Gaming / Japan
Japan Gaming Market Entry
Results
What we moved.
7.5M
Users in 2 years
18 months
To market leadership in the category
Day 1
First print campaign live, against a 3-month goal
6 months
To the first TV campaign, against a 12-month goal
Challenge
Our client, a social gaming brand we keep confidential, set out to enter Japan: one of the world’s largest gaming markets, and one of the hardest to break into. Media relationships take years to build, creative approval culture is exacting, and foreign entrants routinely stall. The client set the bar anyway: first print campaign within three months, first TV campaign within twelve.
Solution
EAST ran the market entry end to end, managing an $8M year-one budget and $4M annually after that.
Speed came first. The first print campaign ran on day one, not month three. The first TV campaign aired in month six, half the twelve-month goal, and it wasn’t a media buy alone: we produced a branded TV game show with sponsorship, four TVCs, and ten tactical digital campaigns, backed by hundreds of creative outputs keeping the brand present between the big moments.
Scale followed the speed. Eighteen months in, the brand was the market leader in its category. Two years in, it had 7.5 million users, in a market that was supposed to be impenetrable.
Services used