The sustainability story that told itself: 7,000-Year old village, one of Japan's best-kept secrets

As the lead creative on this project, I was involved in creative pitching to win JNTO's business, on behalf of BBC StoryWorks. I built a creative strategy and worked closely with a creative filming team from Japan to craft the video storytelling of the campaign.

If one needs to find the most unassuming, humble examples of sustainability, perhaps they need look no further than to their grandparents. The lessons we've received since childhood to fix something before throwing it away, or to tend to our gardens with kitchen leftovers. For many, their grandparents are living embodiments of sustainability, from a time before it became a sexy buzzword, rooted in heart and practicality. These examples of sustainability become our foundations as we live and breathe it, rooted in emotion and belonging - they are the sustainability stories that tell themselves.

When our client, Japan National Tourism Organisation, wanted to promote destinations in Japan through sustainability in travel, we knew that the most effective and memorable way to do this would be in BBC StoryWorks' distinctive emotional storytelling, communicating sustainability in a way that felt easy and unpretentious.

Our TVC campaign, "Oku-matsushima: Where all roads lead home" is about the travel experiences in Japan that can transform your relationship with yourself and the world, through land, community, and culture.

By uniting the stories of a fisherman who lives in one of Japan's most scenic locations, and the lens of a travelling photographer, we achieved the following goals for our client
- Welcome culture-conscious, sustainability-conscious travellers from Europe, America, and Australia
- Connect with mix of first-timers and people who've visited Japan
- Position purposeful travel experiences in Japan as a reason to pick Japan
- Connect to modern travellers' desire to travel in a deeper way that gives deeper value to their dollar

With a large proportion of BBC audiences saying that living a more sustainable lifestyle is important to them, as well as our extensive award-winning Science of Engagement research proving that authenticity and emotion is critical to memory of brand messaging, we knew that our job was to connect Japanese destination travel with audiences by showing them how visiting Japan could help them learn more about sustainable mindsets rooted in fascinating, Japanese ways of living.

With our client constantly requesting the phrase "sustainable japan" being used in our content, we knew that an education process was underway.

To us, the campaign wasn't about promoting a list of "sustainable" travel experiences, but beyond that: showing travellers how visiting Japan could give the transformative take-home value of a shift in perspective of how they view sustainability. Like the lessons from our grandparents that stick with us, impacting travellers' perception in the long term, affecting how they decide to spend their money.

Our story focused on showcasing this approach naturally within a stunning location in Japan, connecting the power of travel in granting perspective, with Japan's inherent purposeful cultures.

Our main character, Oku-matsushima, is a 7,000-year-old village in Japan. It is said that time stands still there, and that the view of Matsushima Bay at dusk is one of those views that stays in your mind like a photograph, known as one of Japan's top most scenic views. Abe Koya, a local oyster farmer, lives a simple, happy life there and wants to be a good father to his children, the same way his parents were good parents to him. Now, he's joined by Gui Martinez, a photographer trying to capture the beauty of the world as he sees it as though to preserve it for an eternity. These three characters, embodiments of sustainability in different ways, were the pieces that we brought together for an authentic and believable "sustainability" travel story in Japan - one that would tell itself.

In total, the “Oku-matsushima: Where all roads lead home” campaign featured the following deliverables, distributed through a TV broadcast and digital campaign on BBC’s platforms.
- 1x 2m TVC film
- 1x 60s TVC edit
- 1x 30S TVC edit

Execution

Part of the charm of featuring Oku-matsushima, a lesser-known village in Japan, meant that little information was available about it online. After many phone calls, our team learned Oku-matsushima had a small, tight-knit community. Oyster farming and the village’s “Olle Trail” are two key experiences available to tourists.

From here we were able to break our narrative down into three key characters, who served different facets of sustainability to ensure it was embedded intuitively throughout the film.
- Character 1: Oku-matsushima and its community (Representing a physical manifestation of the “tourism” element of our film, as well as the need to preserve the world’s beauty)
- Character 2: Local host - Oyster fisherman Abe Koya (A force for change in his community with a unique vision on a better tomorrow and knowledge of local experiences)
- Character 3: The visitor - Film photographer Gui Martinez (Mirroring our viewer, on a personal mission to capture Oku-matsushima’s iconic view)

Learning their stories, we wanted to welcome viewers into a community that respects its people and its land. In the glow of nature, we wanted to help viewers witness how the relationship between visitor and host can be reciprocal, special.

Instead of forcing it into a pre-existing creative concept, we realised that Oku-matsushima was a place where people could get lost, to find themselves. Oku-matsushima’s small community of people welcome travellers into their homes to create a travel experience that’s unlike any other. Intimate, considered, and unforgettably beautiful. Taking inspiration from these and the village’s iconic “Olle trail” — which translates to ”the alleys that lead home from the main road” in Jeju dialect — we arrived on the creative message of “Oku-matsushima: Where all roads lead home”

Our film took a metaphorical interpretation of this phrase to suggest that while the “main roads” or the major tourist destinations may satisfy the general expectations of inbound tourism, it is the “alleys” or local communities that lead “home” or to an ultimately more personal and lasting tourism experience.

Digging deeper into the “sustainability” messaging in our film, we tackled it on a few levels to ensure that the concept of “sustainability” resonated deeply and psychologically
- Sustainability through concept: “Oku-matsushima: Where all roads lead home” encourages viewers to treat the places they visit as their own homes. With respect - the ethos of sustainability.
- Sustainability through local practices and traditions shown in the film: Abe Koya implies the process of fishing and sharing catch directly with the community (Reduced footprint), he speaks about how his parents taught him to be a better person and how he imparts that to his children, a raw and human perspective. Gui Martinez, our photographer, is positioned as ”learning” these lessons to share with the world, and reflecting on them through nature landmarks like the Olle Trail
- Sustainability through trust and third-party validation: Our film included Oku-matsushima’s recognition as one of the “BEST TOURISM VILLAGES by UN Tourism”

Instead of treating the differently-timed durations of the film's cutdowns, we decided to treat them as unique edits instead. The 30s cutdown was led by the perspective of the photographer in our film, Gui Martinez, encouraging awareness of a “Sustainable Japan” tourism campaign and encourage users to dig deeper into the story of Oku-matsushima in the full video, led by Gui's stunning photography on reversal film.

Results:

On BBC television channels, our campaign delivered 71.8 Million impacts to high income audiences on the BBC as verified by GWI research, and an estimated 367M in reach across households.

Despite just a 2-week promotion duration on social media and Youtube and a very minimal budget, our digital campaign yielded incredible results against BBC StoryWorks benchmarks.
- The video campaign was able to score higher impressions than the average of any engagement/video campaigns running between Nov 24 - Feb 25, with 50% more impressions rendered than average, a notable amount of which was organically-driven.
- On Instagram, we saw a spectacular engagement rate that was nearly four times that of other BBC StoryWorks APAC campaigns between Nov 25 - Feb 25.
- In total, we digitally garnered 1.2M impressions, and 437K video views.
- Our highest engagement rates came from Youtube, which also boasted the highest full length completion rates at 50% and 100% among all of the platforms.

Video description (Written by me):

“I like watching the morning sun. The power of the sun rising… It makes me feel like I have to work hard again today. A new day has arrived.”

Even those who call Oku-Matsushima home consider the locale one of the Japan’s most scenic views. And yet it remains one of the nation’s best-kept secrets—occupied by a friendly community of people who speak of the small village as having a beauty that humbles you.

Abe Koya, an oyster fisherman whose relationship with Oku-Matsushima goes as deep as the pearlescent waters bordering it, says that the waters here were made for oysters. Famed for its plump, juicy oysters honed by mineral-rich waters and fishing techniques, the serendipitous conditions of this town are a reminder of nature’s persistent prowess.

“I’m made most aware of the greatness of nature and the smallness of humans, the smallness of myself … I want people to actually come here, to see the scenery once, and feel it with their own skin.”

Witness the breathtaking bounties of this 7,000 year-old village and meet its welcoming community through the lens of Gui Martinez, a solo traveller and photographer who documented his experience there on rich, reversal film.

Whether to villager or visitor, Oku-Matsushima is where all roads lead home.

CREDITS

Creative Lead: Hijanah Hernandez
Project Lead: Racy Lim
Director: Tom Slemmons
Producers: Adrian Grey, Shino Kazuki
Cinematographer: Brandon Strack
AC: Rosie Hubbard
Sound: Jeffrey Jousan
Production Manager: Yoshifumi Egawa
Colour: Michelle Madden
Post Production Assistance: Alexis Wuillaime
Photography: Gui Martinez
Featuring: Gui Martinez, Abe Koya
Special thanks to: People of Oku-matsushima