In Japan, SUBARU’s awareness has been high for its advanced automotive technologies such as Boxer Engines, All Wheels Drive and brake support systems. In other words, SUBARU has been popular mainly among car enthusiasts, unlike in the United States where it is known as a family targeted brand. The challenge was to make the SUBARU brand more accessible to much wider target consumers including family targets in Japan instead of just car enthusiasts.

We create a 90 seconds commercial slot during one of the most popular prime-time-TV-shows and produce story-driven long-form commercials to tell stories of drivers and their families. The series became so popular and continued over 7 years with 16 episodes. New Challenge and Idea: In 2017, we decided to break the

boundary again between advertising and regular entertainment by creating two 30-minutes TV drama based on the 90 seconds TV commercial series, with the request of a Japanese major TV network who wanted to leverage the popularity of the commercial series. In 2018, the series picked up by a major publishhing-house to be adapted into a novel.

The project is a well-integrated branded entertainment and regular entertainment (TV Drama and Novel) as it is completely diîerent from simple product placement as the car itself plays an important role so the audience can relate to the car as a character.