Getting deeper into Tohato's snack food wargame in Japan, this is a BIG advertising concept

I really love the web. I posted about Tohato's World's Worst War and how it won an award for the best mobile advertising campaign. And I said it was a great story, and I'd get back to it. Well, before I had even had time to think about trying to find their info, a good friend who specializes on the Japanese mobile market posted a story about it. No surprise, that was our friend Lars Cosh-Ishii over at Wireless Watch Japan. The best part is that he found an english-language video clip describing the game. Its EVEN more COOL than I thought !!

So lets dig a bit deeper. First the big picture. Tohato makes snack foods in Japan, potato chips, that kind of stuff, in bags. They launched two new spicy snacks in October 2007, the "Tyrant Habanero Burning Hell Hot", and the "Satan Jorquia Bazooka Deadly Hot" (yeah, gotta love 'em Japanese and their Western style branding. I don't know if I'd have thought of "bazooka" deadly hot, but hey, why not. I wouldn't want to be hit by a bazooka..)



Then Tohato used Japanese ad agency Hakuhodo to create the launch campaign for the new snacks. And what a campaign they designed, indeed. They designed a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG). Not only that, but their game ran on mobile phones - another relatively rare phenomenon in the MMOG space, most MMOGs like World of Warcraft, CounterStrike and Lineage 2 are designed for personal computers.

Then - the recruitment of the players/gamers/army. Each side recruited an "Evil Army" based on the brand of snack and those who liked that flavour. Gamers could join the Habanero Evil Army, or the Satan Jorquia Evil Army. To sign up, you had to buy a bag of the snacks and scan the 2D barcode with the cameraphone (83% of Japanese already use the 2D Barcode feature, so this is quite commonplace in Japan today, certainly among the youth, who were the target audience, classic Generation C for Community)

Once in the game, gamers were encouraged to recruit friends to join that Evil Army. The recruiter would gain promotions in the army depending on new recruits, and their recruits. A classic pyramid scheme and remarkably viral. A private was promoted to sergeant, then promoted to lieutanent, then to captain, etc..

The armies had 31 battlefields to win the World's Worst War. These had again really appealing names for this generation, like Sweet Sucker's Execution Hall, the City of Anal Torture, and Shadap Bay. Remember the target audience, this is exactly the kinds of names that are cool to them..

The battles were scheduled for 4 AM - when there is least traffic in the network. Obviously this meant the Gen-C members needed to be up at that hour, so probably consumed more of the snacks at that part of the night. They generated enormous traffic, 100,000 page views per day. And the game had a 24 hour news alert service to inform gamers what was going on, who died, which team won the latest battle, who was promoted, etc.



Now, I love this concept in a million different ways. Its clearly interactive and very viral. It is true engagement, in that the users had fun playing with the brand, their characters had shapes in the style of the death masks of the snack of choice, and they had to go and literally fight (and virtually even die) for their preferred brand. Talk about creating passion and involvement. It is clearly capitalizing on many of the the 7th Mass Media benefits, personal (my gaming character on my phone), permanently carried (alerts), always on (4 AM wars), user data (redeeming the 2D coupon) and social context (viral marketing).

It lived in that space between reality and virtuality. And it drove attention and buyers to the new snacks brands. And obviously, it was a totally non-digital brand, that was able to launch a totally digital initiative, fully consistent with its target audience and its passions. Brilliant. The campaign won the "Yellow Pencil" award at the D&AD annual awards. If you'd like to see a short video that describes it in English, go to the Wireless Watch Japan, and follow the story there.

Now, I'd like to find out who won the war (if any of our readers in Japan know, please tell us) and am digging still for more info. Oh, and our congratulations to Hakuhodo, great idea, great execution! This is my fave story right now.

Comments

[Alan Moore]

Tomi,

would not say it is a pyramid scheme, I would say its a smart way of building a community at grass roots, creating inentives, around reputation, authority and recognition.

Great post btw.

Alan

[Voytek Siewierski]

Cannot make up my mind between "Tyrant Habanero Burning Hell Hot", and the "Satan Jorquia Bazooka Deadly Hot"

[david cushman]

Great way of putting a brand into the hands of people likely to influence.
Any idea about its sales success (or otherwise). Market share it grabbed? etc

[Christopher Billich]

Important note: no one actually had to stay up all night to play. You scheduled your moves (as in which base to attack/defend during the next round) in advance, and then the system would spit out the results after.

Players were rewarded with more than 120 collectible wallpapers,for capturing bases, including some very hard to get ones that could only be obtained by players that met a number of objectives.

They actually did three installments of this game between October 2007 and April 2008. By the last installment, the game mechanics had become quite sophisticated, including training your soldier (on site, once a day max.) to boost his powers, rank not only depending on the number of people recruited, but also on battles fought/won etc.

It also featured an intricate system of gaining/losing "information points" by posting strategically relevant information to the own army's BBS and eavesdropping on the other side's conversations, which I thought was pretty cool. You could even defect to the other army if you saw things going downhill for your side.

Wish I had information on the actual campaign results - difficult to find!

Hi Voytek, DC and Christopher

Thanks guys, for stopping by.

Voytek - yeah, I HAVE to buy two bags of both of those snacks the next time I'm in Tokyo. I gotta try them for myself and make my choice. I'm not one for hot spicy snacks, so likely for me it the lesser of two evils. But like your sons, my nephews are big into gaming of course, so I also have to bring a pair of the snacks to Finland to my nephews (and nieces) to try, while I tell them of this "cool" story about Uncle Tomi's work, and gaming on mobile and snack foods in Japan. I can see the two brothers for example immediately picking opposite sides ha-ha..

David - nothing more yet, but am digging into it and having my "spies" ha-ha trying to find more info. One of them is our friend Christopher Billich here, who already gave us a bit more insights..

Christopher. I can't say how happy I am that you could give more info and corrections on this. I am totally in awe of this campaign, and so far all of those experts in mobile that I've shared the story with, have been very impressed by the campaign. Now I have real info much more beyond what was just on that short video clip.

And I'm sure you'll be including this case study in your next report on the Japanese mobile advertising industry, like the one for 2008 that you released - its a great report by the way, for all of our readers, go take a look at www.infinita.co.jp/research. These guys really know what they are writing about.

Thanks for writing

Tomi :-)

[Jareth]

Sadly, the blog echo chamber keeps repeating a katakana mistake.

I have seen this article and another one online showing said videoclip and I have to say that the clip was created/translated by someone guessing at katakana (a common occurrence that leads to many translation errors) and without any basic knowledge of popular hot peppers. The name is not Jorquia, but JOLOKIA. The official Tohato website even says in plain obvious romaji that the product uses the Bhut Jolokia peppers, which are hotter than even the (previously hottest known pepper) Red Savina Habanero peppers used in their regular Tohato Boukun Habanero chips.

Crazy ad campaign though and highly creative.

[Ingrid]

Japan's vending industry responds much quicker to changes in products than the U.S. I think such a campaign would be impossible in the U.S.

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Jareth and Ingrid

Thank you for the comments, will respond to both individually

Jareth - sorry about the mistake in the translation, obviously not my translation, I only repeated what was in the other sources. I do not speak Japanese. I think the big point of the blog was not how spicy the snack is - jolokia spice - but that the campaign was truly an 'engagemnet marketing' campaign and very novel in asking fans to pick sides and form an army... But thanks for the correction.

Ingrid - I hear you, but these are not only vending machine sold snacks, you can buy them at the Seven-Eleven style of convenience stores and the main stream supermarkets etc. That is very similar to the experience in the USA, and the US market has seen lots of rapid changes to given brands in the fast-moving consumer goods segment, so this could very easily be done in the US. Like the long running 'war' between Miller and Miller Light beers, 'tastes great, or less filling' which used to be a big tradition in the Superbowl advertising breaks. (I don't know if this is still true as its years since I lived in the USA). But the idea to take two of your brands and pit them against each other is not revolutionary - the idea to have your fans then form an army to fight in a virtual game, that is truly innovative..

Thank you both for writing. I have to go remove those spam comments here that had appeared, sorry about those.

Tomi Ahonen :-)

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[Jake]

Does anyone know what the sales of the snacks were? How effective in selling these two new flavors was the mobile campaign?

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By the last installment, the game mechanics had become quite sophisticated, including training your soldier (on site, once a day max.) to boost his powers, rank not only depending on the number of people recruited, but also on battles fought/won etc.

It also featured an intricate system of gaining/losing "information points" by posting strategically relevant information to the own army's BBS and eavesdropping on the other side's conversations, which I thought was pretty cool. You could even defect to the other army if you saw things going downhill for your side.

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