The Challenge

In the frozen dessert market, sales during the summer occupy most of the year-round sales. In order to differentiate this product from competitors, it was essential for us to come up with a new kind of advertisement structure that would continue creating a hot topic and capturing the attention of the viewers throughout the 3-month summer season.

The Strategy

We came up with the idea of combining TV ad with the murder mystery.

We decided to create the following to overcome our challenge.

-A new structure where the TV commercial will link with a comic series in a weekly comic magazine.

-A shocking story setting where a series of murders occur within AKB, Asia's No.1 idol group.

-A campaign in which viewers can solve the mystery and find the killer.

With these 3 ideas, we created " The Ice-cold Murder Files ".

The Result

"The Ice-Cold Murder Files" was the talk of the town throughout Japan's summer, helping our client with the satisfactory result on sales improvement, achieving such great achievements as the following at the same time.

TV coverage: 49 cases

Newspaper & Magazine coverage: 88 cases

WEB coverage: 587 cases

Access to site: 23 million 144 thousand 588 page views

June 25th 2012

TV ad -Murder file 1-

The first episode of Ice-cold murder files was aired.

Poster ad around major train stations

We posted the print ads around major train stations to stimulate the buzz among the young target.

Official website

We started the special website.

As each episode aired, the website analyzed the episode, giving testimony videos and pictures on the murder scenes.

July 4th 2012

Weekly Manga(comic) magazine

The first Manga episode was published on the weekly Manga magazine.

Manga episodes continued for 9 weeks, giving more clues to point out the real killer.

July 25th 2012

TV ad -Murder file 2-

2nd episode started to air.

August 24th 2012

TV ad -Murder file 3-

3rd episode started to air.

August 29th 2012

TV ad -Murder file 4-

4th episode started to air.

September 12th 2012

TV ad -Murder file 5-

The final episode started to air.

The Ice-cold Murder Files continued to occupy people's attention throughout the long 3-month summer season and resulted in the following accomplishments.

- Television news coverage: 49 times

- Newspaper and magazine coverage: 88 times

- Web site coverage: 587 times

- Campaign website access: 23m views