The management theory classic that told the Toyota story for the first time

A little while ago I read a book called The Machine That Changed the World, written in 1990 as a summary of a 5 year $5m MIT research project into the global automobile market.

I discovered it while looking for the best description of the most sophisticated, long-term-successful manufacturing organisation & method (of complex technology) the world has ever produced, and I am tempted to believe that this book describes it. In fact I was so inspired I ended up writing my own notes and sharing them with some friends who are experts in manufacturing in order to understand what has happened since 1990. These additional insights are added at the bottom of the notes below.

The “machine” in question is, in a word: “Toyota”, and it describes the emergence of their “lean manufacturing” model and its subsequent proliferation to the other Japanese car manufacturers and during the 1980s more broadly to many plants in the US as well. But the story is a lot bigger than that one word, than the car industry alone,  and made me realise that I really had no idea how much mass manufacturing had evolved since its invention by Henry Ford, even before Toyota, and Japan’s other “assemblers” revolutionised it from the 50’s through to the 90s. Revolutionised is not in any way an exaggeration it seems.

It also made me think a lot about the potential for coupling machines with the sort of creative problem solving that still only teams of humans can deliver. We are now in the era of AI, but actually the lean manufacturing lesson informs us that we are really in the era of “humans x AI”.

Mass production vs Lean production

The post Japanese Innovation: The machine that changed the world appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

Japan has long been importing and adapting advertising formats – in this case beer poster girls!

I have seen this process from both sides, initially while working in the UK office of a big international agency, where we were the hub, creating and “distributing” campaigns to other markets. But ever since arriving in Japan I have mainly been “on the receiving end” as it were, and it is exacerbated by the fact that Japan really is a different market. Whether that difference is fundamental, or one of degrees, is a question I have explored in previous posts, such as this one describing the Japanese advertising industry, but for the purposes of this article I will focus mainly on the cultural and linguistic gap.

In fact, for many of the international agencies in Tokyo, most of the work they do is in-bound localisation, and if they are not empowered to properly adapt or transcreate the brand to Japan – which is often true – it can be quite an unrewarding role. It’s one of the reasons I actually got frustrated and struck out on my own from one of those big networks to start up my own agency here in Tokyo back in 2004.

Although 90% of the work we do at Profero Tokyo is original to Japan, from time to time we lead a localisation process, and when conducted in a strategic way, they never fail to reveal deep insights into the core brand DNA and highlight the fundamental similarities and differences between cultures, and hence can be fascinating and rewarding projects to be part of.

The Brand Localisation Framework

For simplicity I am going to look at localising brand taglines specifically, and use them as a proxy for brand positioning, because ultimately this is the point. I am going to use “tagline” to mean either the semi-permanent brand tagline motifs, as in “Honda – the power of dreams”, as well as product-brand taglines, and also campaign taglines, such as Apple’s “Mac vs PC”, which are obviously more transient, but essentially the process is the same.

In some of the examples, e.g. MasterCard, a campaign tagline ends up becoming the brand tagline, for a good few years at least, which is far from uncommon, so overall I feel confident generalising in this way.

It is also true that the same principles can be applied to other executional choices when localising e.g. the visual realm, choice of music, voice actor, you name it. All elements ultimately need to be considered within the same framework.

In general I think there are 3 approaches to bringing a global tagline into Japanese.

Approach 1: Leave it in English

• Although in many European markets and some Asian, proficiency in English is high enough to just go with a tagline originally crafted in English, that is not true of Japan, so unless it is really, really simple the target audience will not understand it.
• This can be justified if you can assume that some people will get it, and for the rest spell it out in some form or another: sometimes just writing it in katakana to make it feel more familiar, or else explain it in Japanese without attempting to replace the original English.
• This is often the most expedient approach for brands looking for global consistency more than local emotional connection.
• I believe it is usually a big missed opportunity and only really makes sense if the brand trades off its global status almost exclusively in differentiating itself.
• It is most likely to make sense for a brand that has lots of products that can have a product brand story told about them, and particularly if they are really innovative products.
• An example would be Nike’s “Just do it” motif. It really helps that the original is so simple that most of their target audience would get it, and the fact that their products are designed around universal human features, namely their bodies. However, it would be wrong to believe that Nike loses nothing by not having a proposition that is as powerful in Japanese as “Just do it” is in English.
• Another example would be the original iPod and iPod Nano TV campaign by Apple using the dancing silhouettes that became so iconic. If you have a break through product with visceral cut-through creative and your brand benefits from its foreign / global cache, then you can more or less leave it alone. These cases are fairly rare though.

Approach 2: “Adapting” it into the Japanese Culture

• The adaptation approach aims to bring the same meaning to life in Japanese as a copy line that stands on its own without any mention of the English mother line
• You usually create a variety of alternatives that range between being direct translations on one end of the spectrum, through to ones that take more license with the original meaning on the other, but might push a resonant button among the Japanese target (see option 3 below)
• The closer you are to the direct translation end, the more it feels to the audience like a direct translation, and this serves to emphasise the foreignness of the brand again.
• What usually happens in this scenario is you are able to hit on a copy line that more or less says what the original English line says, but it does not resonate as much as the original does in English, but the way a lot of brands think this is an acceptable price to pay for global consistency and feels like a safe choice
• The more license you take the more chance it has to resonate and feel like a made-for-Japan communication, but at the cost of consistency with the brand globally, causing unease for global brand managers
• Localising the tagline but then applying it to creative assets (such as TVCs, transit ad creative, web assets, etc) that have not been adapted or transcreated themselves leads to communications that do not quite add up to the local audience.
• If a brand has the local resources to develop local creative assets then I would usually be recommending the 3rd approach below, but these lines are blurry, and there are examples where this adaptation approach has been very successful.
• Foreign brands should not be trying to become or act like domestic Japanese brands, but rather to find a way to leverage their foreignness to give them an advantage over local competition (e.g. aspirational, innovative….), since the local players will usually always win on grounds of familiarity. Hence retaining an element of the global campaign is often a vital ingredient, not simply an acceptable compromise, and this would apply to Approach 3 below as well.

A priceless example

The Priceless tagline / proposition for MasterCard started off as a campaign but has more or less been woven into the fabric of the MasterCard brand as a permanent part of its identity. In general all credit card brands assert that when you pull out your credit card the brand name on it says something about who you are, and prestige often bordering ostentation is the traditional territory of the category. In contrast MasterCard’s agency developed this brilliant proposition:

“There are some things that money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard”

The insight behind the campaign is that there are special moments in life, often serendipitous, usually shared with loved ones, that no amount of wealth could purchase. For a credit card brand (= access to money) to be dramatising this insight shows that the brand understands that there are more important things than itself. This implies that it is magnanimous, humble, and big-hearted, traits that many people would prefer to have associated with themselves. And besides the prestige can be communicated through the creative execution itself. It also taps into the post-80s/90s materialism sentiment that in fact luxury is at heart experiential, so it was and still is very much “of its time”. Copy lines never really work in isolation, and the high-end feel of the execution adds “luxury” attributes to MasterCard’s brand image.

“There are some things that money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s Mastercard” – Priceless Campaign localised to Japanese

The creative device evolved to become a very simple set up stating the price of an experience or thing, but then trumping it with an emotional outcome, which is “Priceless”. The simplicity of it is the hardest thing to adapt into Japanese, and actually this is always the case. The best copy lines or creative devices are sort of hacks of the language that manage to say something profound and impactful in a very simple way.

The only way to adapt this into Japanese AND retain the original meaning is to spell it out, but to find a copy line that does it in a relatively short and elegant way, and I believe they succeeded with “お金で買えない価値がある”, literally “there is value that cannot be bought with money”. MasterCard actually retain the English word “Priceless” as a branding device, more than because they assume their Japanese target would understand what it means. Many will not, but it becomes another branding device that adds value to the brand through repeated use.

Approach 3: Transcreation of the Concept into the Japanese Culture &Psyche

• This approach aims to take the DNA of the idea, and find a way of bringing that core idea to life within the Japanese psyche or culture in full knowledge that this will take it away from the original meaning.
• In terms of the creative development process it amounts to going back to the creative brief, rewriting that, effectively adapting that, and then starting afresh with the creative development working with Japanese planners and creatives.
• At that point what makes it the same campaign? Just how far can you strip a campaign back before it becomes something different? In fact, how far can you strip a brand back before it becomes something different?
• In its purest form the best creative briefs define the emotional response that you aim to elicit and empowers the creative process to press that button, which is always going to require language and culture-specific communications.
• Since the emotional responses of humans are universal, a creative brief stated in these terms and accurately translated into local languages can be the bedrock for a brand that plays in the same emotional territory wherever it is advertised in the world.
• To my mind this is the ideal approach since if a brand does not strike an emotional chord with people in a market, it will always be hobbled and less robust as a global brand because of it.
• However, the stimuli that will elicit the same desired emotional response will differ culture by culture, potentially target segment by segment too. This fact alone goes a long way to explaining why adapting brand strategies to multiple markets is such a tricky process.
• Usually you do not have or in fact are not able to strip a campaign concept to such bare essentials, for various reasons. For instance, the global client just does not have the bandwidth to get into the conceptual nuances in foreign markets. It is, after all, just one of many they have to manage. It is certainly true to say that the more they trust their local brand and agency teams, the more likely they are to allow the brand to be transcreated.

Semantic Ambiguity

One of the things you learn from working in the adaptation and transcreation areas a lot is that really good copy in any language leverages ambiguities implied by the choice of words to claim as broad an emotional relevance as possible while still “feeling” sharp and precise.

A good example that is close to my own heart is for the brand Indeed, the world’s biggest job search site, and adapting its global brand platform “How the World Works” into Japanese for its Japan market launch campaign, developed by our colleagues at MullenLowe in Boston.

The genius of this tag line in English is that it is a familiar expression that implies wisdom and knowledge of a complex human system, but by matching it to the context of recruitment sets up a double entendre with its literal meaning of how people find work, which is of course the raison d’être of the Indeed brand. The sharpest of communication strategists among you will have noted that this is an inherently flexible device since it says “we know how the world of employment works”, and, by inference, how to get you the right job, or to the companies recruiting the right candidates, but it does not say what that “How” is. The “how” comes in via the creative.

With the Japan launch of Indeed in 2015 the “How the World Works” campaign, which doubles as a brand tagline, was transcreated to carry a similarly powerful emotional evocation: 「その仕事が、世界を動かす」which back-translated says, “work that moves the world”. Brand positioning connoisseurs will have already noted that the savviness double-entendre is not retained in this transcreation, and instead emphasises what is more emotive connotation to Japanese people, the idea that your work has a higher purpose in the societal sense – a core brand value for the Indeed, although one that is not made explicit in its English tagline. If there is an intended ambiguity, it is in the way that 「世界」in Japanese can been both “your world” and “the World”, which was exactly the range of mental scales that we want the brand to transcend.

As someone who works across Japanese and English everyday, I am tempted to believe that the Japanese language, because of the unique way it has evolved as a sequence of assimilations of foreign languages, is extraordinarily flexible in the options it gives copywriters to play with, an unprovable theory that I intend to explore in a future post.

Approach 4: Stratified brand platforms

Is there a 4th approach? Actually, I think there is. It is where the international brand’s communications are stratified into global creative, usually in the approach 1 or 2 adaptation approach, usually projected through traditional media like TV. But then in other “high touch” channels like social, digital engagement and event-based promotions, the approach is closer to approach 3), being highly contextualised. This is often also very pragmatic given the centralised structure of many global brands, since seeing the same TV ads go out in all markets is very reassuring to those brand stakeholders who are not necessarily engaged in the nuances of international market cultures, but allows the freedom to the more ‘under the radar’.

A good example of this hybrid approach is RedBull, at least for the first few years after they launched in Japan, when they ran the global “Gives you wings” animated TV creative but simultaneously built out their extreme-sports & music-based engagement programs. It is my impression (I am not a RedBull expert) that now as a mature brand in Japan they have dropped the “gives you wings” TV work and have built out their extreme sports and music platforms into the dominant local brand-building platform, and very effective it is too.

Photographer Credit: Jason Halayko/Red Bull Content Pool

Idealism vs Pragmatism: what is the true path?

Ultimately I do not believe there is a single “right way” since brands exist in the real world where budgets and mental bandwidth can be constrained, and so I can accept that any of the 4 approaches above could actually be the correct choice for the organisational context in which the decision is made, and all of them can work. But from the point of view of someone like me who loves to help brands resonate, flourish and become the transcultural conduits of fresh ideas and compelling propositions, approach 3 is the most exciting to be part of.

The post The Art of Localising Brands to Japan appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

A cylindrical gift is wrapped beautifully in a Japanese department store

The post How good is Japanese customer service, and how bad can it get? appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

The entire “Tokyo Memoirs” series is collected here.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Our next big endeavor led to our biggest “culture hack” to date, where we tapped into a deep furrow of Japanese entertainment culture, to rejuvenate a tiring brand in the Japanese market place, helping it reclaim top spot in an increasingly crowded market place.

Norton Fighter was a product of hybrid culture

Norton, the security software company, had been a pioneer in the first mass era of personal computing, and had enjoyed a cash-cow business in Japan’s security-conscious market alongside the explosion of the Windows platform for over a decade.

However, by the time we were introduced to them at the end of 2007 it had found itself crowded in by local rivals with products that could claim to do the same thing (at least in the eyes of the average PC owner), and more agile, local marketing strategies, and their revenues were hurting as a result. Having previously relied on a combination of traditional media-based brand salience combined with boring descriptions of product functionality at the point of sale, they needed a communication platform that could capture attention and increase relevance with Japanese audiences.

A passionate hybrid team

Inspired by a smart and charismatic client, Anton van Deth, who believed that even security software could be a compelling product category, despite what most people including many in his own team, we set out to set up a totally new communication paradigm through which to engage consumers around Norton’s product benefits.

Combining with a team of local character designers led by one of Japan’s top character design and toy model gurus, Don Kratzer (fig-lab), and in cahoots with an awesome development team led by Vince Ota, we worked to develop a multi-channel campaign centred around a hero character that played off the hugely successful 1970’s Ultraman style TV  hero show genre called “tokusatsu”. Tokusatsu means “special effects” in Japanese because of all the latex costumes and pyro-technics the low budget TV shows used, and it provided a rich seam of stylistic references for our creative executions.

Inventing a communication paradigm

Starting as an stunt style event outside the World’s biggest electronics retail store in Akihabara, we quickly set about recasting Norton’s entire product efficacy communications within the good-versus-evil storytelling paradigm, broken up into an episodic structure. True to the original genre, a central superhero character was developed, “Norton Fighter”, who was a cross between a Japanese tokusatsu style “guy in a mask and lycra suit” with a more macho American comic hero like Captain America.

Also just like in the original TV shows behind the lead hero character was his scientist inventors. Together they fought against monster characters (think guys in crazy monster costumes) that were based on the hitherto intangible plethora of malware threats such as viruses, trojan horses, botnets and the like, we were able to create fun, compelling dramatizations of their product story in basically any communication touchpoint, from point of sale tools to online games, TV ads to OOH.

That was the strategy anyway, but it still had to be executed creatively and rolled out to channels, and done in a way that built credibility and relevance with local stakeholders and customers.

Engaging key audiences

Key to the success of this roll out was engaging Japan’s influential ‘otaku’ community, the nerdy computer geeks who play a critical role in defining the credibility and reputation of computer related products. Largely oblivious to international brands and unaffected by mainstream media campaigns, this community had to be engaged on their own terms and on their own turf, and within a cultural space that resonated with them.

The answer was “hero-shows”, live shows that re-enact iconic battles between the heroes and monsters of the TV series, usually incorporating stylized fighting scenes and tokusatsu weaponry. Hence we began by running hero-shows outside the electronic stores in the districts of Tokyo and Osaka synonymous with the otaku culture, namely Akihabara and Osaka’s equivalent. For one event that created a lot of buzz online we combined the hero show with a otaku idol group, Marvel Parfait. All of these events were captured on video and seeded on Mixi and tech influencer blogs where they attracted some notoriety.

In concert with the events we shot mini-episodes depicting a battle between Norton Fighter and one of his arch enemies, in a style that paid homage to the original 70’s style with low-fi effects. Incidentally the first of these videos was picked up by the big American tech blogs like engadget and TechCrunch, marking the first time Norton had been featured in the new breed tech-news sites, with most commentators expressing surprise and delight that such a typically conservative tech brand like Norton was doing something interesting. This put us and our activities in the spotlight within Norton global, and meant that incremental budgets could keep flowing.

Norton Fighter takes on Botlas, the Botnet lord

Paying homage to a genre

From a creative execution point of view, we were very conscious of the potential risk of playing with such a treasured creative genre, as tokusatsu is in Japan. Do it well, and the foreign brand can be embraced by local audiences unlike ever before. But if you fail to do justice to the local creative genre you will lose credibility not gain it, and risk rejection from those who were previously merely indifferent.

As an example of the attention to detail that was applied, Don, who led the development of the all-important monster characters, would call creative strategy meetings to decide on the names of these web villains. For instance, the Trojan Horse genre of internet threats was represented by a mechanical horse-like character named “mokubakuba”, and he laboriously researched monster characters from the original TV shows.

Similarly Dicky, my co-founder at Alien-Eye, and lead video director, knew he had to get lots of details in the videos just right and so watched over 100 hours of original 70’s hero shows before he felt confident enough to direct something that could fit into the genre. But at the same time we could not simply ape the original genre. We had to take it somewhere new, and we did this by building in the brand values of the American software brand, making the hero character much more buff and hulk-like than the Japanese heroes would be, and using contemporary video effects to complement some of the old analogue techniques we employed.

I will never forget visiting the studio of the craftsmen that developed Don’s team’s designs into larger-than-life latex wonders. These guys had been working on tokusatsu costumes for decades, and more recently scale models for sci-fi movies, so their studio was an Aladdin’s cave of the weird and wonderful. We spent large chunks of the budget on these costumes, and much of the story development that took place over several years was driven by the costume production timeline.

Extending reach through multiple channels

In another medium, Don transformed the typical product pamphlet placed in the point of sale into a reprise of a tokusatsu fan comic magazine. Here the dry-as-a-bone technical spec sheet was replaced by manga dramatisations of the videos, product benefit statements into character profiles, with Norton’s cutting edge security technologies called out as the latest weaponry developed by the science team.

Having established the credibility of the our hero character in this way, the campaign was extended to mainstream channels with TV commercials, OOH and station media, and even a 25m high inflatable balloon of the hero character that was placed outside Japan biggest gaming event Tokyo Game Show. The buzz and awareness this created shifted sales to the extent that the brand reclaimed the #1 share of the category spot from its local rival, despite being significantly outspent both in media and in the retail channel.

One of the most interesting factors within this was the fact that for the first time the shop clerks who work the software floors of the big electronics chains, who are very much affected by what is being written in the otaku forums and blogs, started talking to customers about the hero character and explaining the campaign to them, being advocates for the brand for the first time.

Design credit to Masako Mori, Direction to Fig-Lab

Daring to be original

As we learned in many other ambitious campaigns we took on as well, effects like this showed us that if you set out to do something original and do it with creative honesty and integrity, all kinds of positive secondary effects spring up that you would never have been able to imagine at the outset and which help you make it a success. “You make your own luck” as they say.

And also as with other campaigns where we broke new ground in Japan, we started to see other brands with more money referencing our work, trying to come up with their own “culture hack” approach to gaining notoriety in Japan, not least Nike with their Akiba x tokusatsu viral, which actually seemed to get more attention outside of Japan. That may have been the intention from the start, since Japan’s culture has so much depth and authenticity to tap into, this too would be a valid strategy.

In the lecture series I have run on growth hacking since we wrapped up this multi-year break through campaign I reference it as an example of the culture hack as a way of gaining brand notoriety and scale. Technology brands tend to be obsessed with technology hacks for growth, and they should be. But they often forget that ideas are still more scalable than technologies, and that brands can leverage cultural genre in order to make themselves more accessible and interesting. With ever-growing competition among online services in particular, brands that can hack into an existing culture and create something novel out of it can enjoy very powerful effects.

+++++++++++++++++++

Read more from my “Tokyo Memoirs” series here.

The post Becoming a creative hybrid – Tokyo Memoirs Chapter 5: Otaku Culture Hack appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

Ginger has developed a super-smart hybrid technology that combines NLP and statistical algorithms to process all the English that is out there on the web, and using this enormous corpus as a reference, corrects non-native English as the user types.

Like Japan, Hebrew-speaking Israel is an island nation in terms of language, and so they have similar challenges when it comes to communicating in English. They also have one of the most fervent technology development cultures on the planet. Ginger is a product of that context, and I believe is a ground-breaking technology that has the potential to lower the language boundaries between cultures globally through supporting accurate and expressive communication in English.

Ginger’s take on cognition is just one area of this burgeoning field, and the article discusses the bigger picture, as well as explaining more about Ginger’s approach to it.

The article first appeared in one of Japan’s leading tech news sites, The Bridge, in December 2013 in English and Japanese, where naturally, as my client, Dudu got the credit. The main audience was Japanese, so a bit more effort went into the Japanese script, and I have rewritten some of the more awkward phrasing for the English version below.

************

Cognition-as-a-Service will come of age in 2014

Here at Ginger we are predicting that 2014 will be remembered as the year that CaaS, or “Cognition-as-a-Service” platforms came of age. Cognition is historically a complex biological trait including skills such as decision making, problem solving, learning, reasoning, working memory and not least language, skills that today the computer sciences are chipping away at from various angles.

With each major evolutionary step in computing we have seen over the last 30 years, from mainframes to PCs, the internet, cloud and SaaS, and now ubiquitous smart mobile, the new realm has not so much replaced but augmented what was there before.

In the same way the promise of CaaS is to allow apps and services to function more intelligently and intuitively, allowing you to converse with them, ask questions, give commands and complete tasks more efficiently and conveniently.

Apple’s Siri is one of the most famous cognition-based services in general use today. And now Google’s recent innovations to its search product for mobile, incorporating more contextual conversation for queries, pits Google’s AI technology against Siri in the cognition-augmented search arena. In both cases, most of the technology itself is in the cloud, even though the device is in the user’s hand. Their main functions only work when there is an internet connection.

Natural Language Processing

The reason for this is that the two necessary tricks to make sense of a user’s speech input – speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP) – require cloud-based servers performing intensive processing of proprietary algorithms, and these processes are beyond the capabilities of handheld technology.

NLP-type processing is so intensive because of the sheer diversity and complexity comprised by a language like English. Old school NLP solutions were based on rigid rules that map inputs to a big list of known inputs. But the list can never be long enough, and the hard rules can never cover all the edge cases that appear naturally in language. This is why the experience of talking to a supposedly “smart assistant” has so far always left the user frustrated and feeling misunderstood, since they have up until recently been built using the hard wired rule-based approach.

You need more powerful, agile technologies that can figure out that in a sentence such as: “Yuko wants to eat an apple”, Yuko is something that can have wants, and can eat things, and that apples are things that can be eaten. The technology needs to be able to do this for the vast majority of sentences the app is likely to encounter. This is incredibly hard, but here at Ginger and a few other places, we are doing it.

The “Platform Model”

It is not just Apple and Google who are eyeing this new technology realm. IBM is now also a player with Watson, recently announcing that the same supercomputer-strength software that conquered the quiz show “Jeopardy!”, will be available to app developers through an API and software toolkit. This will allow cognitive apps that leverage cognition to be hosted in the cloud on Watson. This would obviously be a great thing for IBM’s cloud hosting service as well.

This “platform model” in tech business is nothing new of course. In recent years IBM did this with its Websphere application server technology, which went from an internal project to a software community of thousands of developers. Salesforce.com did this with its Force cloud-app development platform, as did Amazon with Amazon Web Services.

But what is different with CaaS platforms is that cognitive powers will be baked in to the operating system, and all the apps that are developed on that platform. That will bring intelligence to a mass public in a wide variety of as yet unimagined contexts.

Gingers Approach to Cognition

At Ginger we have not opened up our technology as a platform via an API yet, but we are already providing the benefits of its cognitive powers to a mass user base globally. Our technology uses statistical algorithms in conjunction with natural language processing, referencing a vast database of trillions of English sentences that have been scoured from the web. This allows us to work out what the users of our applications are trying to communicate, be it in Microsoft Office apps, Gmail, Facebook or anywhere else for that matter, and correct their mistakes and suggest improvements to their expressions.

One thing is for sure – this is a really interesting space to work, and it will be fun to see where computer based cognition will go in 2014.

The post Cognition as a Service – a new Hybrid Technology appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

The customisable “iTunes Blog Parts”

The fourth post in my “becoming a creative hybrid memoirs” series, describing my experiences growing Alien-Eye, a hybrid creative company in Tokyo which I co-founded in 2004. This chapter covers the period from 2008~09 or so, and describes the microblogging boom that exploded around that time and some of our exploits with it.

The entire “Tokyo Memoirs” series is collected here.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

With the novelty of Mixi peaking out, the next big wave to hit the Japanese web was the micro-blogging boom around 2008 to 2010 that  made Japanese the most blogged language on the planet for a while. During this time everyone who wanted to be with it and online had a blog, It was a lifestyle accessory.

Although blogs had been around since the 90’s, they were now not just for geeks but for anyone who was brave enough to stick their head up above the parapet of Mixi’s anonymity and declare their lives open to the public (although many of the blogs were also anonymous), and web giants like CyberAgent grew off the back of new blogging platforms that for the first time pulled in celebrities from traditional media, such as magazine models and TV talents.

It was significant, not least because Facebook would not have succeeded in Japan if the microblogging boom had not broken down the “closed-ness” of Mixi. Facebook also likely benefited from the blog-weariness that followed the blogging bubble.

iTunes meets Japan’s blogosphere

During this time we had started working with the iTunes division of Apple in Japan, who were looking to grow their music downloads business rapidly, and later apps. They had already got their catalogue of Japanese artists up to critical mass, but perception lagged behind and most people saw them either as software for ripping rental CDs, or rightly more as a store, but one that only had foreign artists, hard as that is to imagine now. This time the solution was a technology hack, but one that played very much of the design iconography of the early iPod series, as well as blog-fashion consciousness of the times.

One of the strongest drivers of the blogging boom was the culture around styling your blog with the right colors, characters, favourite brands and accessorizing with blogparts, since so many of the blogs of this time were lifestyle accessories, rather than a medium for sharing experiences, ideas of opinion. Known outside of Japan as “widgets” blogparts were the focus of a lot of attention for a while, with media sites ranking and reviewing them and media spends promoting branded blogparts.

Our solution was to suck the chart data out of the music store via the RSS feeds and insert it into customisable blogparts that were designed to look as similar as possible to the iPod Mini, and later the iPod Nano series.

Crucial to their popularity was to allow them to be customised to the style and tastes of the host blog. Firstly the colour could be chosen from among the official iPod colours. Similarly the chart genre could be picked from among a dozen genres, from JPop to HipHop, meaning that the look and musical taste of any blogger could be satisfied.

Designed to scale

In general this approach, essentially a product range strategy, of creating a line up that is consistent in form and hence recognisable as part of the lineup, but customisable in the details, is a real winner in the consumer psychology of Japan. It is for instance the cornerstone of UNIQLO’s success. They popularise a line of clothes that are identical in all but colour, but then make 20 subtly different colour varieties of it. This allows consumers to buy into the same look as everyone else, while feeling that they have made a unique choice.

Our blogparts were really right for their time and place, a blogging culture hack that had the Apple brand behind them, so we knew if we got them in front of the right people they would soon take off. First we promoted them through the blogpart ranking sites, with both media and editorial placement. We also ran highly targeted banners that featured on the blog update confirmation page on major blogging platforms like Ameba and LiveDoor. We also did some seeding with music influencers who had blogs, but only a handful.

They quickly took off and within the space of 6months were on the blogs of 15k music scene influencers and fans, and had huge UU and PV counts every month. In fact, the Google Analytics tracking code we had in those blogparts gave us so much interesting insights into the blogging culture.

With such broad visibility among the digitally savvy music scene the solution played an important role in shifting perception of the store’s catalogue as well as channeling a lot of users to the store, and all this for a pretty insignificant development cost upfront and then modest hosting fees every month.

Digital music downloads have long been dominated by downloads to mobile devices, and these revenues were all controlled by the carriers. So although iTunes was always growing in Japan its inflection point was of course the arrival of the iPhone, and carriers have not had it quite so easy ever since. Although the App Store was around before the iPhone launched in Japan for the benefit of iPods, again it was the iPhone that made it take off.

So our blogparts were also plugged into the App Store chart rankings RSS feeds, and away they went driving millions more impressions on a different set of blogs for virtually no extra cost.

The widgets were initially built in Flash, and worked just fine, but after a couple of years of garnering millions and millions of free impressions every month for the iTunes Store and its products we were told that Flash could no longer exist in the Apple ecosystem. So we had to rebuild them in HTML5 in about a month, and we did, and it made us pioneers in Japan of this now near ubiquitous technology since it was not a necessity for anyone else.

How big a can a widget be?

The blogparts also spawned a second bigger technology project which began when a small ISP portal site offered iTunes a tab on their portal in exchange for weekly updated content that would then fuel click-through purchase on the iTunesStore and hence affiliate revenue for the ISP portal. Building HTML pages every week was never our cup of tea, and besides would have been an inefficient investment for our client, so we hit on the idea of developing on top of the blog part engine to create fully automated main-column embeddable widget, and called it Partner Parts.

From the get go we saw Partner Parts as media product that could be used by multiple online distribution partners, from bigger portals to music community sites to web magazines, with minimal costs and total scaleability. Where the blogparts worked to distribute to the long tail of personal blogs, Partner Parts targeted the mid to high traffic site properties.

Unlike the blogparts, in order to work with multiple partners and for them to be able to customise their own widgets the system need to have an account structure and basic CMS, and a team to maintain them, and yes put them all in HTML5! I.e. more like a real web product.

We built this into a really solid solution, and got up to around 15 partners in Japan, and at one point we were in discussion with various Apple markets around the world to help them adopt the system. But the talk fizzled out and although we kept it going in Japan it never reached the scale we had hoped.

When hybrid teams don’t work

In retrospect I can connect the success of the iTunes Blogparts and the experience of trying to productise Partner Parts to the biggest blunder I have made in business. Their relative simplicity compared to the reach they were able to achieve gave me first hand experience of the scalability technology can give you, and a thirst to do it again, only bigger, and with the IP owned by us. I started trying to build out a development team within Alien-Eye, paid for by client projects, but aiming to build out our own products.

Of course the blogparts would have been nothing without the the massive content platform Apple had established with iTunes, its conviviality through the RSS feeds, and the momentum that the Apple brand had with early adopters consumers at that time, so it was in many ways a false lesson in instant scaleability. We were just joining a couple of dots within the realm of the brand.

We were not the first digital agency to try to spin off a product, or pivot to a product strategy, and were not the last either, and while I am sure there are success stories, it seems to be a pretty hard thing to pull off. I believe having a hybrid team of technologists, marketing experts and project managers is actually pretty ideal, but they have to be focused on the same thing. To make the technology product you really need to be focused on it, and perhaps riding your luck on the marketing stuff leading up to making the transition, so you can get to a minimum viable product as quickly as possible then bite the bullet, fire your clients and get investment, not necessarily in that order. We lacked that focus, not least myself, and we also never found a leader for the development team, so the DNA of the company at the top was all marketing in background, and that makes it really hard to recruit, retain and have a technology vision to inspire and direct developers.

In the end the combination of the 2011 Touhoku earthquake and tsunami and a bubbly job market for developers in Japan at the same time brought about a mercifully swift end to the internal dev team experiment, but not before we had made some great mobile apps, social games and other projects I will be writing about in following episodes.

Incidentally now and Lowe Profero we have a couple of hundred developers in our office in Beijing doing development work for all the offices in the network, including ours. Having this kind of scale and competitive price advantage combined with quality assurance is the way to go.

The post Becoming a creative hybrid – Tokyo Memoirs Chapter 4: Blog Culture Hack appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

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.

An initiative aimed at supporting international web / mobile brands grow in Japan, and developing Japanese growth hacking talent

I was recently interviewed for a Japanese creative industry magazine “Project Design” to talk about the relevance of “Growth Hacking” (Japanese article here), the approach to growing web and mobile startups that has come to prominence in recent years, to established and non-web businesses. I was interviewed in Japanese, but wrote up the main threads of the conversation in English below.

First of all though some context. Why was I being interviewed about Growth Hacking? I have been a involved a lot with startups one way or another. I have had numerous startups as clients over the years, companies with a good product-market-fit for Japan for whom my company has effectively been the growth team for the Japan market. Also through my role as a mentor for 500 Startups, Silicon Valley’s top accelerator program, where I offer advice to founders and growth hackers on how to grow in in particular, but anywhere for that matter. I also run Growth Hacking Japan University, a 7 week lecture course in Japanese that I have run twice now, and plan to run again soon, teaching growth hacking techniques and strategies to Japanese founders and aspiring growth hackers, and learning a lot from the participants at the same time.

Most of the time I work with bigger established brands, including cloud tech companies and web services, for whom we (Profero Tokyo) position ourselves as “the performance engine” that drives incremental results in one or a combination of marketing areas. I would not describe this work as “growth hacking” per se, but being so focused on KPIs and striving to create operational efficiencies, actually the work has a lot in common with what a growth team in a web startup would be doing, and this is recognised by several of our client partners. Ginger-Software, the disruptive native English writing technology, founded in Israel, is one brand for whom we fulfil this role in Japan.

At Profero Tokyo we are very conscious of the hybrid team we bring to each brand partner, the skill sets that combine when our specialists work together to create additional value, both through coming up with ideas that cross disciplines, as well as synergies that drive efficiencies for our clients, and in this sense we have embraced the growth hacking philosophy.

Here are my notes from the interview:

++++++++++++++++++++++

Growth hacking can inform the philosophy, techniques and most importantly the hybrid teams that established companies should bring to new business models.

Growth hacking needs an agile environment

The whole point of Growth Hacking is to grow a new business model as quickly as possible. That objective is shared by many established companies when they start a new business division or launch new products, so in principle there is nothing stopping big companies from “growth hacking”. However, growth hacking works best in the purest sense when nothing is held sacred, allowing the product-market fit to be established without constraints, such as “brand XXX’s target are always YYYY type of consumers”. Nurturing this sort of agility into the culture and environment of a big company is very hard to do, hence why companies tend to become less innovative as they get bigger.

One way of looking at what changes when you go from a small agile startup to a big established company with many stakeholders, existing customers and partners, is to think in terms of where the efficiencies are coming from, since all business models need to be creating efficiencies of scale of some kind or another if they are to grow.

In small companies with very little baggage and a small cohesive team internal efficiencies should be off the chart, but because the business model has no scale yet in the market, it enjoys minimal external efficiencies. As companies grow and gain momentum in their market they go through a tipping point beyond which they have broad awareness among their audience, people know what to expect, they can enjoy economies of scale when purchasing, and in general external efficiencies get better. But at the same time they tend to become more complex internally with multiple management levels, physical and social distance between employees in different departments, more complicated decision making processes and more friction in general.

So a lack of agility within some big companies would likely prevent a growth hacking type model to whir within it. But in its purest ‘bootstrapping’ sense growth hacking is not always necessary or the most efficient route to success anyway. Where a new business division can leverage the strength of established business models and a symbiotic ecosystem can be created, such as Apple succeeded in doing across its hardware and software business, then that is the quickest route to success, and Growth Hacking doctrine would demand that that is the route taken. iTunes was never a standalone music store. The App Store only exists because of Apple’s mobile hardware. Building out an consumer ecosystem in a pre-planned way can be the right approach, provided you get the strategy spot on.

Having said that, I remember reading an interview many years ago I think after the iPod took off, in which Steve Jobs said that his main role was insulating his R&D team from being influenced by the commercial influences elsewhere in the business, nurturing a free-thinking environment for a group of super smart product designers and developers. Everyone knows what happened after that. Although I would not call Apple’s astounding run of innovation growth hacking, creating a free thinking context in which experiment can happen and a tight team can work fervently together is I believe also necessary for the growth hacking scenario.

Rapid Prototyping cycles for product-market fit

So when is Growth Hacking relevant and possible for big businesses? At its heart Growth Hacking is an ongoing series of experiments, each one built on the intelligence gained from the those than ran before it. This is essentially iterative prototyping, a concept that is no way a new idea for big companies, but in the case of web startups they are doing it in public, or to anyone who will pay attention, and getting feedback directly to tune the product and the marketing mechanics at the same time. For many reasons not least the desire to keep new developments unseen from competitors, it is harder for big companies to do this process in the open.

The iterative method is founded on data. If there is no way to capture the performance of the product as data and use that data to make informed decisions about how to improve the product and market it better then forget the Growth Hacking idea. It’s something else at that point. This may well limit true growth hacking to web and mobile companies where the products are literally plugged into the market itself, but I am open minded on this point. All kinds of products are getting hooked into the internet-of-things now, and reporting performance data back to engineers and designers. Either way it does not stop other companies from using the ideas and approaches that are bound up with growth hacking.

Implicit in the argument above is the assumption that the marketing model and the product experience can co-evolve together. Often when companies get big and established one ends up downstream of the other. In many growth-hacked web services these days, the user experience itself comprises viral mechanisms that bring other users in, so that the product does its own marketing. Even if the viral effects are not wired into the product in this way, the product and the way it is distributed needs to allow for really short prototyping cycles. This principle is something that big companies could learn from, or at least aspire to this ideal, since often they place marketing downstream of R&D, which can end up in the miserable scenario of trying to sell products that are unsellable.

Connect customers & growth team directly

Spelling this principle out in terms of the people involved, the ideal is to short cut the feedback loop between those designing and creating the product and its ultimate customers as much as possible. The word “growth hacking” feels very cold and technical, not really the ‘human insight based thinking’ that we like to boast about in marketing, nor the ‘customer centric culture’ that corporate CEOs work so hard to advocate in their companies. In a way though the growth hacking approach is the MOST customer centric approach there is, provided that the data being collected and used for optimising with actually does represent the value the customers are bringing to your brand and bottom line, in both the short and long term.

Thus the quintessential growth hacking metrics-based process of experimentation and optimisation is in simple terms a way to short cut the ‘prototype > test > iterate’ loop and make it spin as quickly as possible with the least separation between market and product evolution. This efficiency is what underpins the “fastest route to success” philosophy at the heard of the growth hacking movement.

Anyone who has worked in a science laboratory or R&D lab recognises this process, and so in a sense growth hacking start-ups have effectively put the lab at the centre of the business. In too many big businesses not only can the R&D department become a costly appendage, but the scientific approach often loses out to internal politics or other constraints, or else the R&D amounts to just tinkering with existing formats because the bigger vision has been forgotten or become obsolete.

Defining the necessary conditions

So I believe big companies can benefit from growth hacking style approach to growing a new business model, but they have to set up the context to mirror to some extent that of a startup in the following ways:

• It should be run by a few people who “own it”: passionate about the idea and strongly incentivised to make it work, ideally through equity ownership
• These leaders should be given the responsibility to take decisions without committee agreement, leading to forthright decision making and accountability
• Allow risk taking and accept failure as a natural part of the process. Experimentation is needed to hit on the right formula, and you are unlikely to hit on it first time.
• Start off with as few people as possible. The last thing the leaders need is a big team to manage before they know what it is they need to be doing.
• You need to create an efficient, no-fat-on-the-bone base upon which to build out a profitable model. Too much resource early on, either people or money, will lead to inefficiencies that will at worse kill it prematurely, or else get baked into the business and restrict profitability later on.
• Give the business brand-independence, enough for it to be able to tell its own stories and connect to a distinct audience that becomes its early adopter customer base from which an early majority can be recruited.

The importance of a brand narrative

This last point about the need for brand independence is often forgotten I believe, but companies whose founders understand how to grow a brand often take off faster and win big in the long term. This is because they are making the technology mean something more than what its features would imply on their own. In my experience people often forget that the experience people have is fundamentally different depending on what they are looking to get out of it, and this is dependent on how well it is branded and the communications around it. No first time user touches a feature set without preconceptions, so framing this interaction and the ongoing usage is the role of the brand.

Founders and companies with simple, powerful brand identities and compelling ideas around their technology, such as Phil Libin with Evernote’s “remember everything”, or Mark Beniof’s with Salesforce.com death-to-software narrative, are so good at selling their technology story that we forget just what masters they are at branding. Both men had plenty of business experience before founding the companies that made them famous, and it shows.

I would say that successful startups always have a strong “founders story”, a vision to make the world better, core values, that for better or worse get baked into the brand perception from early on. Even if they are not a consumer-facing brand, this narrative is important for getting others excited about its potential, which is always necessary. These stakeholders are the investors, journalists and early hires in tech startups. But the same thing goes for new business models springing off big business, where the equivalents would be the board members, the individuals transferred in or hired into the business as well as the consumers who would adopt the new product.

So although it is very hard to generalise about how business models should get built out, the brand story and how it enables businesses to captivate each subsequent audience as it builds its following is one, and the other is the way the internal team expands.

Growth teams and growth hackers

It is my belief that team structure is the most important area of growth hacking for big or established companies to take note of, not least in starting off slim, but what type of people are brought into the mix.

If we generalise a growth team into specialists and generalist, a room full of generalists is not ideal, but then nor is a room full of specialists, and yet this is often the make up you see.

You definitely need deep vertical expertise. In a web start up you might have an SEM specialist, a PR specialist, a contents marketing / social media specialist and product developer as the first 4 members of a growth team. The challenge is getting these relatively diverse skill sets to work cohesively together so that much needed synergies emerge. It is even harder in big companies where these verticals might already exist as distinct departments, potentially physically separated.

In order to get them working synergistically you need someone who can speak all all their respective lingoes, and who has a sense for the difference between just showing up in that area, and actually driving competitive advantage. Who is that person? It needs to be someone who has themselves dived into these skill sets at one point, not to the extent that they became an expert in all of them, but typically in one area at least.

These multi-skilled individuals are the sort of people who, being quick learners, dive headlong into a knowledge specialism for a while, get to the point where they understand 90% of it, can perceive the nature of expertise in that last 10%, but do not fancy spending the next 3+ years to perfect those skills themselves. And then they move on to another vertical. They get bored as quickly as they get inspired, but rather than being a weakness, it equips them with a rare combination of literacies.

Not T-shaped, but “rake-shaped” talent is key

In management theory they are similar to the T-shaped people, but actually more like a “rake”, or Japanese “kuma–te” meaning “bear’s claw”. You heard it here first! Ideally you can find one of these talents who also has leadership potential, and build the team around them, since they can be the bridge that gets the teams working together efficiently.

These sorts of people are rare and hence very valuable assets, especially if the areas they can bridge between map to the necessary skill sets of your business, and have the communication skills to forge a team spirit. These sorts have been key drivers in the growth of the US silicon valley tech startups, where they are highly prized but they are even rarer in Japan. These people represent the “growth hacker” archetype, and so perhaps more so than “growth hacking” the approach, it is this archetypal skill set that is most important to highlight beyond web and mobile startups.

In Japan deep vertical expertise is celebrated and rewarded. Finding your craft and plugging away at it for a lifetime earns you respect and career progression. This is no bad thing, and Japan’s ongoing success as an economic force is built on this tradition. Japan does not have a shortage of specialist, I believe.

However, the way companies and careers are structured it makes it hard for multi-disciplinary careers to be nurtured within companies, and hence there are not many growth hacker types around, and I believe this is a limiting factor on Japan’s economic success going forward that needs to be addressed.

The post Growth Hacking for brands and how to grow a hybrid team 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!

*************************
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.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

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!

*************************

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.

++++++++++++++++++++

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.