Nissen's YouTube Channel

On 17 August Nissen, a Japanese e-commerce giant,  announced the launch of its official YouTube channel.

The interesting feature of the channel is the use of custom gadgets and annotations. The channel contains many 30 second clips with Karina showing off the latest in Japanese fashion. Users can click on the annotations in the video, which will bring them to the relevant page within the online shop.

Nissen is the first in Japan to use the custom gadgets, shown above the actual movies, for e-commerce purposes. Some 23,000 items can be searched for through these gadgets, and the coming autumn and winter collections are also included.

The YouTube channel also has a keyword-based search functionality for its products, a section for weekly top selling products and social media features like Twitter.

Currently 16 commercials can be found on the channel, and there are plans to expand this with more original content, fashion shows and even interior design product offerings. Watch this space.

What will the Women's World Cup effect be?

On Sunday 17 July, history was made when the ladies of Japan's national soccer team became world champions, beating the USWNT in a penalty shoot-out. It was an epic match,  in any case it gathered a lot of media attention, but what could the consequences be for Japanese advertisers acting internationally?

Probably not much, if nobody acts on it anyway. Japan has traditionally been a very inward-looking market, and is weak on (international) PR. To illustrate, I searched very hard for commercials related the Japanese soccer team on YouTube a few days ago, but I couldn't find any. I did find quite some starring the US team.

According to Tetsuya Honda, CEO of strategic PR firm Blue Current Japan, the craze surrounding the women national team should be seized as an opportunity to promote Japan and its culture. He writes this in a blog post for cnet Japan.

Why? Because Japan received a disproportionate amount of attention for winning the tournament. As we know, Japan had to endure a disaster on March 11, and many viewers, media and soccer fans recognized the victory as some sort of closure for the things that had happened. ESPN called the Japanese team the "team of destiny", and other media used words like "fate" and "destiny" to describe the happening.

There is some amount of magical "air" surrounding the Japanese victory. Struck by disaster, the team worked very hard and played with very little fouls (they also won the fair play award), and it came back twice from behind against a team that was technically superior, to win in a penalty shoot-out in a dramatic way. It seems unreal.

This "air" is something temporary that Japanese marketers and PR agencies should capitalize on. The sudden switch from negative news coming from the land of rising sun to positive news is something that doesn't happen this often. That is what Mr. Honda writes, and I tend to agree with him.

And if Japanese marketers won't do it, wouldn't this be an opportunity for any other international advertiser to promote Japanese products? Beyond the obvious connection with the victory in soccer, one could think of branding Japanese products with an increased focus on some sort of mysticism, kindness and (female) beauty.

Don't you think?

Land of The Rising Search Terms

Google presented the search terms with the highest growth in volume from 1 January to end of June 2011. These search terms reflect seasonal trends and highlights in current events. I made a list of the translations with a short explanation. Check them out:

1. Nuclear power plant - No explanation needed.
2. Galaxy S2 - Google may be proud that the Android-driven device is so popular. See also my previous post.
3. iPad2 - Apple's tablet doing a good job. Don't forget about the option to target tablets seperately.
4. tilt - Apparently, if you search for 'tilt' on your mobile device you'll get a tilted Google search results screen. Funny way to get some extra traffic! Also, it goes to show how large mobile search is in Japan.
5. Geiger counter - For obvious reasons.
6. Cesium - A chemical element related to the 3/11 disasters.
7. Power Saving - As I wrote earlier, saving energy is big in Japan.
8. Yoshiko Tanaka - Member of the pop group Candies, who passed away on 21 April 2011. Received great attention from the media, and sympathy from the Japanese people in general, when she released her final words to the public which includes a message of support to the people in the Tohoku region.
9. Rikuzentakata - City in the north badly hit by the disasters. Made famous in the west by horrific images.
10. Radioactive material - Again, people searched for information related to the disaster.

So, understandably, the triple disaster in the north of Japan had a huge impact on the search landscape. My predictions for the second half of 2011?

• Google+
• Galaxy S3
• iPad4

I am quite sure these will be in the next top 10. Seeing the current developments of tablets other than the iPad, probably some new tablet or app will make it there as well. In any case, hopefully we will see an entirely different kind of top 10 than the first half.

 

The tilted screen when you search for 'tilt'.

Picture from livedoor.jp

Targeting Mobile Japan? Build an Android App!

Japan has been an early adopter of mobile internet. While Europeans and consumers in the US were struggling to download e-mails on their phones, the Japanese were enjoying the ease of mobile sites and have been able to enjoy the convenience of being able to access the web while on the move.

It might therefore be surprising that Japan is actually lagging in smartphone adoption. In a recent Google Think Insights Study called "Global Perspectives: Smartphone Users and the Mobile Marketer" (PPT) we can read that smartphone adoption across the globe is as follows:

• US - 31%
• UK - 30%
• France - 27%
• Germany - 18%
• Japan - 6%

A mere six percent of the Japanese own a smartphone? This might be explained by the fact that the Japanese long relied on WAP technology (and i-mode, a similar system by NTT DoCoMo). This technology developed very well in Japan and the phones were also more suited to the Japanese than smartphones have been; I am referring to the superior input of Japanese characters using physical buttons as compared to touchscreens.

However, times are a-changing.

iPhone and Android phones are gaining in popularity and thanks to them smartphone adoption is growing. Recent growth is fueled disproportionately by Android devices, as we can see in this table I got from comScore Japan:

Although the iPhone is said to remain the most popular device (Android OS is used on many different devices), this fact may not be that relevant for developers of mobile apps. This Google Insights graph shows the popularity of the search queries "iPhone app" (blue) and "Android app" (red).

These are the graphs for July 2010 until June 2011. It's hard to see the results clearly on such a small graph, so see the results for yourself here. It is clear that Android apps are becoming increasingly popular while iPhone apps are just stable.

By the way. the Japanese are crazy about apps; an average smartphone user in Japan has 45 apps installed on his phone! That's nearly double the figure of US smartphone owner (23). Also, the Japanese are very willing to buy through their smartphone; 45% of smartphone owners made a purchase on their phones, 29% of smartphone adopters in the US, and only 17% in France. (All figures from same Google Think Insights Study.)

I am no e-commerce expert, but this seems like an opportunity waiting to be grasped. How about building a shopping app? Only 10% of Japanese advertisers have a dedicated app at this moment, as compared to 19% of US advertisers. Even a large e-merchant like Kakaku.com doesn't seem to have a smartphone app.

The building apps in Japan is still quite blue ocean. This while the Japanese love to use them. As smartphone adoption is kicking off, and Android taking the lead in this, the conclusion seems to be pretty straightforward. Don't you think?

E-books Go Offline in Japan

E-books are hot. Just recently Amazon announced that their sales of e-books surpassed the sales figures of physical books. Check out the popularity of Kindle, Amazon's famous e-reader, on Google Insights. It's skyrocketing.

As reading becomes an activity that doesn't require physical books, and as bookstores are disappearing into the clouds, one would assume no sane company would invest in making book vending machines. Luckily, life is full of surprises.

At the 15th e-Book Expo in Tokyo, a company called Glory was showcasing their latest innovation: an e-book vending machine. See the picture below, from a Japanese source.

The idea is that you choose a book from the screen, pay to receive a receipt with a QR code, which you can read with your mobile phone to download the e-book to your phone. Simple enough.

The article mentions that no registration is required to buy books, and that the possibility to pay with cash are the merits of this vending machine. Fair enough, but it seems very counter-intuitive to develop something physical for goods that are completely digital.

The fact that you need your smart phone eventually to download the book makes you wonder why a user wouldn't start with browsing on his phone in the first place. That made me come up with actually another merit of the vending machine: its big screen. It's probably more convenient to browse for books on a bigger screen.

Would this work? Would this machine increase sales of e-books? I think so. To understand why, you would have to see this clip about some innovation in retail in South Korea:



You may have seen it already. It goes to show that offline product confrontations are great triggers for people to start spending money. The e-book vending machine, through its physical presence combined with ease of use through an intuitive UI, may become a great success as well.

What can we learn from this? I think it is that relying on online marketing only may not always be a sufficient strategy. Combining it with offline efforts to invite potential customers to interact with your product offering, that might be a better way to go.

In Japan a Person Sighs Every Three Seconds... On Twitter

Every three seconds? According to mineral water maker Vittel, once every three seconds a person tweets that he is 'tired' or 'sleepy'. Research (Japanese) has shown that the number of tweets increase around Wednesday. This might be caused by a start-up problems in the beginning of the week, worsened by the prospect of two more days of hard work until the weekend.

You can see the evidence here (source). The red line indicates the tweets about 'sleepy' and the blue one are tweets about being 'tired'.

The x-axis are the days of the week. With some imagination, you can see some peeks around Wednesday (水).

So what do you do with this information if you bottle mineral water? Create an app ofcourse! On the Vittel Refresh Tweet site you can link the site with your twitter account and then it will run a movie that contains a few tweets from your accounts and some profile pics of your followers.

It wasn't very interesting for me to be honest but it might work better if you have some posts in Japanese about being tired or sleepy, something my twitter account lacks. In any case, it's innovative enough to create a campaign around it. If it is possible to pick and choose tweets from an account that gives access to an app, it would be also be possible to make it return messages in real-time based on the wording in the tweets.

Food for thought? Thirst for knowledge? Innovation in the Japanese advertising landscape never ceases to amaze me.

Dentsu Strikes Deal with Skype to Offer Ads while Calling

Dentsu will start offering ads on the online telephone application Skype, in Japan.

It will be an exclusive deal from which Dentsu hopes to generate some $12 million (1 billion yen). The ads will be shown when starting a conversation including video chat, and it may take up to 1/3 of the screen*. (Pretty in-your-face if you ask me.) Similar deals exist in US and Germany already.

These ads, which are a recent change in Skype's direction (it used to ad free), were not totally unexpected. The competition for online calling is getting fiercer everyday, and rates are dropping diminishing revenues. What better idea than to put ads on it (many eyeballs because of increased interest) and have the service for free (or at least cheaper)?

What will be the next step? The satirical website Onion News Network made this clip a while ago. I wouldn't be surprised if it would become reality. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.