WOWOW | WOWOWに入りましょう。 | 2017
If You Ask Who'd Actually Be Happy to Watch This, Well, That's Exactly the Point / WOWOW "The Encounter"
"♪Should I join the hmm-hmm-hmm~" Yuya Yagira hums to himself on a train platform, and the lyrics are so mysterious that Kasumi Arimura can't help but call out to him. I've been watching this series for a while, but thinking about it again, this really is a celebrity commercial, isn't it.
The insight
Could you swap in no-name actors and have it still work? Actually, you could—but then you'd have to ask, who would be happy to watch it? People might say, "Did you see that ad with Yuya Yagira and Kasumi Arimura?" But it's hard to imagine anyone saying, "Did you see that hmm-hmm-hmm ad?" If you wanted to pull that off, you'd probably need some other kind of concept to make it work. And if you're going to take that kind of gamble, you might as well pay tens of millions of yen for some insurance instead—especially here in Japan. Casting really matters.
Afterthought
As the series goes on, the relationship between the two gradually steps up bit by bit, and yet in the end they just keep repeating "should I join, or should I not"—there's something irresistibly endearing about that. I think advertising also needs the courage to believe in the power of its talent.
