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Prior to my first Japan­ese trip, a col­league gave me this sage advice, “In Tokyo, things are what they are…unless they are not” Hav­ing been to the Far East before, the dichotomy of his coun­sel didn’t sur­prise me – after all, if Asia epit­o­mizes dichotomies and Tokyo must be the poster child.

With 33 mil­lion (give or take) souls in one metro area, it ain’t sur­pris­ing there is an excep­tion to every rule. The ultra-modern sky­scraper next to the cen­turies old Shinto shrine, the con­ser­v­a­tive, com­posed work col­league who trans­forms into a col­lege kid on Spring Break after a few drinks, the effi­ciency of Shin­juku sub­way sta­tion with 3 mil­lion daily trav­el­ers to the chaos of Tsuk­iji Fish Mar­ket; Tokyo is home to them all. And it was here that Steven Elliott and I trav­eled in late Octo­ber to meet with our col­leagues from Dentsu Y&R.

The Banner/Dentsu rela­tion­ship is quite young and is based on ser­vic­ing our Hitachi DMG client. With Banner’s strong Euro­pean tech­nol­ogy cre­den­tials and Dentsu’s impres­sive rep­u­ta­tion in Japan, the com­bi­na­tion was a nat­ural part­ner­ship to ser­vice Hitachi’s Euro­pean busi­ness. The Japan trip was to build on the grow­ing rela­tion­ship between the two agen­cies and to begin craft­ing the next evo­lu­tion of the “Best Kept Secret” cam­paign we launched in May 2006.

In short, the trip was a run­away suc­cess. Noth­ing com­pares to a real live indoc­tri­na­tion into the Japan­ese obses­sion with tech­nol­ogy and design. As a 30-something male, you try resist an eight-storey build­ing ded­i­cated solely to all man­ner of elec­tronic gad­gets. Cou­ple that with a city that actu­ally has annual robot shows. Steve and I missed a robot con­fer­ence by a few days where the high­light was a race between a robot that can run and one that can ride a bike! If you want to get tech­nol­ogy – espe­cially in the con­sumer space – noth­ing beats Tokyo.

We also ben­e­fited immensely from the coun­sel of our Dentsu col­leagues who took great pride in ensur­ing we under­stood the nuances and sen­si­bil­i­ties of Japan­ese aes­thet­ics and design. All key inputs as the Banner/Dentsu team attempt to develop a unique brand voice for Hitachi. It has cer­tainly been an inter­est­ing chal­lenge for us to develop a cam­paign that rec­og­nizes Hitachi’s pedi­gree in the elec­tron­ics cat­e­gory whilst cel­e­brat­ing its unique Japan­ese her­itage. You can just imag­ine the pas­sion­ate debates that ensue…

Ulti­mately, as Ban­ner deep­ens its rela­tion­ship with Hitachi and Dentsu, we will con­tinue to grow our exper­tise in one of technology’s most unique and vibrant mar­kets – Asia. With part­ners and clients like these, we’re look­ing for­ward to forg­ing fur­ther part­ner­ships and friend­ships in the region. One’s, ide­ally, that will unearth some inter­est­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. What an excit­ing jour­ney that promises to be!

See our Tokyo Flickr slideshow here.

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