting Hollywood celebrity Bruce Willis, and his god-like status in Japan. How could we catalyse a mini phenomenon in this space?

The other new arrival on the scene at this time was YouTube. Although not Japanese, YouTube was adopted rapidly in Japan where the unrivaled upload and download internet speeds allowed for a seamless experience, even before YouTube was officially in Japan with a Japanese UI. Like any open creative space YouTube had spawned its own video genres, one of which was the homage video, where fans of a particular film would reenact their favourite scenes and share them with the community. My co-founder and lead video creator, Dicky Chalmers, was a keen observer of the homage video phenomenon, so when he stumbled across a laughably bad Japanese impersonator of Die Hard’s lead character “John McClain”, called “Puchi Bruce” (where Puchi, derived from the french “petit” implying diminutive or puny), the threads all came together.

We got hold of just enough budget to make 5 homage videos of the 5 most memorable scenes from Die Hard 1 ~ 3 casting Puchi Bruce in the John McClain role. Critical to the success of the campaign, and a point of contention with the client, was the sincerity with which these scenes were reenacted. Although the acting from the impersonator and the C-list foreign talent that we cast in the other roles was comically bad, we were adamant that it should always be sincere, without a hint of sarcasm as you might expect in the US or UK for instance. Executed in this way the films positioned Puchi as a genuine fan, not someone trying to get some cheap laughs and a little slice of fame, and hence allowed him to be endearing to Mixi’s users, someone who they want to get behind and turn into a puchi-celebrity.

Puchi DieHard Episode I

By making the films look like the product of a group of die-hard fans of the series, faithfully recreating their favourite scenes, we were able to pass everything off as an unofficial movement unconnected to the film studio, which suited them perfectly since Bruce Willis could not abide impersonation. In this way the videos were proof of Puchi’s obsessed dedication as a die-hard fan of the series, qualities that Japan’s subcultures respect beyond all others.

We had one of our team, a former make-up artist who we had recruited not least for his big Mixi-footprint, ghost write a blog and a “MyMixi” account for Puchi which we popularised using various growth-hacking tricks that we had worked out using Mixi’s social mechanisms, both of which really took off. We hit the Mixi friend limit pretty quickly, and every update we put up garnered a chorus of well wishing comments. The blog too had got real traction, to the extent that shortly before the premier it became the #1 ranked talent blog in Japan.

All this buzz online did not go unnoticed by the mass media. Puchi got noticed by TV producers who invited him onto their variety shows with TV ratings of 9%, 10%, 12% of the nation. Puchi had hit the Big time, as it were. He would appear on the shows, do his hapless impersonation, as the studio guests collapsed in mirth around him, but the upcoming Die Hard 4.0 release was always noted of course, meaning the film was getting great publicity.

Although we had succeeded before in building a campaign strategy that played out over time, this was the first time we were able to craft a narrative along with it, the arc of which concluded with the premier event. The studio had separately run a campaign to invite 100 bloggers to attend the premier. We had built the impersonators persona around his dream to meet his hero face to face, the permier event representing his one and only chance. He (we) applied to the blogger lottery, but were rejected and then publicly approached the studio to be invited, but were rejected. The TV shows loved it. His fans on Mixi and on his blog reassured him that he was the real superstar. In the story arc of the anti-hero, the climax is rejection by the hero, and he was loved even more for it.

Reflecting on the relative astronomic success of this campaign we realized that while we employed numerous growth-hacker like technical tricks to propagate our content on Mixi and YouTube, the biggest factor in our success was a cultural hack: understanding how the subcultures of the web play off the mainstream, and vice versa, and how creating and nurturing characters within that can lead to social phenomena.

To this day as much as I am a student of the technology-based growth hacks as the web evolves, I still look to culture hacks to create game-changing growth effects, and within this unique personalities undergoing an archetypal transformation in full view of a curious audience work particularly well.

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See here for all the articles to date in my Tokyo Memoirs Series

The post Becoming a creative hybrid – Tokyo Memoirs Chapter 3: Culture Hack 2007 appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

Title screen from the viral web movie series “The Urban Samurai”, Alien-Eye circa 2005

The second post in my “becoming a creative hybrid memoirs” series, describing my experiences growing a hybrid creative company in Tokyo which I co-founded in 2004. This chapter covers roughly the 2nd and 3rd years of Alien-Eye, during which we struck upon a winning formula for creating viral video contents in Japan, and came of age as “growth hackers”, the more recent term for marketers that focus on high impact low budget growth tactics on digital. This period also includes the emergence of Mixi as a cultural force in Japan, which we embraced as the first open social platform for sharing content and which marked the paradigm shift from “viral” to “social”.

The first episode of my “becoming a creative hybrid can be read here!

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Tokyo memoirs chapter 2: Creative traction

In my last year in Ogilvy Japan, prior to establishing Alien-Eye, a school friend visited me in Tokyo with his girlfriend. After leaving school he had gone off to study fine art, creating a wonderfully free-thinking house of artists near the excellent art college where he studied. After each term of mind bending physics and applied mathematics at Oxford I would escape to his retreat and plug into the alternative vibe.

By the time I was in Japan he had established a boutique fashion label “Rogue Chimp” (this was way before Bathing Ape emerged, in case anyone was wondering!). He was keen to bring the chimp to the uber-fashionable Japan. I managed to identify a potential first distributor, a fashion entrepreneur who ran a graphic design based clothing label called “Shop 33″ that was tied into the graphic design cultures of both Japan and the UK.

Although my friend’s label never made it big in Japan, it was a significant episode both for Alien-Eye, since “Shop 33″ became our first viral campaign client, and also for me personally as the owner also inadvertently introduced me to the woman who became my wife, mother to my children and love of my life. So in some ways my children owe their lives to a rogue chimp. It’s funny how the world works sometimes!

The brief from Shop33 was to grow the notoriety of his brand in the UK, and we told him that with as little budget as he had his only hope was a viral video based campaign. The concept that Dicky came up with for the videos, “The Urban Samurai” deliberated played off Japanese traditional culture, but blended with contemporary elements, like the seedy sets and the slick title sequence. The title track was “inspired” by a 70’s TV anime theme track, but recreated with a big hip-hop base treatment. It was designed to appeal to the UK’s graphic design and fashion creative community who we knew perceived would be intrigued by this sort of aesthetic and quirky stories.

It was a significant milestone on the path to becoming an accomplished “growth hacker”, not so much for meteoric success of the campaign, since it was not meteoric although did OK, but because it exposed me to the ferocity of the singular success metric, in that case video views, and this in a world before YouTube, if you can imagine that!

The following year after launching the Shop33 movies series, entitled “The Urban Samurai”, we started using YouTube as an online reel, and the videos can still be seen up there.  Here is the second from the series:

If you have never lived day and night for a period of your life by a single metric then I do not think you can call yourself a growth hacker. There is no hiding from it, and without a media budget, seeding slush fund, or some other way of buying success, it is both crushingly transparent and liberatingly honest as a measure of the worth of your efforts. Over the years since I have lived-the-single-metric on numerous campaigns and growth-hacking pushes for brands, and although I now have a bigger team with more skills sets to help make them a success, the excitement remains undiminished. Although the web is a much more sophisticated creature now, in many cases it does all come down to a single metric, albeit with quality checks.

Based on the Shop33 experience we pitched and won a similar pre-YouTube video based campaign for an international low cost airline trying to break into the well-protected Japanese market. Working with a very smart and liberated soul at their agency we came up with an idea, probably for the first time (that we got to execute anyway), that was a perfect fit for Japan. An international band had licensed their global hit track to the airline. Digging around we noticed that a Japanese comedian had won the world air guitar championships in Helsinki, where they like their air guitar, performing to this same tune.

Forget clever, conceptual creativity, do not ask your audience to think deeply, but instead create an original cultural realm married with an aesthetic space of the moment and run with it. Thus was born the world’s first air guitar video submission contest. By this time we had realized the importance of tying into offline touchpoints to activate online buzz and so created air guitar booths at the band’s concerts, and creating seed content to inspire users to create and submit their own. It was also through this campaign that we managed to pull in a multi-talented Japanese producer, a guy with a common touch for creative in any channel and who could get stuff done. He later became my main partner in the business.

By the time we were leading this crazy air-guitar subculture, another force was at work that was multiplying the effectiveness of our efforts. Mixi was here and with scale. It marked the shift from the ‘viral’ era to the ‘social’ era, pretty much before anywhere else in the world, at least on a significant societal scale. Essentially a copycat of Friendster, the SNS that laid the ground for Facebook but paid the price for being too early, Mixi was the right social model for Japan’s privacy conscious users of the era.

With anonymous accounts, and driven by the passive “footprint” social mechanism (members can see which other members looked at their profile page), it hockey-sticked, boasting a billion monthly PVs on PC before Mark Zuckerburg had his braces removed, and a billion on mobile before Facebook was a blip on VC’s radars. All of sudden cool people had somewhere to hang out online, a galaxy of communities sprung up around common interests, informational needs and gossip, and at last there was a platform within which content could really thrive.

We soon realized that it was all very well making interesting content, but you need people to help socialize it to make a business out of it. One of the best hires we made at this time was a make up artist who we had used on several of our video shoots who had a big network on Mixi who had been spending his time between styling fashion shows transcribing computer code. We told him to spend the time at our office instead. He is now one of our top creative producers working across all kinds of brand categories. It is funny how things turn out.

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The next instalment, Chapter 3 – Culture hack 2007 can be read here!

The post Becoming a creative hybrid – Tokyo memoirs chapter 2: 2005~2006 appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

Logo of Alien-Eye, Inc, 2004~2013

The first in a series of posts describing my experiences running hybrid creative businesses in Japan.

I spent my first two years in Japan working in Ogilvy, an international advertising agency, as part of the WPP Marketing Fellowship Program, a 3 year program sponsored by Ogilvy’s parent company and global marcomms goliath WPP Ltd. I spent my first year in Ogilvy London, and then persuaded my mentor on the program to let me transfer to Tokyo. Half way through my second year in Japan I had decided to set up my own company when my 3 years ran up. That company was Alien-Eye, founded in October 2004.

There were 3 main reasons I needed to get out and do my own thing, despite all the smart people I got to work with: i) I did not feel I was getting enough exposure to Japanese language and culture in the relative comfort of an international agency; ii) I was of the “digital generation” and saw the web and mobile as my medium, but I could see that things were not moving quickly in that direction where I was at; and iii) I fancied being my own boss, and taking on the significant challenge of being foreign entrepreneur in Japan.

As is always the case when you look back, I can see now I was totally naive and had I known what I was letting myself in for I might well have thought twice. But thank goodness no one tells you how tough it’s going to be.

Having got into making documentary “ethnographic” videos at Ogilvy in London, making videos became my primary route for exploring Japanese culture, and I was actively searching for a film maker who I could partner with, ideally one who could speak Japanese.

When I met my co-founder at Alien-Eye, Dicky Chalmers, he was already making movies in Japan, creative shorts mainly, and could speak Japanese having come to Japan on a Japanese language scholarship. By coincidence contemporaries at Oxford University, we found ourselves similarly committed to speaking Japanese like natives, and desperate to get into the cultural mix, and we were not afraid of working hard to get there.

Despite the overlaps, we were though very different, and thank goodness. Dicky was always more about artistic movies, “the lies that show us the truth” as Picasso once described art. I have always been better at more direct ways of telling the truth, and although aspired to being “a creator” at that time through documentary, I have since accepted being an inventive strategist, inspiring a creative process and everything that comes with being an entrepreneur.

Looking back neither of us had any sense for nor interest in “business” at that point, and to his absolute credit, Dicky still has little interest in business, although he has plenty more sense for it now, having worked as a successful commercial director in Asia for more than a decade now. Together we set about making cool, interesting, funny, beautiful, enlightening videos. Basically anything we could persuade someone to pay for, and a lot of other ideas we could not. In a way the medium of video was our platform of hacking into Japanese culture, and our tools were the desktop editing software from Adobe, Apple and the increasingly powerful but just about affordable desktops themselves.

As teenagers is the 90’s and brought up visually on, among other things, MTV and MTV idents (the interstitial animations or short clips between videos or segments on MTV), British comedy TV, and western cinema, we were keen to express our alien-perspectives through this medium on Japan’s own “edgy” music shows, not least MTV itself. As creators we were welcomed warmly, but our ideas were never picked up. Although praised for being ‘omoshiroi’ (original/funny), invariably they would fail on one very Japanese criteria: “is there a chance this might offend someone?”

We could understand this attitude from a state broadcaster with a government remit, but for a supposedly cool music station with about 0.1% of the national TV audience, it seemed absurd. We took an important lesson away: relative to the UK, almost all Japanese employees, however small, think a bit like a civil servant in a patriarchal regime, and are risk averse with it.

Harder to accept, but probably more important for us to understand, was the fact that there is little appetite in Japan for the type of satirical humour we were brought up on and wanted to make. We would have to adapt our approach, we realised.

We did not read the media landscape very well either. In 2002, the last year I was in the UK, being trained as a strategic planner at the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather London on the first year of the WPP graduate program, entertainment on the PC web was becoming mainstream, people could access content from their office workstations, and viral videos shared by email were all the rage. Surely this culture would come to Japan, and we could catch the wave?

With Japan’s more conservative office environments, but world-leading 3G mobile connectivity, we figured that rather than PC, it would be mobile where a grass roots creative video culture would spring up. Around 2004 the ground was ripe for a Japanese mobile YouTube-like platform to burst up from the roots. Remember YouTube was not around at this point, even in the US. But in Japan there was a dedicated core of Flash animators and developers making wacky stuff online, waiting for a legitimate platform to embrace them, a mobile carrier with most of Japan’s students and 20-somethings downloading content at speeds that would still today put all countries bar Korea to shame.

But it was not to be. Instead of establishing an open creative space for video with open-standard media formats for the creators to not have to worry about, and set up a set of tools for them to promote their work, said mobile carrier did the opposite. They released a proprietary video codec that required the creator to purchase the encoder for several thousand dollars, and made sure that nothing that was not created by one of their “official partners” could ever get found. In short they locked it down as a medium, and of course nothing interesting happened there. Unfortunately “locked down” is the norm for Japan’s home-grown media platforms. Another lesson was learned. We turned our attention back to the PC web.

About that time we were introduced to a sociology post grad to play the part of a Mifune-esque samurai in a cheesy corporate video for a Swedish packaging company (anything for rent money!). After we finished the shoot we got talking and it turned out he was writing his thesis on Japan’s web culture.

He summed it up very neatly. Japanese society is very polite on the surface, but that does not mean no one has unkind thoughts about other people. They cannot say them in public, so they write them online. The free Japanese web was effectively a gutter for the collective psyche. 2chan (pronounced “nee-chan”) was a giant of the early Japanese internet. Effectively a sprawling nexus of chat boards, this was where employees slagged off their bosses, vicious rumours about celebrities propagated, and greedy politicians for the bashing they deserved. Although fascinating, this was not something to put at the centre of a business model pivot.

If mobile was locked down by the greedy carriers, and PC culture was either Microsoft Office or an anonymous dirty gossip platform, where should we ply our trade? With no steady creative jobs and no sign of a medium to call our own, we were demoralised to say the least…

The second chapter in this series can now be read here: Becoming a creative hybrid – Tokyo memoirs chapter 2: 2005~2006

The post Becoming a creative hybrid – Tokyo memoirs chapter 1: 2004~2005 appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.