日清食品 | 匂わせたい | 2020
Totally fooled, and happy about it / Nissin Foods "I Want to Hint"
A man's shoulder caught in the edge of a glass. Matching shoes. A poem you read vertically that spells out "I'm with the winning team." Ugh, another hint-dropping girl on social media, you think, getting a little annoyed. But that annoyance turns into pure delight by the end.
The problem
In March 2020 (month 3), Nissin's Traveling Ethnic series launched new cup noodle products, and the bagged noodle version also expanded to stores nationwide. The main target was women in their 20s and 30s. But in the world of web videos, people skip the moment they get bored. So Nissin zeroed in on something trending on social media at the time: "hint posts," where people don't brag about their happy life directly but hint at it indirectly through photos. You know, that culture that's a little annoying.
The insight
Nissin's team studied a huge number of social media posts and picked out the ones that felt "realistically relatable" as hints. A shoulder caught at the edge of a glass. A reflection in a pot lid. An oversized hoodie. They figured that building up relatable "I've seen this before" moments across ten patterns in the first half would make the twist in the second half land even harder. On top of that, there's a wordplay connecting "hint" (nioawase) with "smell" (nioi), which also makes you think of the appetizing smell of the product.
The idea
The video takes the form of an original music video, with actress Arisa Komiya playing a woman dropping hint after hint on social media. For the first half, it looks like typical boyfriend-hinting, but at some point the mood flips, and even the background music shifts to sound like an Indian restaurant. The screen rewinds to the beginning, revealing that the words "Nissin Traveling Ethnic" and cup noodles had actually been visible everywhere the whole time. Even the vertical-read poem had a double trick: it actually spelled out "Traveling Ethnic." And in a final thorough touch, the man who appears at the end turns out to be a mysterious Thai man.
What happened
Released on April 12, 2020 (month 4), the video got about 750,000 views on YouTube. On Twitter it was viewed over 6 million times combined, with plenty of positive reactions like "I keep watching it again" and "I laughed." The carefully planted details encouraged repeat viewing, and it spread even without the official Twitter account promoting it. It won the Grand Prix in Category B (web advertising) at the 2020 ACC TOKYO CREATIVITY AWARDS.
Afterthought
This design of making you annoyed first and then delighted is just irresistible. And what's even better is how seriously they thought through ways to keep people from skipping. The web video world is unforgiving—if it's boring, people leave instantly—so a project that can create this "I got totally played!" feeling is genuinely powerful. You want to hunt for all the little details hidden throughout, you want to watch it again, and you want to share it. Nissin's instinct for catching the mood of "right now" is as sharp as ever.
