Quotes of the Day
During a business trip to Europe five years ago, Yasumichi Oka, the founder and creative director of Japan's hottest boutique advertising firm, had a disheartening realization: he was a failure. He was then a creative director at Dentsu, Japan's largest and most powerful advertising agency, and such self-doubt was not usually part of his job description. But, he confesses, he had always felt a gnawing dissatisfaction. After his ideas made their way through the massive combine that is Dentsu, he explains, the finished product almost always felt disappointingly watered down. In Europe, however, he discovered how differently many prestigious Western firms approach their work. For some smaller ad shops, the quality of the product, the cleverness of the advertising itself, comes first—and business imperatives come second. "There, creatives like me were treated with much respect for their work, which was unheard of in Japan," the 46-year-old says between puffs on his cigarette. "And some agencies focused on the creative side only. I thought this business style should come to Japan. And I thought I should be the first one to do it."
Suitably inspired, Oka returned home, quit Dentsu ("No one quits Dentsu," he says with a laugh), recruited away three of his most talented colleagues and founded Tugboat, Japan's first purely creative advertising agency. Today, Tugboat is one of the country's most-sought-after and -award-laden shops, with a client list that includes Kirin Beverage, East Japan Railway Co. and TV network tbs. In the process, Oka has also became a leading figure among a small but growing clutch of quixotic Japanese art directors and designers seeking to escape the orbit of the country's surprisingly confining advertising industry. With a focus on artistic control and attention to quality, refugees from larger firms are clustering in Tokyo's trendy Minami Aoyama district and founding their own two- and three-person firms with names like Tugboat, Samurai and Future Text. Though only loosely affiliated, this new generation of independents is nonetheless unified by one goal: to rouse the world's second-largest ad market from its creative torpor.
As a result, most Japanese agencies consider themselves primarily ad-space brokers who throw in the less tangible, harder-to-price creative product as practically a freebie. Says Kashiwa Sato, who quit Hakuhodo in 2000 after 11 years as an art director to found Samurai, "Perhaps only 10% of the budget is spared for creation, despite the fact that the ads are what actually communicates with the consumers." (In the U.S., the amount allocated to creative can easily top 20%.) Critics say this lack of focus on content has led to a pervasive complacency and predictability to Japanese advertising. Even a casual perusal of Japanese media bears this out, revealing an over-reliance on hackneyed advertising tropes: the celebrity endorsing beer, the model pitching skin cream and adorable cartoon characters shilling everything from consumer loans to English lessons.
As Japan's economic funk lingers into its 13th year, however, such formulas are proving less filling and not so great-tasting for increasingly selective consumers. That, in turn, is making advertisers more receptive to the new ideas and fresh approaches being offered by the scrappy upstarts.
In 2000, for example, Tugboat added a new twist to the typical celebrity endorsement with its line of ads featuring actor Tadanobu Asano for Xerox color printers. For part of the campaign, the company created posters covered with small stickers that also doubled as game pieces for a prize giveaway. As passersby removed the stickers, the ads were slowly revealed, creating an evolving, almost organic work. (The ads almost sparked riots when they were unveiled in Tokyo train stations, as crowds crushed in to get their hands on a game piece.) Then there were the spots in which a black-clad Matrix-like bad guy pursued a frazzled businessman who just wanted to enjoy Suntory Boss, his favorite brand of canned coffee. Sounds fairly standard, but here was the hook: as the series progressed through 16 linked episodes, different companies—ranging from record labels to cable channels to mobile-phone operators—started blending their own product placements into the ads, sparking a trend toward quirky intercompany collaborative ads that continues to this day. And working with Samurai, Tugboat promoted a recent album by boy band SMAP, not with the expected heartthrob photos of the singers plastered everywhere but with a bold interpretation of the band's logo in blues, yellows and reds printed on a seemingly endless array of objects, from paper fans, Swatch watches and Lego toys to street banners and even buses.
As businesses, these upstart agencies seem to thrive more on the kick of killer campaigns than the revenue they generate. Despite all the critical acclaim, most of these new firms are still just barely scraping by. Oka acknowledges that Tugboat sometimes experiences months with no income at all, but he says it's worth it. "Unlike at the big agencies, we only accept requests that match our conditions. This freedom of choice itself is a luxury. We never have to lower our standards." But even with all this fancy talk about integrity, independence and purity, Oka and his fellow travelers harbor few illusions about the extent of their influence and the lasting power of the burgeoning creative-agency movement. Oka certainly doesn't think Tugboat will ever topple the Dentsu-Hakuhodo juggernaut and doubts that he can spark an industrywide revolution. "Sometimes, I have a feeling we will wind up being seen as weirdos, not innovators," he says. All he really hopes, he reveals through another puff of smoke, is to be able to carve enough space in the industry for firms like his to thrive in the big guys' shadows. "It's up to us independents to prove that our quality is high and that high quality can sell," he says. "If we can do that, it would send a wake-up signal to the whole industry."
- Jim Frederick | Tokyo
- Small, fresh firms are waging a creative revolution in the ad industry