Previous memoir episodes series have described how we cracked the code for making content-based promotions in Japan (as with the Puchi Bruce campaign for Die Hard 4.0 explained here), or how we got a taste for building technology solutions (as with the iTunes blogparts explained here). But no account of this period in the late noughties would be complete without documenting the disruptive rise (and rise…. and rise…) of the iPhone, and thence the smart phone, and it certainly had a big impact on the Alien-Eye business too. Zooming forward to 2014 as I write now as Lowe Profero I am sure that more than half of what we output is experienced on a smartphone.

It is hard to believe now with the recent launch of the 5.5inch iPhone 6 that the first iPhone was basically an iPod with telephony. Through our involvement with iTunes we were very much aware of the significance of Apple’s ecosystem of digital content across devices being extended to mobile phones, but we could not have imagined just how disruptive the App Store would be, creating an open market place for software.

As described in Chapter #1, when we set out on the Alien-Eye journey we expected the Japanese mobile carriers to enable an open mobile contents ecosystem, but this was in hindsight very naive of us. So although the bedroom creators and hackers got busy making Flash movies and games that could be freely distributed on the web, they did not have a platform geared to surface and popularise the most creative and original to a wide audience, and mobile content distribution was closed / locked down completely by the close-minded carriers. There certainly was no platform with the allure of coding for a new domain of interaction – the touch screen, combined with accelerometers, GPS and cameras all in one app.

YouTube proved to be that creators’ platform for video, complemented here by the distinctively Japanese video platform NicoNico, but no one could have predicted the phenomenon that was the gold rush onto the App Store, although I am sure some claim they did. All of a sudden designers and videographers, university students and ICT teachers alike were learning to code in C+. We certainly did not miss out either, and the constant stream of mobile app development projects, firstly for iOS, and then for iOS & Android, helped grow and sustain our in-house development team through to late 2011, when as previously lamented on this blog, we admitted defeat on a coding team without scale.

The first iPhones in Japan

Our first iPhone app project happened astride New Year 2007 > 2008, which was even before the first iPhone’s came on sale in Japan in July 2008, and was the first iPhone-related campaign of any kind to my knowledge. We were so desperate to get in on the act that we had someone bring us 3 iPhone’s from Hong Kong that we developed and tested on before promptly handing them to the winners of a travel blogger competition we ran to promote Chile as a tourist destination.

Applicants had to reply to the question “Why I want to go to Chile”, and having been seeded skillfully into young adventurous travel communities in Mixi this contest generated over ten thousand inspiring reasons to do just that, all in the persuasive and credible words of real people, creating a viral mechanism around the campaign. The winning trio were then sent to Chile, armed with an iPhone each and a suite of GPS-aware apps we hacked together to live blog their way around Chile’s stunning locations with instructions to take loads of pictures, and micro-blog about all the fun they were having. These posts were uploaded directly to open community platforms like Twitter as well as auto-aggregated into a live-stream campaign site that we set up.

Chile Tourism Campaign that was made possible by live blogging from GPS enabled apps on an early iPhone

All of this content, as well as the social media buzz, combined with the blog and travel news site coverage of the contest successfully transformed Chile’s online presence and positioning as a destination for young independent travellers. One of the most satisfying aspects of this project was that it fixed Chile’s SEO problem in Japanese. Until that point a search for Chile would yield pages of results relating to either ‘ebi-chili’ recipes, the popular chinese spicy prawn dish, or else the Red Hot Chili Peppers, since both contain the same two katakana characters “CHI-RI” as the country, and are searched for more frequently. Finally, and thanks in some ways to the iPhone, Chile was visible on the web in the Japanese language.

Today the Japanese app store is the most lucrative in the World, for the first time topping the US’s app store revenue in 2013, and now with Android going strong too, sales of game titles on smartphones are fuelling multi-billion-$ game companies’ IPOs and really killing consul makers like Nintendo with it. But back in 2009 when the iPhone sales had just about given the platform enough scale for businesses to take a serious look at it, things were more open and explorative.

Before there were apps, there were….

Our most complete experience with the App store came through a partnership with Tokyo-founded Cerego Inc, and their English learning platform iKnow!, previously named Smart.fm, but because we had already been active on another Apple-popularised platform, podcasting, we were able to adapt our way into apps in effect.

Over 4 or 5 years of working with Cerego I personally enjoyed numerous close working relationships through which I learned an awful lot, and several of those live on as cherished friendships, but it was co-founder Andrew Smith Lewis who brought us in initially and, with his eye for seeing a chance to create eye-catching spin-offs that made the core platform more convivial with the big wide web outside, was an essential supporter and advisor to all the projects we worked on together.

The partnership with Cerego had flourished during 2008 & 2009 thanks mainly due to the amazing success of a podcast program that notched up 10m downloads in its first 2 months after launch and was featured as top podcast in iTunes Japan’s “Rewind 2009” ranking.

The brain child of a talented and passionate Italian multi-media designer, Francesco Romano, he first conceived of the idea of creating podcasts that streamed the multi-media vocab flashcards as a smooth audio-visual experience while he was still working at Cerego. But the company’s focus was elsewhere and so they never got made. Some time later, and for various reasons everyone agreed, including Francesco himself, that he would be better off in the more diverse cut and thrust of the Alien-Eye working culture, and so we got to nurture his podcast idea among many other of his inspired creations.

Enhanced podcast format that used chapter images to create a simple interactive English learning flow c. 2009

Francesco’s podcast hack relied on using the chapters feature in the podcast format, fitting one vocab item plus its accompanying image for each chapter, with audio files playing the audio file for the word, another chapter was used for an example sentence with its audio and image. We could control how many such items we stringed together to make up one podcast. These were interactive to the extent that users could skip between chapter points, although it seemed that most played them hands free on the train commuting.

But how to publish these efficiently? Another invention hooked the old and more hackable version of Garageband, amongst other things a podcast publishing software, to suck in the learning content data from Cerego’s databases and spit out beautifully designed audio-visual podcast.

In this way, Francesco, together with one of Cerego’s own prolific developers, Zev Blut, could generate hours of valuable learning media at will. This “enhanced podcast” format was a game changer on the podcast rankings, since all of the competing pods had to be made in recording studios with costly voice talent and audio engineers. We could produce high quality content much faster and cheaper than anyone else, so we were able to absolutely dominate the rankings. At one point we had 3 separate series created in this way occupying positions 1, 3 and 5 on the all Japan chart, and occupied #1 for most of one year.

To me this is a great example of a “growth hack”, a topic I have spoken and written a lot about in the years since, e.g. this post about growth hacking talent, and Francesco’s approach to turning his vision into reality by thinking fluidly and adaptively across technology platforms illustrates the required mindset.

The app store comes of age

So the first generation of the Smart.fm iPhone apps were based on the enhanced podcasts, but also included games and other interactive features that were developed and improved in later versions. Cerego entrusted us with creating and running this nascent off-shoot of their business, overseeing it of course, but allowing us to design everything, from the product itself, the naming, pricing strategy, promotional activity. We hired an app developer over from the US, Brett Gneiting, who we tracked down after he had been a prizewinner in Cerego’s API competition a year or so previously and he and Francesco formed an awesome UI/UX > coding partnership.

We really embraced this opportunity to take ownership for the performance of a business vertical, and the longevity of the partnership speaks to its financial success, riding the wave of popularity of each iPhone release and all the attention the App Store garnered, bringing in significant revenue for Cerego and keeping us honest too.

One of the most rewarding aspects of having ours hands on every element of the product and marketing strategy was the ability to apply strategic ideas and see very quickly and directly whether they worked or not. When you work on big brands in an agency with a bunch of smart, opinionated marketers you always look at the strategy and think you could write the script better: the client got the naming wrong, or screwed up the pricing strategy, or did not position it in the opportune way; but usually you are not able to change those core elements, and even if you could it would take a relative age to see the effects.

So the app store was almost like a microcosmic market simulator with very rapid and dynamic feedback, so we could tune all those things together with the smart folks at Cerego, Andrew Smith Lewis and Russ Moench in particular, and work out what worked best. In fact it was such an intensely industrious period and we cut our teeth in so many different ways that it spawned a host of different skill sets that we were able to offer to other clients, from short snappy promo videos like these for the first app series, we developed a whole app / web service identity design and positioning strategy offering off the back of this period, and over all it gave us a lot more confidence in our convictions as marketing strategists.

News entries on the Alien-Eye homepage for successive app generation releases c.2010~11

Cerego has developed an extensive and high quality corpus of learning material, and that is what we leveraged for the iPhone and later Android apps. But its secret sauce is when this content gets hooked up to its proprietary learning engine algorithm. For various reasons this could not be encoded into a standalone app, but once Cerego re-booted it’s backend for the cloud era and rebranded as iKnow! made their push as a truly web 2.0 service they were able to provide a seamless experience for their growing paid user base across all devices, and it made sense to phase out the stand-alones. However, the success of the app store partnership set up perhaps an even more empowering collaboration with Cerego that will be the subject of a future memoirs post I suspect.

Over the 2 or 3 years between 2009 and 2011 all kinds of brands were commissioning apps from us, IBM being another noteworthy one, and other agencies too of course. Although I am proud of much of the work we did, most of these programs became forgettable for one of two reasons.

The first was under investment in initial promotion versus development. There would be an intent to make the initial functionality as awesome as possible, leaving little of the inevitably limited budget to launch it properly. It would have been better to get to minimum viability quickly and cheaply and then test the water, but few brands are setup to think in this way.

The second was lack of sustained intent and investment. Like puppies, an app is for life, not just for christmas. Actually, an app is an investment in an engaged user group or audience, and you need to keep improving and developing your app in order to nurture and grown that user group. Marketing departments are sadly not usually empowered or else of a mind to embrace this sort of opportunity.

Since the gold rush era the “I want an app too” effect has warn off, we (now speaking as Lowe Profero) are still developing apps, but they are typically business critical ones, and we have several hundred top class developers to code them. Examples would be a members app for the multi-billion Euro fashion EC businesses like ASOS; the order for app Dominoes Pizza; the loyalty app for booming restaurant franchises like Guzman y Gomez…

The truly cloud-based service models like Cerego, whose team’s live and breath features, UI and UX across all platforms because they are the difference between business success and failure, have in general brought the development in house as you would expect, and so after 2012 we helped them in other ways.

News post on Alien-Eye site on the sad passing of Steve Jobs.

And the app store itself is not the playground of tinkerers and hobbyists that it was in the early days when a developer in her bedroom could create and market an app and earn a million bucks in a month due to the inherent scaleability in and buzz around the marketplace. Some of those early entrepreneurs now run scaled up business around the app store, but most of them have been squeezed out, no longer able to get any visibility as big software and gaming companies have weighed in.

Actually the reasons for the minnows getting squeezed are probably as much to do with the ever increasing number of devices and iOS versions that apps needed to support, and that only got worse when Android swept into Japan. Towards the end of our partnership with Cerego on the app store in late 2011 we really felt this. In the early days of the App Store there were only a few handsets (iPods, iPhone, iPhone 2) and similarly few iOS versions. As Apple released each new wave of iPhones with bigger screens and new iOS versions with new capabilities the development resource required to keep up swelled.

This evolution suited Apple and the Android device makers just fine, since it put more pressure on users to upgrade to the latest model phones, (where most of the revenue is for Apple) and big gaming titles on the App and Play store dominate revenue anyway. So the gold rush with its long tail of entrepreneurs panning for gold came to pass on the big revenue-mining companies moved in. Such is the way of the world, and with its passing Apple too became less of a darling of the creative community, which loved the openness of the early app store. Steve Jobs passed away in October 2011 accompanied by much grief and sadness among us as well as so many others. Perhaps that was the date that marked the end of this chapter for us too.

The post Becoming a creative hybrid – Tokyo Memoirs Chapter 6: The app store gold rush appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

The entire “Tokyo Memoirs” series is collected here.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.