Hasta La Gadget!

While passing through Shinjuku station last Sunday I happened upon a neat sampling gimmick on one of the large poster ads. Two workmen were literally sticking free plastic packages in rows all over the billboard for passing consumers to peel off and take home.

The ad itself was for a manga called Itsuka Tenma no Kurousagi and the plastic sets each contained a mini sample of the book. The staff told me they replenished the samples four times a day, though Sunday marked the end of the campaign. They seemed to vanish quickly; returning a little while later all the samples had been taken.

Part of the Fantasia Bunko series from publisher Fujimishobo targeting adolescent readers — though most of the people I saw claimed the samples were adults — the book is half manga, half novel, and actually contains good old text pages too.