All Nippon Airways - Is Japan Cool?

All Nippon Airways - Is Japan Cool?

Ever since Tokyo was announced as the venue for the 2020 Summer Olympics, Japan’s largest carrier All Nippon Airways (ANA) has been running a campaign called ‘Is Japan Cool?’

The idea is to take different elements of Japanese culture from Ramen to Cosplay, and to highlight them for global audiences, encouraging them to travel to the country itself - naturally on ANA.

The campaign is fronted by an impressive website stacked full of different topics and themes.

For example, the “Japan Dreams” section includes items as diverse as Japanese 3D latte art, to a camera app that turns anyone into a Manga character. Website visitors can then vote various items up on which they think is the most cool.

The latest incarnation of the ‘Is Japan Cool’ campaign is ‘Is Japan Cool - Dou.’ As the airline explains, “Dou refers to the way of life and we focused on nine Japanese masters who perform bu-dou (Japanese traditional martial arts) and gei-dou (Japanese tradional arts).”

If you then head over to the website, you are presented with nine different ‘Dou’ characters, covering everything from Judo to ‘Noh’ (a form of dramatic theatre).

Clicking on a character allows you to play around with 3D demos, where you can see every movement. Each sub-section also includes interviews with the artist / performer, and a ‘demo’ section, where the performer stands on top of a “tron” style digital landscape.

As a website, “is Japan Cool” is really well designed and built. Judged purely on the content, it’s one of the best destination websites from an airline that we’ve seen. It’s slick, filled with great graphics, it brings different elements of Japan to life, and (most importantly) - it genuinely leaves you with the feeling of “I want to go there and see it for myself.”

Despite being packed full of multimedia and 3D animations, it is also very mobile responsive. We tried out the ‘Kendo’ sword fighting sequence on an iPhone (albeit with WiFi and not via mobile data) and it worked perfectly.

At the same time as adding a new section to “Is Japan Cool?” the airline also announced that it had refreshed its ‘Explore Japan’ webpages, which are a more standard tourist guide to the country covering cuisine, crafts, customs and history.

Key Take-Away

First of all ANA deserves full marks for consistency. This campaign has been running for five years, and the airline has stuck with it, periodically updating the site and regularly launching new content ‘modules’, such as the most recent one looking at martial arts and performing arts.

The result is that ANA has a rich content base that it can draw upon to promote its home country. Production values are also very high, and it works on mobile devices. It’s the type of website that makes you want to stick around and discover the different elements.

Well done ANA in producing an excellent destination marketing website and campaign, which has made it onto our cover this month.