Bridgestone golf balls are made with Japanese technology. So we use a Bridgestone mad scientist as a spokesman for the campaign. For the web, he tries to speak English but it is very difficult to understand him. We have included an on-line golf video game to make people want to spend more time with our brand. If you fail to hit the ball far, two Japanese scientists will insult you with their bad English.

Blogs, message boards and forums drive people to the Bridgestone site as does the TV and print.Golfers are buying the balls…and the fun campaign.

The campaign was launched in southern states in the dead of winter. Only these states could play golf because the weather wasn’t too cold. We began by creating Tobu messages on boards, blogs and forums to ‘seed’ the Japanese word, “Tobu.” With no advertising yet, people didn’t see it as an advertising scam. After three weeks of ‘seeding’, we coordinated TV and magazine to break and give the Japanese word, tobu! some legitimacy. The Tobu! Television spot ran only on golf channels and magazine ads ran only in golf publications. After all, the budget for the campaign was only $500,000.