Hasta La Gadget!

Our friends over at CyberMedia have written up a great post on Nintendo’s new Wii-no-Ma service, which looks like it has a pretty good chance of revolutionizing content delivery in Japan.

As it is right now, most Japanese are basically watching the same handful of terrestrial stations, but the proliferation of Wii consoles in Japanese homes combined with its intuitive family-friendliness make them ripe as platform for selling traditional media content other than games.

Each family member (up to 8, which is a lot) can create their own avatar in the system, which also allows the service to better target individual users for ads and development issues. Wii-no-Ma was created along with advertising giant Dentsu which is surely looking for a new way to reach folks who are in front of their screens but not watching television.

‘Wii no ma’ is free-of-charge but has an implemented advertisement system. In order not to bother watchers with colorful, blinking pop-up ads like on PC or mobile sites Nintendo created a new form of advertisement. No advertisement is shown on the screen unless the user actively chooses so. After watching video programs on ‘Wii-no-Ma’, users are guided to ‘会社の間’ (’Kaisha no Ma’ – ‘The Companies’ Room’) an advertising platform from sponsor companies. There are twelve screens in ‘Kaisha no ma’, Each of them can be utilized by companies to communicate with the customers in ways like casting videos, asking questionnaires, giving out vouchers or delivering free samples to the household.

For the whole skinny on Wii-no-Ma and what Nintendo’s up to, check out the full post at Cybermedia.

Finally got out to see the gigantic 30 meter “scale model” Gundam out in Odaiba last night, just taking the one photo here along with some live-streaming via Qik (below). I gotta admit, the thing is pretty darn cool and realistic looking. Took a while to figure out where it was exactly, but soon spotted a group of overweight, SLR-toting otaku and followed them over.

Danny’s site has much more on the figure-lover’s dream model, while Pink Tentacle has some great nightshots as well.

There’s a lot that can be done with PET bottle shapes, from sexier versions to the manipulated artistic pieces below. The bottles can communicate ingredients, emotion, or positive effects on the body purely by the bottle design and shape.

New from Coca-Cola Japan, l LOHAS is jumping in on the Eco bandwagon with a bottled water that makes an environmental stand (at least marketing-wise) with its bottle design that twists up neatly into a 12 gram piece of plastic that is said to be 40% less than other PET bottles.

The marketing push makes the consumption process into three easy steps: Buy the water, Drink up, Twist up and dispose. Not too different from most other drinks, except for the twisting part which makes the waste noticeably smaller than your average PET bottle. While it may not make a tremendous difference in terms of waste (though it’s certainly space-saving), it does lend itself to a certain spirit of ecology that is making its way into Japanese society.

We’ve written before about Taspo, the RFID-chipped ID card that allows “of age” (20 or older) smokers to get their smokes through any of the nations 420,000 tobacco vending machines. Mostly the campaign has been a disaster for folks who own vending machines, a boom for convenience stores (where you don’t need the cards), and and a burden for smokers who just want to buy a pack without registering themselves with Big Brother.

Taspo originally began their campaign to get people to sign up by providing application packets at vending machines. These required applicants to submit copies of identification, fill out a form, and provide pictures in specific sizes before mailing it all in. When this didn’t work, they began to set up stalls in conventions and train stations (like this one) to get folks signed up without having to pay for a picture.

Clearly, this hasn’t worked either, as a Taspo service center has even opened up in Yoyogi to provide instant ID checks and card creation within 30 minutes.

Out of 27 million smokers in Japan, only 33.7% have signed up for the card, a significant amount if you consider that the rest have nearly no chance to use vending machines at all. In fact, convenience store sales have jumped to record highs in the last year thanks to the “Taspo Boom” in the midst of recession.

Going by purely anecdotal evidence and personal experience, even the heaviest smokers want nothing to do with the card. For most, however, it’s not a privacy issue, but one of pride: They don’t want an official “smoking license”, complete with a picture of themselves, to buy something that is their choice. In order to protect a small minority (teenagers) the rest of society must bear the burden of Taspo.

If tobacco makers are actually interested in selling their products and not just submitting to what will surely become complete regulation, they would be embracing vending machines with facial recognition, rather than making their customers file with the authorities. Of course, facial recognition doesn’t always work, but it’s a relatively non-invasive way to solve a problem that isn’t such a big deal to begin with.

In the meantime, convenience stores should beware: Increased sales in your sector mean that you’re next on the chopping block. Expect a full-on Taspo reader integrated into cash registers in no time.

In a campaign for Hajime Chaka, the beverage company makes clever use of this staple of urban life.

To commemorate the two-year anniversary of its “Hajime Chaka” tea drink, Coca-Cola Japan has launched an innovative advertising campaign to take over city taxi cab seat belts. Safety belts in 200 cabs around Tokyo and Osaka will be branded with the slogan, “Every Day Weight Support Hajime Chaka” until mid-June.

The feted beverage is billed as a “healthy green tea” using 100% domestic tea and containing zero calories. The use of seat belts is meant to accentuate the discomfort or self-consciousness one might feel belting in a hefty “metabo” waistline. Metabo is the Japanese way of saying “metabolic syndrome,” which is said to mostly effect salarymen—just the sort who might be taking a taxi home after an evening drinking session with co-workers.

Standard promotional material for Hajime Chaka features a traditional-looking warrior fighting metabo, another appeal to the middle-aged male company employee seeking to feel better about his body and energy.

Trend Potential
Public transportation in Tokyo is notoriously plastered with advertisements and companies compete to cover new—and eye-catching—ground. The Hajime Chaka campaign goes a step further, by drawing on a physical and emotional sensation that the target consumer presumably feels upon using one of these forms of transportation—and encountering the well-placed advertisement.

Via J-Cast