The 90-second opus, a world away from the 15-second ads that take up the majority of airtime on Japanese television, was born out of an internal competition at Dentsu to come up with ideas that would expand clients' horizons of what advertising is capable of.
"Maybe next time, clients will understand and get to know the power of creativity, or what people really like to see regarding their brands," explains Yukio Nakayama, senior creative director at Dentsu Knowledge Institute Establishment. "Otherwise storyboards can be powerless. They are just pieces of paper."
The young creatives behind the Ajinomoto Stadium spot feel their victory at AdFest shows the kind of work they can do, if only given the chance, while Dentsu's senior management has a longer term goal -- to nurture a working relationship between the agency and its clients that enables more creative work to become the norm rather than the exception. Winning awards is nice, but establishing the environment that leads to awards is more important, Nakayama says.
Much of Dentsu's mighty machinery is geared towards producing Japan's staple 15-second spots, still a lucrative source of income for Japanese agencies, but in recent years Dentsu has also started to tweak its internal structure in order to stimulate more freewheeling thinking.
This process began in earnest about three years ago, with the creation of a special horizontal unit designed as a sounding board for the sharpest thinking from within each of Dentsu's divisions, along with the setting up of wholly-owned but semi-autonomous hotshops within the agency framework. These act as testbeds for new thinking, by giving selected creatives and planners greater freedom.
The reforms are gathering pace. Dentsu has started inviting novelists and poets, artists and concert masters to give its creatives a perspective on the raw component of communication -- words, sounds and images -- from outside the narrow confines of advertising. The agency is also planning to set up a corporate university that will engender creative thinking in all staff on the payroll, not just those in the creative departments. There is currently little need for creative thinking in Japan's modern advertising climate, much the same today as it was a generation ago. New communication channels, such as the world wide web and cable TV, have yet to make a significant impact on the daily lives of most Japanese people, leaving mass media with both a reach and an authority that is virtually unique for a developed market.
On TV, most ads still follow tried and tested formulas that companies have been using for years -- celebrity endorsements or visually arresting graphics as shortcuts to instant differentiation in cluttered ad breaks. Nevertheless the sort of initiatives implemented by Dentsu show that the agency feels Japan is changing.
"To keep winning pitches," Nakayama says, "we have to see a little further than the present day." Fifteen years of economic hardship has left its mark on Japanese society. Companies have stopped waiting for the good times to return and have started re-evaluating their advertising as a way of breaking through the deadlock. Firms operating in areas that have experienced the most severe competition, such as the automotive sector, are often in the vanguard of trying out new ways of communicating with consumers.
Meanwhile, the claim by terrestrial TV and daily newspapers to provide access to all sections of Japanese society is slowly being challenged ,as traditional media consumption among Japan's teenagers and 20-somethings shows signs of declining. The advent of personal video recorders giving TV viewers the power to edit TVCs from their lives provides a new yardstick by which companies can measure the effectiveness of their advertising, at a time when media budgets are under closer scrutiny than ever.
"I think there are fundamental changes happening now," says Andrew Meaden, CEO of media agency MindShare Japan. "Far more clients are looking very closely at what they spend and with whom, and re-examining their agency relationships as a result. Many of these changes, though, are attempts to maximise value in existing mainstream channels, rather than necessarily introduce new ones into the schedule."
Japan's continued recession has cultivated not just a new sense of value, allowing shoppers to browse in both exclusive emporiums and cut-price ¥100 shops without any seeming contradiction, but also an interest in the concept behind many of the goods they are buying, according to director of strategic planning at McCann Erickson Japan, Dave McCaughan.
Japan may not be the only market where Apple's iPod has captured public imagination, but it is pretty much the only country where widespread interest extends to the iPod's designer too. "This is the only market in the world where people get into this stuff," McCaughan observes.
Companies have been quick to seize upon this phenomenon -- Sony signed up a clutch of celebrated designers to put their names to a limited edition range of mobile phones -- but they are also using it as a prompt to start developing relationships with consumers with customer relationship management initiatives (CRM).
The conditions are right for CRM to take off -- Japan's traditionally reticent consumers are becoming more willing to share information and engage with companies, while the increasing popularity of new communication devices such as internet-enabled phones and PCs powered with broadband allows companies more opportunities for interaction.
Dentsu's main rival and Japan's second largest agency, Hakuhodo, has combined two formerly separate creative and marketing planning units as part of its recent restructure of its operations in order to facilitate the provision of integrated, after signing up two academics from the US, Professor Don Schultz and Adjunct Professor Lisa Fortini-Campbell, to advise Hakuhodo and help devise new systems of integrated communications.
President of JWT Japan, Ambar Brahmachary, argues that spending on TV is on the verge of a precipitous decline as more and more brands discover the virtues of integrated communication, pointing to examples such as Nestlé, which has dispensed with television promotions for its Kit Kat brand in favour of branded entertainment and online initiatives that give the brand a chance to start a dialogue with its customers. "We're increasingly finding that you can give up spending on TV dramatically if you can still attract and hold the attention of your target group," Brahmachary contends.
Nevertheless, examples of bold marketing in Japan still appear to be limited in the main to brands challenging the status quo, rather than from any general sea change in attitudes to marketing on the ground.
Companies such as Dentsu are adopting a keizen approach -- introducing gradual rather than overnight change -- enabling them to prepare for a future that is being shaped by underlying currents in Japanese society, while still catering to the established ways of doing things.
TV ads such as the one for Ajinomoto Stadium may not be much in demand today, but Dentsu believes to continue with the same formulas that have been successful in the past would be fatal. "We have to invent the way to protect ideas," Nagayama says. "Newborn ideas are like a baby, very weak, but the baby is our future."
The young creatives behind the Ajinomoto Stadium spot feel their victory at AdFest shows the kind of work they can do, if only given the chance, while Dentsu's senior management has a longer term goal -- to nurture a working relationship between the agency and its clients that enables more creative work to become the norm rather than the exception. Winning awards is nice, but establishing the environment that leads to awards is more important, Nakayama says.
Much of Dentsu's mighty machinery is geared towards producing Japan's staple 15-second spots, still a lucrative source of income for Japanese agencies, but in recent years Dentsu has also started to tweak its internal structure in order to stimulate more freewheeling thinking.
This process began in earnest about three years ago, with the creation of a special horizontal unit designed as a sounding board for the sharpest thinking from within each of Dentsu's divisions, along with the setting up of wholly-owned but semi-autonomous hotshops within the agency framework. These act as testbeds for new thinking, by giving selected creatives and planners greater freedom.
The reforms are gathering pace. Dentsu has started inviting novelists and poets, artists and concert masters to give its creatives a perspective on the raw component of communication -- words, sounds and images -- from outside the narrow confines of advertising. The agency is also planning to set up a corporate university that will engender creative thinking in all staff on the payroll, not just those in the creative departments. There is currently little need for creative thinking in Japan's modern advertising climate, much the same today as it was a generation ago. New communication channels, such as the world wide web and cable TV, have yet to make a significant impact on the daily lives of most Japanese people, leaving mass media with both a reach and an authority that is virtually unique for a developed market.
On TV, most ads still follow tried and tested formulas that companies have been using for years -- celebrity endorsements or visually arresting graphics as shortcuts to instant differentiation in cluttered ad breaks. Nevertheless the sort of initiatives implemented by Dentsu show that the agency feels Japan is changing.
"To keep winning pitches," Nakayama says, "we have to see a little further than the present day." Fifteen years of economic hardship has left its mark on Japanese society. Companies have stopped waiting for the good times to return and have started re-evaluating their advertising as a way of breaking through the deadlock. Firms operating in areas that have experienced the most severe competition, such as the automotive sector, are often in the vanguard of trying out new ways of communicating with consumers.
Meanwhile, the claim by terrestrial TV and daily newspapers to provide access to all sections of Japanese society is slowly being challenged ,as traditional media consumption among Japan's teenagers and 20-somethings shows signs of declining. The advent of personal video recorders giving TV viewers the power to edit TVCs from their lives provides a new yardstick by which companies can measure the effectiveness of their advertising, at a time when media budgets are under closer scrutiny than ever.
"I think there are fundamental changes happening now," says Andrew Meaden, CEO of media agency MindShare Japan. "Far more clients are looking very closely at what they spend and with whom, and re-examining their agency relationships as a result. Many of these changes, though, are attempts to maximise value in existing mainstream channels, rather than necessarily introduce new ones into the schedule."
Japan's continued recession has cultivated not just a new sense of value, allowing shoppers to browse in both exclusive emporiums and cut-price ¥100 shops without any seeming contradiction, but also an interest in the concept behind many of the goods they are buying, according to director of strategic planning at McCann Erickson Japan, Dave McCaughan.
Japan may not be the only market where Apple's iPod has captured public imagination, but it is pretty much the only country where widespread interest extends to the iPod's designer too. "This is the only market in the world where people get into this stuff," McCaughan observes.
Companies have been quick to seize upon this phenomenon -- Sony signed up a clutch of celebrated designers to put their names to a limited edition range of mobile phones -- but they are also using it as a prompt to start developing relationships with consumers with customer relationship management initiatives (CRM).
The conditions are right for CRM to take off -- Japan's traditionally reticent consumers are becoming more willing to share information and engage with companies, while the increasing popularity of new communication devices such as internet-enabled phones and PCs powered with broadband allows companies more opportunities for interaction.
Dentsu's main rival and Japan's second largest agency, Hakuhodo, has combined two formerly separate creative and marketing planning units as part of its recent restructure of its operations in order to facilitate the provision of integrated, after signing up two academics from the US, Professor Don Schultz and Adjunct Professor Lisa Fortini-Campbell, to advise Hakuhodo and help devise new systems of integrated communications.
President of JWT Japan, Ambar Brahmachary, argues that spending on TV is on the verge of a precipitous decline as more and more brands discover the virtues of integrated communication, pointing to examples such as Nestlé, which has dispensed with television promotions for its Kit Kat brand in favour of branded entertainment and online initiatives that give the brand a chance to start a dialogue with its customers. "We're increasingly finding that you can give up spending on TV dramatically if you can still attract and hold the attention of your target group," Brahmachary contends.
Nevertheless, examples of bold marketing in Japan still appear to be limited in the main to brands challenging the status quo, rather than from any general sea change in attitudes to marketing on the ground.
Companies such as Dentsu are adopting a keizen approach -- introducing gradual rather than overnight change -- enabling them to prepare for a future that is being shaped by underlying currents in Japanese society, while still catering to the established ways of doing things.
TV ads such as the one for Ajinomoto Stadium may not be much in demand today, but Dentsu believes to continue with the same formulas that have been successful in the past would be fatal. "We have to invent the way to protect ideas," Nagayama says. "Newborn ideas are like a baby, very weak, but the baby is our future."
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