Japanese Whisky and a Digital Market That’s Heating Up
A 3-D ice cube sculpting campaign for Japan's whisky lovers reflects an increasingly creative digital mindset across the region.
It’s Suntory time! Not to get confused with the famous line from Bill Murray in the 2003 comedy-drama Lost in Translation, this time is actually Suntory time.
The Internet has been abuzz recently with work coming out of Japan-based Hakuhodo that is sweeping up regional creativity awards within Asia. The campaign, tagged “3-D on the Rocks,” has Suntory using a makeshift 3-D printing device that allows consumers at certain bars in Japan to select an image that is then rendered into an actual 3-D ice cube.
Whisky lovers (like myself), especially in Japan, have an infatuation with their giant-sized ice cubes, which form the critical foundation for their whisky. From this untouched block of ice, people can select images ranging from the Statue of Liberty to Batman and famous Japanese temples to occupy their whisky glass.
Check out this video to see how they did it.
This campaign was well advertised and heavily underpinned by a big digital push, which supports a new report that recently came out from Dentsu pointing to a significant rebound in the ad market in Japan.
In 2014, advertising spend in Japan rose by nearly 3 percent, exceeding the US$50 billion mark for the first time in six years. One of the most important contributors to this surge came from digital, which saw a more than 12 percent increase in spend among advertisers, hitting new levels never seen before in that market.
The biggest digital channels that made up this growth came from smartphone, video and programmatic spend. The current penetration of smartphones in Japan is hovering around 50.8 percent, but expected to reach 69 percent of all mobile phone users by 2018.
With this increase comes an increase in mobile ad spend by brands looking to test out new and innovative formats to reach consumers while on the go.
Japan has always been a TV-heavy market. But for the past three years, video has slowly been taking share out of its TV cousin. Brands have become more comfortable in spending in video as the usage rates of Japanese consuming video has finally grown to critical levels.
And with programmatic, brands and agencies have fully adopted ad technology in Japan as a means to be more efficient with their ad buys and to shift from the traditional method of buying pages to the new dynamic methods of buying people and audiences in real-time.
With all this, we will start to see more brands like Suntory starting to put digital and technology at the center of their brand experience and overall marketing spend. While digital still has a long way until it dethrones TV as the top ad channel, I do see digital taking over in the next five years, particularly as we approach the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
Consumers’ media preferences will continue to shift to digital in a big way and brands will start taking greater risks to become true digital pioneers and innovators in Japan.
