Yes, they come again. This time with solid determination and good amount of resources in Tokyo.

NAVER, number one Web search service in Korea has started open beta service for Japanese market.It is their second entry for Japanese market since their first attempt which was ended 2005 due to focus on domestic market, or simply said failed.

They held press conference in their new Tokyo HQ in Osaki for their new search service, http://www.naver.jp/.  Yasuyuki Matsushita of Asiajin interviewed Jun Masuda, Chief Strategist of NAVER Japan for their plans and future.

Compared to current market leaders, Google and Yahoo! which serve tons of search traffics for our daily Internet life, NAVER introduces new concept which combines search functions and popular social bookmarks or recommendation akin to my list on Amazon.com. The idea of NAVER seems like mixture of search, social bookmarks and some SNS in one place.

New NAVER site has cool simple interface with their corporate green color, which is apparently differ from traditional Korean design taste. But under the hood, NAVER integrates key features like search news topics, photos, movies, blogs and consumer generated contents which enables you to gather favorite items on simple collections.

Their clean top page designed in green

You can of course search web but in same time, you can create your favorite list of items (photos, movies, blog, comments and reviews etc which dubbed “matome search” meaning “your collection on search” which you can share or add comments on your designated ID. This function is much similar to social bookmark services with SNS in mind, but NAVER offers more value because you can find someone which has similar preference within NAVER space.

You can create your favorite collection like car you own or your favorite movie star, by sharing these collections, you can reduce noise or garbage in search result which sometimes happen traditional search engine, Mr. Masuda said.

It seems NAVER values more human created collections or recommendation than width or depth of search. Their key new features like matome-search and smart folder tells that user demands more sophisticated results.

One of the my questions at press conference was how they will make money based on new search services. Mr.Masuda answered that NAVER do not evaluate their business in short term, meaning not a year or two. He also mentioned that these new features were planned, designed and developed in Japan which is huge step forward for company from other countries. This shows their strong will to dive in to somewhat crowded market called Japan, as a comeback boy in the game of Internet services.

Mr. Masuda emphasize that because NAVER Japan will not plan revenue from this start, they will evaluate number of registered users and collections user generated.
He also mentioned that mobile version of VAVER will come out around August so we can see much more traffic thru mobile phones especially from mid to high teen generations soon.

So their challenge might come in two points, first one is how they can gather users within NAVER who will be willing to generate comments or favorite lists. Then next one will be how they can convince content providers (news sites, photo or video sharing sites) to legitimate their use of those contents in NAVER. And of course, biggest question is how to make money.

But for now, we should welcome their comeback to Japanese market as a challenge against giants like Yahoo! and Google in search business, and social bookmarks and SNS in hatena and mixi. it is certainly valuable for other venture companies to monitoring their efforts to re-enter new market.

Yes, they come again, welcome back !!

Yasuyuki Matsushita

Tags: Company, Japan, Korea, New Service by Yasuyuki Matsushita
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YouTrivia (in Japanese, Kentei Gocco) is new style of advertisement to reach customers using trivia style questions to certain topics. The company named “Manabing” which means “on learning” in Japanese (http://www.manabing.jp). They grew 15,000 trivia for 8 million users for last three years. Their new ads attracts large clients like Nissan, Hitachi since it has low abandonment rate and good amount of hard core enthusiasts as users. Asiajin’s Yasuyuki Matsushita met with Mr. Igarashi of Manabing to drill down their success.

Asiajin: Can you describe original concept of Kentei Gocco ? Does this come from cultural preference of Japanese people who loves quiz or trivia ?

Igarashi: Well, our original vision was to combine education, entertainment and advertisement on Internet as our core business. We had discussion among our staff, it started as blog widget or something. But just within 10 or 20 minutes of dialog, it became idea of having serial quiz or collection of trivia on entire web site not blog widget. We have created web site in around 2 weeks and made it public. It was coincident that date was same as “niconico douga” (http://www.nicovideo.jp/) went public as beta, Dec.12 2002. I joined this company to make good web service which is greater than mixi which is No.1 SNS in Japan.

Asiajin: Do you have any difficulties on beginning ? You are quite popular so far.

Igarashi: No, not exactly. As we opened the web to public, we were lucky to have clients to turn our business on. It helped a lot. But it was so exciting to see first boom on a trivia happened then.

Asiajin: What was the first trivia which gathered so much traffic ?

Igarashi: First trivia was one about Urawa Reds, our premier professional soccer club in our region. It was spread by word of mouth to fans of the club around here, Urawa is our local town in Saitama, with deep knowledge of players and club which fanatic supporters typically has. That trivia has over 40K users so far. We also has trivia for each players of the club. We think these professional sports related trivia are pretty much popular. For example, trivia for hanshin Tigers. Other popular trivia for Junji Takada, a very funny comedian, has large amount of trivia and fan for it. He is crazy and funny like hell. His trivia is HOT

Asiajin: Oh, I know Let’s talk about functionality for moment. What is your future plan for functionality ?

Igarashi: We had more functions at initial plan for web site. But as we see our usage of it, it is better to keep it simple. We used to have function like uploading images, it was cut by intention.

Asiajin: As I tried to answer a trivia for myself, after I answered several quiz, then it automatically starts Flash movie as advertisement before result come out. I think this is clever to do so since you want to know how you’ve done or points you got.

Igarashi: Yes. This is the good reason not let users leave our site. After you answered several trivia, then it is natural for you to wait the results. Our founder has background originally from e-learning industry, this is the result of these expertise which is not focused on functions but based on approach of education or psychology. Our clients are very happy that their messages are delivered appropriately.

Asiajin:We know that you have English site and Chinese site for these trivia. What about your future for these global expansion ? it seems that it is remarkable to company at your size to offer services in Chiense.

Igarashi :Yes. We found that Chinese contents or trivia had increased organically on our Japanese site with huge traffic from Taiwan. Most of these trivia has been made for Japanese singers or actors who are very popular in Taiwan so far. Of course situation are same for anime, manga or games in Japan. it is quite unique to find that these users in Taiwan generate “Own Trivia” so much. Yes, it is trivia for yourself. We don’t see that phenomena in Japan. It is quite fun to see.

Asiajin: You mean Quiz for yourself ?

Igarashi: Yes. like “Do you know my hobby ? Choose from below..”  kind of

Asiajin: It is funny.  Who would give correct answer to such personal stuff ? Family ? or friends ?

Igarashi: Friends, Maybe. We don’t see such stuff from Japanese users so this would be a character of personality which each nation has. Or maybe by their culture.

Asiajin: I know that your services are famous of using Amazon Cloud Computing in some respect. You are very early adopter of AWS aren’t you ?

Igarashi: Oh, yes. We had good learning period by reading bunch of English documents.   Our first deployment of AWS was around September 2007 so it is fair to say we are early adopter. I think wev service which is open to public, cannot plan coming traffic ahead like us is appropriate for using cloud computing. We also run consulting services for cloud computi¥ng based on ES2/S3, you can find useful information on our news site (http://cloud.manabing.jp).

Asiajin: You are giving seminars to public, right ? Can you tel me future plan for your business ?

Igarashi: We believe these quiz or trivia trigger users not by technical or informational but more emotional desire in people’s mind. So our plan is to deliver variety of serivces which mix not only advertisement but education, marketing activities, questionnare, user experimental testing so on. So we can be very unique company to the market.

Asiajin: Thank you very much. I hope to see your growth soon.

Trivia based new approach for let clients deliver messages is quite unique. Manabing and their Kentei Gocco is something you need to watch if you want to find the way on advertisement.

Tags: Japan, Service by Yasuyuki Matsushita
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We all know that the Japanese love cameras. There are a bunch of manufacturers out there and new products appear on the market every month or so. As you can imagine, a typical Japanese tourist carries a couple of camera products at all times. But Sony, which holds the No. 1 share of the camcorder market in Japan, is far from satisfied with the way people use their camcorders. Most camcorder users only take movies on memorable days such as their kids’ birthdays, school sports festivals, etc. Sony thought up the tagline “Every day is special” as the concept for their 2007 campaign.

Their new promotional web site called “Cam with me” is part of a campaign which is generating huge emotional feedback from internet users.

The “Cam with me” campaign started as a teaser in December 2008 in Japan and officially opened to the public in January 2009 with huge success and positive blogger feedback. Asiajin’s Yasuyuki Matsushita talked with Keiichi Motoyama, Interactive Planner at the Hakuhodo ad agency, Yohei Iwaki, Art Director and creator of the website, and Kaoru Chono, the producer, (the latter two are from a new company called 602 inc) to find out what happened behind the scenes of “Cam with me”.

Yasuyuki: Can you tell me the concept of this website ?

Motoyama: “Cam with me” comes as a result of our effort to render the “Every day is special” tagline in a very emotional way, rather than only literally. We chose the Internet because it can now be both a personal and interactive medium. Because of its interactivity, our content can touch viewers’ hearts and they eventually feel this could be their own experience. The content starts with a baby girl growing and playing, from kindergarten to elementary school, then from a teenager to a beautiful young lady. Finally, she gets married, leaves home and then comes back with her baby for the holidays. This is constructed in a very emotional way.

Iwaki: I was in charge of these scenes, and all of the design details and interaction. All of the scenes were done with input from a movie director.

Yasuyuki: What was the most important part in its creation ?

Motoyama: I wanted it to be as emotional as it could, like those “We all shed tears” types of movies. We did a study of these types of movies for context, tone and manner. Another point was this should be as simple as possible to use.

Iwaki: The story is pretty simple. The movies start with a cute baby girl playing, growing to schoolgirl age, starting to work, falling in love and getting married, and taking her baby back home to see her grandparents. You can actually choose your favorite moments in the early part of the movies but you cannot do this once she becomes a bride and leaves home. Which is a metaphor for real life — you can’t control your daughter once she becomes a woman. These scenes were very carefully created by our team.

Chono: We can’t say the exact number of actresses who auditioned but we did have huge a number of auditions based on actress profiles. We had 11 actresses in these movies. The phrase “Cam with me” just popped into Iwaki’s head at the meeting. We needed a word that sounded like Handycam and which was easy to pronounce.

Yasuyuki: The site can be embedded as a widget in blogs which is quite unique. Why did you choose to do that?

Motoyama: Yes. Typical promotional sites only deliver the results of what you created, but our embeddable widget is a window into the whole experience. You can embed the entire site as a blog widget. This enables viewers to have exactly the same experience as on our campaign site. So the viewers feel that the site is interactive and is created by themselves. We wanted this to be the “Most emotional movie ever!!” type of content, just like a movie advertisement. This should happen by “word of mouth” on the net.

Iwaki: Another point is the sound and music. It is best not to play it with the mute setting on.

Yasuyuki: How about feedback ?

Motoyama: We had a good amount of feedback from a variety of people. We are happy to see that typical housewives wrote on their blogs that this is very emotional to watch with their husbands. These reactions are not from professionals, but common people who do not pay attention to net promotions, and these are the most valuable voices for us to listen to. Other feedback from international viewers, especially from Korea, was a nice surprise for us. I think the actresses resemble them most.

Iwaki: We also had a good reaction from bloggers which really caused a chain reaction. This is because anyone can create their own series of movies in the blog widget.

Yasuyuki: Have you had any requests for a “Boy” version of the story?

Motoyama: Yes, but the “young woman leaves home, gets married, and comes back to visit” story is a common thread in our society, which is really the backbone of this project. So a “boy” version is a bit difficult. We did have this idea in the early stages of the project though.

Iwaki: We had another idea which was a pet version, namely a dog. A girl leaving home and coming back with a baby is kind of a happy ending. But if it was a dog, the ending would be a “final” departure, which would be quite difficult to describe.

Yasuyuki: Oh, I agree. So this will be the last question. What are your overall comments on the project ?

Motoyama: It is good to execute buzz marketing for this campaign but without huge media exposure like TV commercials, it is hard to say gigantic buzz on real world cannot be achieved.

From a creator’s point of view, it is very important to find insight within our viewers. That was a great result for me.

Iwaki: I really want everyone to experience this site. To be honest, it wasn’t close to my heart at the very early stages of the project, but as we created the storyboard, it became dangerously emotional. As an ad creator, I can be very critical about any ad, but this still makes me shed tears.

Chono: This project was a great experience to work on. If there is any chance to make an international version, I’d love to try that.

This interview was done with lots of planning documents along with some laughter and jokes. I think the idea of not pursuing functionality or specs for the camcorder, but rather to create an emotional buzz on the Internet is a new type of marketing experiment. I hope that you were able to feel the emotion behind the scenes.

Tags: Event Report, Japan, Video by Yasuyuki Matsushita
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