NHK | COTO-TAMA | 2009
Words turn into little rolling balls / NHK "COTO-TAMA"
Just the title, COTO-TAMA, already hints at some kind of wordplay. This is a 2009 piece for NHK made by Hakuhodo. It's about little clusters of words rolling across a computer desktop, eventually making their way onto the wall of a building at a live event.
The problem
The video opens in darkness, with the facade display of a building lighting up to lay out the challenge: getting tech-savvy young people to come to the "Digital Art Festival Tokyo 2008." The idea behind it was the observation that young people tune out traditional advertising and instead gather information from social media and blogs. When NHK, as a public broadcaster, wanted to turn the themes of language and expression into an ad, the place they chose to land it was the computer screens of young people.
The insight
The title "COTO-TAMA" seems to be a play on the Japanese words for "word" (kotoba) and "ball" (tama). It also echoes "kotodama," the Japanese idea of the spiritual power dwelling in words, so I think the core of this campaign was the power of words themselves. In fact, once you type in text, it turns into a moving cluster of little balls, and only when the person who receives it hits "Decode" does it turn back into meaning. It's a design where words temporarily become something tangible, a little ball, that rolls from person to person.
The idea
The screen opens in darkness, with the facade display of a building glowing. What they created was a desktop widget called "COTO-COMMUNICATOR." When you type something like "Going to the Digital Art Festival" into the Create Message box, the text transforms into an animation of little ball-like creatures and flies off to the recipient's desktop. When the recipient presses Decode, the message wriggles open, spelling out something like "going, going." Messages ride along on the same little balls: from the organizers, "A special artist from France will be appearing," and from a performing artist, "I'll be playing a new song at the festival," with reactions like "Really?" and "New song?!" stacking up on screen. Then, on the day of the event, messages sent by users are projected in real time as digital art on the giant screen on the venue building's wall, with visitors holding up their phones to take pictures. At the end, the words "MEMORY OF COTO-TAMA" and "SEE YOU NEXT YEAR" remain on screen.
What happened
According to the narration, within 20 days the widget became the number one download on Adobe AIR Gallery. Conversations spread across the desktops of people interested in digital art, and attendance at the festival rose 25% compared to 2007, with a final figure of 10,000 visitors over three days shown on screen. It's a piece that won GOLD and is still listed on overseas advertising archive sites today.
Afterthought
The wordplay I imagined from the title, "word" and "ball," really did turn into rolling balls on screen. A single line typed on a desktop becomes light on a building's wall that same night. Seeing "SEE YOU NEXT YEAR" at the end, it feels like a record of a playground built to last a whole year. No wonder a piece of work from over 15 years ago is still remembered through the award it won.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2009
