We have delivered ‘Otaku’ news combined with related sightseeing info to overseas ‘Otaku’ fans interested in J-pop culture—centered on our Tokyo Otaku Mode Facebook page, which has over 1.3 million likes so far.

Together with Expedia, we've launched a campaign where those who have seen our video content showcasing the many charms of visiting Japan can book their own trip to Japan through Expedia quickly & easily. By distributing sightseeing info, our campaign has newly heightened ‘Otaku’ fans' awareness of Japan's attractions and promoted travel to Japan.

By gathering information on overseas 'Otaku' events, we investigated to what extent 'Otaku' contents are being recognised overseas. By directly listening to the voices of overseas 'Otaku' fans, we discovered that we can strongly motivate a visiting tour, by combining both 'Otaku' contents and traveling.

The goal was to enhance 10 million more visitors to Japan through this campaign project focused on ‘Otaku’ culture.

Going along with the changing attitude of users, we focused on the overseas 'Otaku' fans and showed them Japan's appeal by exposing them to its contents, and we could let them experience a very exciting trip. In terms of business impact, the Tokyo Otaku Mode web site has been accessed by 111 countries, and has reached over 25 million people through Facebook, with the uploaded contents (such as videos, articles) receiving over a total of 300,000 likes. YouTube videos have been played just over 150,000 times and have received positive reviews by over 98% of its viewers.These efforts have been picked up by various media, such as the Japanese Financial Paper, Nikkei, and have started a large, unique campaign for visiting tours. Through this campaign, new attractions of Japan have been successfully recognised. Compared to the same time last year, it has been concluded that visiting tourists have increased by 236%.

During the five month period between August 1 to December 31, 2014, in the campaign countries and regions - Taiwan, Hong Kong, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia -, we executed a web campaign to help visitors to Japan experience their travels as entertainment. Specifically, we created ‘pilgrimage’ content that communicated the appeal of ‘tourist spots’ which were featured in Japanese cultural mainstays like anime and manga, on Tokyo Otaku Mode’s website, Facebook, and YouTube pages. Furthermore, as part of our plan to connect this content into visits to Japan, we formed a tie-up partnership with the world’s biggest travel reservation website ‘Expedia’. We created services for making reservations for value-rich travel package plans tailor-made for our campaign, and offered them to ‘Otaku fans’.

Looking forward towards 2020, Japan has a goal to achieve 20 million visitors annually. Currently Japan receives 10 million visitors, and we have been thinking about all the unique ways in which we could boost those numbers. And so, with the expanding worldwide movement in Japanese anime, manga, and fashion, we came up with a campaign geared towards ‘Otaku fans’ who love J-POP culture, something to make them “want to travel to Japan.”

‘Otaku fans’ who have yet to visit Japan were the targets.

We motivated them to want to actually visit Japan by having as many ‘Otaku fans’ as possible come into contact with social media content, starting with video content.

We presumed that ‘Likes’ on social media were the most effective form of PR, and therefore concentrated efforts on creating content that would get the most "Likes".