In Japan, the Pharmaceutical Affairs Law strictly regulates the promotion of the effectiveness and efficacy of drugs, and subsequently pharmaceutical companies have always faced an uphill battle in promoting their products. The result is that most promotional campaigns default to clichéd images such as freeze-framed smiles and “the happy family that overcame illness together”.

Kyowa Hakko Kirin, which came into being with the merger of two major pharmaceutical companies in 2008, marked its five-year anniversary with a company value promotion campaign. The goal: to surpass the number of hits on our Thunderbirds tie-in promotional campaign the previous year with one featuring all-original digital content. We unveiled an interactive digital campaign with content that evolved along with the number of consumer participants. The number of visitors exceeded our goal, and the campaign was successful in promoting the value of our brand.

The purpose of this digital promotional effort was to promote the value of our brand, and the goal was to surpass the number of visitors to our Thunderbirds tie-in the previous year. The target audience was our prospective clientele — men and women in their 30s and 40s.

The digital campaign was online for four months between October 2013 and January 2014 at invisible-things.com. The site initially grew through word-of-mouth before experiencing a surge in visitors after being featured in media outlets such as Wired Japan and Web Designing as a forward-thinking initiative by a pharmaceutical company.

The site attracted 560,000 visitors, surpassing our Thunderbirds tie-in of the previous year. Our campaign was featured in articles and interviews with our client representative in magazines covering everything from business to design as an example of a forward-thinking initiative by a pharmaceutical company. Across social media, our project garnered attention for its artistic look and feel, and word-of-mouth demonstrated that our value appeal had won over our audience.

Kyowa Hakko Kirin sells ethical pharmaceuticals used to treat serious illnesses such as cancer. As such, consumers only encounter these products when they or their families are affected by serious illness, and the company rarely enters consumer consciousness through day-to-day life. Furthermore, World Health Organization (WHO) reports consistently place Japan as first in average life expectancy; you could say that for the Japanese, the concept of mortality is generally a stranger to their everyday lives. In order to promote the value of our company to such an elusive audience, we developed an interactive art platform based on Kyowa Hakko Kirin’s founding mission statement 'Commitment to Life'. Our challenge: to create awareness among a public for whom “life” isn’t constantly in question.

Mass communication channels (i.e. television) were ineffective in increasing name recognition and raising awareness about our industry. Although our digital campaign tie-in with the well-known Thunderbirds universe was a success, copyrights meant it was not our property, and we decided it was necessary to roll out a digital campaign of all-original content.