Verbatim Championship / Award Entry

Verbatim, the world's leading storage media brand, entered the Japanese market in 2009. On this occasion, a promotional campaign was started, to familiarize the Japanese audience with the brand name, the brand concept and the company's stylish products.
The brand name “Verbatim” is difficult to read/pronounce in Japanese.

The examination of reading proficiency in difficult Kanji or English words is frequently applied in Japanese school so as to assess student's memory. These are also becoming popular contents in TV quiz shows and others.

Memory Battle
We developed an entertainment campaign called "Verbatim Championship"; through memory quizzes about difficult reading words include of "verbatim", and 3D fighting games, users can generate their own "Media Monster" and get a handle on it. We thought these helped to raise the brand awareness of Verbatim. The aim was to make a wide and explosive spin-off effects among the target demographic, frequent users of computer. Media Monsters include and express the three key aspects of the company that should be instantly recognizable to consumers: the Verbatim brand name, Verbatim’s brand concept, and the stylish form of Verbatim’s products. Generated by the program, the form of Media Monsters are never the same.

We developed two separate, use-specific blog widgets.


Blog widget A:	Users can include a blog widget within their blog and display their personalized Media Monster. When users access the Verbatim Championship site from these blog widgets, they are able to challenge it to a fight with their own freshly-created Media Monster. [>> LAUNCH SAMPLE]		Blog widget B:	Users can add widgets to their blogs that replay movies of their Media Monsters' previous 3D fights. > [>> LAUNCH SAMPLE]

>>	The stylish and exciting look of the Media Monsters and their elegant, real-time movements were programmed using Flash and a special integrated 3D engine. This allows the user to introduce special fighting techniques during the game.
>>	Each Media Monster and each fight is given a unique URL, which makes it easy to share and communicate the Monsters and fights on blog widgets and social networking services like Twitter and mixi.
>>	Users can continue to fight until reaching the 'last boss'; a special, oversized, mean and difficult-to-beat Media Monster. When Verbatim Championship was launched, by beating the last boss, users could get special incentives related to another Verbatim campaign “Kiroku-seyo! AKB4800!” featuring a Japanese girls pop group AKB48 and it attracted one’s users to the other. (“Kiroku-seyo! AKB4800!”content has closed.)
>>	A pronunciation quiz which is not so difficult to answer if you consider.

>>	The project got overwhelming coverage in online media, news sites, culture portals and social networking services like Twitter and mixi. Special hash tags, "#Verbatim", were established by users, fighting tricks and guides were shared on community sites, and an army of Media Monsters was created.
>>	The Verbatim Championship was also featured on a large number of news sites, including {the market-leader} Yahoo! News.
>>	Since the launch of the project on November 16th 2009, twenty-five million (50,000,000) page views from five million (8,000,000) unique users were recorded (as of March 2010). Users have created over two million Media Monsters and the total number of fights reached 50 million.

WEBSITE - JAPANESE	WEBSITE - ENGLISH
[WEBSITE - JAPANESE]	[WEBSITE - ENGLISH]
The Japanese version of the website featuring a pronunciation quiz in the Japanese language.	The English version without pronunciation quiz for non-Japanese speakers. So that non-Japanese-speaking users more easily enjoy the project.