1) Case Study : Driving Customers to Store Fronts with Attention-getting Popular Characters
2) Industry Report: Mobile Marketing Ad Forum 2007
3)Mobile Research: 93.2% of users subscribe to mobile mail magazines
4) Carrier Trend: Fuji Television and Recruit Establish a One-seg Affiliate Company
5) Japan Cellular Subscriber Data

Starting on May 19 of this year, Seven-Eleven Japan kicked off its Seven-Eleven Loyal Customer Fair with a gift campaign featuring Hello Kitty stuffed dolls. "Although males ages 20 to 30 years old make up the core user base of convenience stores, this campaign was developed with a special consciousness of our female customers with the aim of securing new customers," commented Seven-Eleven Sales Promotion Division Spokesperson, Miyuki Sawada. As part of the campaign, the company prepared over one hundred different varieties of Hello Kitty dolls and placed them in every shop.

The dolls were lined up in a row in an eye-catching way in the center of the store so as to heighten interest in the campaign among the customers.

During the campaign period, customers making a purchase of over 700 yen were allowed to enter a drawing for a doll. Customers with winning tickets could exchange their coupon on the spot for the Hello Kitty doll of their choice.

Customers were able to see the most popular Hello Kitty dolls disappearing from the shelves in the order of their popularity, which also increased their sense of participation in the campaign.

Customers were allowed to sign up for the drawing in three ways: via PC, mobile or in-store. The application flyers listed not only the PC address for the campaign site but also featured a 2d barcode that provided easy access to the site via mobile phone. In particular, the 2d barcode was very effective in increasing participation in the campaign by mobile users and contributed greatly to a higher response level. In addition, the campaign helped drive sign-ups, both from PC and mobile phones, to the Seven-Eleven mail magazine club, also helping to increase its membership. In order to get out word of the campaign, Seven-Eleven made use of NTT DoCoMo's information distribution service known as "Message Free", which enables the direct targeting via mobile of segments based on gender, age and region.

Information about the campaign was sent to the phones of one million females from their teens through their 40's living around Japan in the vicinity of Seven-Eleven shops.

This made for an extremely effective method of raising awareness of the campaign. Also helping to drive the promotion was word-of-mouth communication among female customers, which, as hoped, resulted in a conspicuous presence of female customers in the shops.

All the stuffed Hello Kitty dolls vanished from the stores in about ten days.

Furthermore, in order to participate in the drawing, customers made additional purchases, driving up sales.

Speaking of future mobile campaigns, Seven-Eleven's Sawada commented, "Although it has only been a year since we launched our mobile site, we are already expecting that it will prove an effective means of promotion even in comparison to our PC site. In the future, we will be looking even more closely to identify the different strengths of both the PC and mobile sites, as well as the best way to make use of both of them."

On November 15, the Mobile Ad Forum (MAF) 2007 was held at the La Foret Museum in Roppongi (Minato, Tokyo). The conference focused on mobile advertising and market trends. This was the fifth MAF to be held and was organized by the three companies D2 Communications, Mediba, and Japan Mobile Communications. The event was attended by approximately 850 people, including members of the advertising industry and corporate communications, with enthusiastic audiences for each panel session.

In 2006, there was a significant increase in the number of companies establishing their own public mobile sites. With regard to this, this year's MAF was focused heavily on the subject of how to position and evaluate the role of mobile in a corporate communication strategy. The event was broken into three major panel sessions. The first speaker was Hideaki Mano of the Japan Advertisers' Association Web Advertising Study Group. According to Mano, "Accompanying changes in the media environment is what we would call a paradox of ripeness, in which dead products become hot products on the front lines of retail. Furthermore, with the differences between mixed media and cross media, web 2.0 and mobile 2.0 becoming increasingly clearer, companies have to discover how to position mobile and get the most out of it."

The second panel was titled Real Case Studies: Using Mobile as a Hub for Corporate Communications and featured speakers from Nisshin Foods, Nomura Real Estate and the Recruit Company who reported on projects underway at their respective companies.

Nisshin Foods presented on its Cup Noodle and Guu-ta noodle products, which feature a QR code on the inside of the packaging lid and which serves as a kind of notification that the customer is actually eating their noodles. According to Chiyo Tohkaku of Nisshin Corporate Communications, "The QR Code lets us know how the customer is making contact with the ad at the instant that they are eating." Another such mechanism was used the Yakisoba noodle product UFO, in which customers could not learn the punchline to a mobile cartoon without accessing the campaign site, greatly driving accesses. Nisshin said that plans to put to work the results of these experiments in its future communication activities.

Nomura Real Estate Urbannet started using mobile in January of 2004 as a means to deal with increasing competition from PC websites to secure potential customers. "At the time, there was opposition from people who said that there weren't any people looking for homes via their mobiles, but when we launched the site we were surprised by the strong response", said Masaaki Hasegawa, of Nomura's Nomu.com Promotion Department. The concept for the launch of the Nomu.com mobile site in September of 2005 was the thoughtful salesman. "By assigning part of sales activities to mobile, we could increase efficiency, save time for the customer, and attempt to increase their level of satisfaction."

The introduction of web and mobile had a major impact on the Recruit's methods of marketing to its customers. In October 2006, it launched Japan's largest scale dining site, HotPepper.jp. At present, the service works on all 4 operator networks in Japan. According to Akinori Shibuya of Recruit's Internet Marketing Division, "Mobile media is well positioned as a coupon holder, for F1 media, for outdoor use, and is used for promotion in four ways: to collect customers, to raise awareness, for virals, and for cross-media campaigns. Among these uses, the company has been especially aware of virals, and made vigorous use of decorated mail, Toruca cards, and send-to-a-friend functionality. In my personal opinion, controlling mobile mail means controlling mobile."

Following the three presentations, D2 Communications Akihisa Fujita came on as moderator on a panel discussion titled "Outlook for Mobile in Corporate Communications Strategy." In response to Fujita's questions, the three panelists selected the icons projected on the screen which most closely matched their thinking. Making reference to the content of their presentations, Fujita closed with the conclusion that "Not using mobile is a lost opportunity!"

Next, the term "W-hub communications" was introduced as a keyword for the 21st century. Fujita then closed the session, remarking that "This means not just the PC, and not just the mobile, but that since these are always sitting beside the customer, that we can plan a more definite communication strategy. It is crucial that we reconsider our 4C thinking in order to meet the challenge."

At the conclusion of the event, the three hosting companies announced their commitment in the coming year to pursue a 3-pronged broad approach. This means the three companies will package and provide all types of mobile advertising products, including providing the planning and production of tie-up pages for them as well. These products will be rich, cross-platform, with maximum expressive power, and will also be customizable, making for a very exciting future.

Mediba concluded with comments by President Yoshiaki Kobayashi, who summed up the year's progress in mobile advertising and the opportunities highlighted during the course of the forum.

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Result of Survey : September 12 - 19, 2006 (1 week)
Respondents 4,987 i-mode users
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The following is a survey conducted on mobile coupon usage in Japan. It was conducted by the Internet-based DTR (Desktop Research) service INFO PLANT Co., LTD (Head office: Nakano-ku, Tokyo, Japan; Masaki OTANI, President, http://www.info-plant.com). Data was collected via a nationwide survey of mobile phone users from the Toku-suru menu on NTT DoCoMo i-mode, and based on valid responses from 4,987 users during a one-week period between September 12 - 19, 2006 (1 Week). InfoPlant is dedicated to the expansion of research using mobile phones.

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<Survey Results Overview>
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93.2% of all respondents had subscribed to receive mail magazines on their phones. 39.6% of them have signed up to 3-5 different ones. 93.2% of all respondents have signed up to receive one mail magazine on their mobile phones from provider companies. The largest portion of the users have signed up for 3-5 mail magazines (39.6%), followed by 6-9 (19.1%), and 1-2 (16.2%). In addition, if one combines users who answered 10-14 and over 15, the total of those signed up to receive over 10 is 18.3%. Looked at by gender and age, over 20% of those subscribed to over 10 mail magazines were males and females in their 40’s, which was higher than any other age group (Table 1).

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90.2% receive gift campaign information

90.2% of mail magazine subscribers receive gift campaign information provided by companies. This makes up the most popular category of mail magazine, followed by information about new products and services (67.9%), and coupons (56.7%). Looked at by gender, women outnumbered men with regard to bargain discount information (males: 33.7%, females: 47%) and coupons (males: 48.9%, females: 61.2%).

Looked at by gender and age, a higher number of males and females receiving gift campaign information were in the older age groups, and younger age groups tended to be signed up for coupons. In addition, younger women were the most likely to be looking at bargain discount information (Table 2).

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44.1% think mail magazines should come once a week

When asked how frequently a mail magazine should be sent to a phone by a company, the most popular response was once per week (44.1%), followed by 2-3 times per week (25.4%), and once per day (17.7%). Looked at by gender, more males than females responded they preferred 2-3 times per week (males: 28.8%, females: 23.5%). Looked at by gender and age, most of those favoring one time per week were men and women in the higher age groups. Furthermore, those preferring to receive mail magazines once per day tended to be women in the younger age groups. (Table 3)

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6.5% find mail magazines "very useful", while 65.4% find them "somewhat useful", for a total of 71.9% of all respondents finding them useful

When asked about the usefulness of mail magazines sent by companies, the largest number of respondents said they were "somewhat useful" (65.4%), followed by "not very useful" (26%), and "very useful" (65.4%). In addition, the combined number of those answering "very useful" and "somewhat useful" brings the total of those calling them useful to 71.9% (Table 4).

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Survey Questions

1) How many mail magazines are you signed up for? (Select one)

2) What sort of content do you like to read in mail magazines? (Multiple choices possible)

3) In your opinion, how frequently should a mail magazine be sent to your phone? (Choose one)

4) Which of the following describes your thinking about mail magazines? (Choose one)

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Survey Method: Open Survey on the i-mode Tokusuru menu
Target Audience: i-mode Users Nationwide
Survey Period
Valid Reponses: 4,987 (Male: 36.7% Female: 63.3%)
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Q1) How many company mail magazines are you signed up for? (Select one)

 <Table 1> = By Gender/Age =

Q2) What sort of content do you like to read in mail magazines? (Multiple choices possible)
<Table 2> = By Gender =

Q3) In your opinion, how frequently should a mail magazine be sent to your phone? (Choose one)
<Table 3> = By Gender/Age =

Q4) Which of the following describes your thinking about mail magazines? (Choose one)
<Table 4> = By Gender/Age =

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About the Survey Sites
i-mode sites: Tokusuru Menu
Access method: i-menu top page -> Tokusuru Menu
For more information, please contact D2C Communications at press@d2c.co.jp
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Fuji Television and Recruit Establish a One-seg Affiliate Company

Fuji Television and Recruit have agreed to establish a joint affiliate company called Kone-Tele to manage the platform required to deliver their new One-seg broadcasting service.

Recruit has delivered a number of cross-media products, including the free papers R25 and L25 as well as mass media internet and mobile publications. Now, it is also targeting One-seg as a new media. In addition, Fuji Television is attempting to develop a new business model combining broadcasting and digital communications. Kone-Tele will provide information services via the One-seg data broadcast segment. It will display key words associated with the content of programs that it draws from electronic program guides and offer information associated with them. It is planning to offer information ranging from dining out to events, concerts, travel, and shopping.

One-seg Mobile Phone User Trend Survey

A joint survey was carried out to study users with One-seg capable mobile phones by four companies: Asatsu DK, Dentsu, Hakuhodo, and DY Media Partners. The survey was carried out via the internet and targeted a user sampling of 290 people living within 30 km of the Tokyo metropolitan area. In this study, the four companies investigated the environment and positioning of One-seg broadcasting
services. In order to get a strong grasp of usage patterns for One-seg, they plan to carry out the survey continuously into the future.

From the Survey Findings:

- One-seg mobile phone users are males age 35-49 (approximately 40%).
- Over 80% of One-seg mobile phone users watch One-seg more than once per week.
- Average viewing time per day of One-seg (average of Thursday and Friday) is 35 minutes.
- Factors behind the purchase of One-seg handsets tend to be “wanted a One-seg mobile phone” (60%) and “it was time to get a new phone” (50%).

Adwise and Zappallas Tie Up on Mobile Advertising Business

Adwise and Zappallas are joining forces to operate general mobile sites and also carry out mobile ad campaigns. The sites include fortune telling sites that can be operated for free and target F1 user groups so as to attract female customers. The sites will target a membership of 50,000 users in the first six months. Both companies will make use of their respective strengths, with Adwise utilizing its know-how in internet advertising Zappallas using its expertise in the content business. The companies will collaborate in the future as well on sites that can be operated using advertising revenue.

Here is the latest Japan cellular subscriber data for your reference.
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