日本テレビ | 日テレ営業中 | 1999
It's a TV Station, So Of Course It's Open 24 Hours / Nippon TV "24-Hour Masatoshi Hamada, Open for Business"
I remember watching this with a pretty detached, cynical eye, thinking: well, it's a TV station, so naturally it's open 24 hours. But this stunt with Hama-chan turned out to be amazing.
The insight
When you really think about it, a company's own ad slots should be allowed to get way more wild and crazy. TV stations in particular should stop just mindlessly running the same old promo clips over and over, and instead do things like hand those slots over as a gift to young directors, for example. Maybe it's an old-fashioned industry structure, but there are tons of creators out there who'd love the freedom to use airtime like that. Since nobody's paying as a client for those slots anyway, things need to move toward opening them up more — otherwise it's not going to turn out well.
The idea
This was the punishment game Hamada received on 4/19/1999, after losing a golf match on Gaki no Tsukai. He had to appear 32 times across 24 hours of live broadcasting in Nippon TV's 3-second spot commercial "Nittele Open for Business♪." Switching costumes one after another — a dominatrix, Pink Lady, Kinnikuman, Stan Hansen, Tomoe Shinohara, and more — he kept calling out "Nittele Open for Business♪." He even appeared live on the morning news show, with the bit crossing over between different programs.
Afterthought
Television as a format is definitely old, but precisely because it's an old, well-worn technology, there should be plenty of things only it can pull off. Also, let's not forget, it's still "mass media" after all.
