Twitter in Japanese Mainstream Advertising

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Times are changing…

This is the first time I’ve seen Twitter in Japanese mainstream advertising – and in an offline campaign, no less!  This was seen on the Hibiya subway line in Tokyo and is advertising a new type of coffee – of which a new variety is launched seemingly each week, by one of a handful of major beverage brands.

Twitter fits into this campaign as a mechanism to release information slowly.  In this case, they are telling a story (a novelette) in tweets.

Participating in these offline campaigns that you see on the train is always a little… clunky.

If you look closely you’ll see a search box on the ad – that’s telling you what you need to search for on your phone / pc to find the campaign site.  The campaign site can be found here and it wasn’t the first result for this term (at least not on google).  The twitter page itself does not show up in the 1st page of search results for this term.  The clever among you might be asking why not use QR codes and allow people to just scan the code on the train and go directly to the campaign site.  Well I found out the answer to that recently; there are regulations preventing QR codes on ads in trains.  Train operators want to discourage disruptive phone use on the train.

Have you seen any offline uses of Twitter by major brands?

Posted from 港区, Japan