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It was one of those odd coincidences that deserves to be called serendipitous. The son of a former student (yes, I am that old) was visiting Japan. He asked how business was going, what we were working on. I told him about my Winner’s Circles project, using social network analysis to explore the relationships of the creators who make up the teams that have won awards in the annual Tokyo Copywriters Club ad contest. I mentioned that, not only was it a lot of fun; it had, on the business side, also produced an interesting job, providing the English for the first ever Japan Interactive Advertising Annual, which showcases the winners of the first six Tokyo Interactive Ad Awards contests and especially those that won this year. The Grand Prix winner was “UNIQLOCK: Music, Dance, Clock,” which also won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year. I whipped out my iPhone to show him the iPhone App version. He said, “I know that. It’s my screensaver back at U. of Colorado.”
Then, on December 15, an email from Ad Age pointed me to “Widgets Are Made for Marketing, So Why Aren’t More Advertisers Using Them?” The answer might be that they’re just catching on to the strategy that the creators of “UNIQLOCK” invented, a strategy that combined with superb execution has won the “UNIQLOCK” blog part space on over 40,000 blogs and attracted over 180 million page views worldwide (as of October 2008). That made me think that TalentZoo readers might want to know more about the thinking that went into its production.
From the client side, Kentaro Katsube, UNIQLO’s General Manager for Global Web Business says that,
Web-based communication is always evanescent. The effect disappears quickly. Take banner ads, for example. They may grab your attention. But as soon as they disappear, so does any response to them. That started us thinking about how to create less evanescent communication; that was the starting point. We also wanted to create a site from which we could always be transmitting new information. Trying to address those two issues simultaneously led to the idea of using blog parts as media.
The producer, MONSTERULTRA’s Takaharu Hattori, was thinking, “If we can develop this properly, then we can reuse the software. So I wanted to produce the best possible product right from the start, without worrying too much about profit.” Talking about how problematic a totally new idea can seem, he continues,
At the start, Kodama and I had agreed that the dancers should be non-Japanese, men and women, natural seeming. Screening had already begun, but we were only able to assemble eight individuals, and all just made jerky motions. As dancers they were horrible. The moment I saw them, I knew that it was back to the drawing board. The whole budget and schedule had to be redone. Then, after more trial and error, we settled on an original dance performed by four Japanese sisters. I recall that, on the first day of shooting, when I saw them dancing with such exquisite rhythm in that beautiful light, Tanaka, Kodama, and I all said, “This could be a winner at Cannes.”
The director, Caviar Ltd.’s Yuichi Kodama, says
In reality, UNIQLOCK isn’t interactive. It’s all one-way. That may be because I do so much music video. The concept embodied in UNIQLOCK is a 24-hour music video. So I asked myself, what is a video that you’d keep on watching? What sort of music would it have? What other qualities? My thinking started there.
Projective Inc’s Koichi Tanaka, who came up with the idea of using blog parts says,
There is no end to the things to which this idea applies. If this were TV, for example, it would be like being able to edit broadcasts and to create one’s own broadcasting code. Not just creative expression, it affects the whole idea of communication. Even in the modes of transmission and reception, the invisible parts of the project, it reveals infinite possibilities. If we pursue them, the interactive framework will become wider and wider.
What they all emphasize, however, is how a team of seasoned professionals, all dedicated to producing the best possible work came together and pushed each other to a level no one had ever reached before.
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