Case Study: Dentsu World Table Tennis Championships

Agency: DENTSU INC.
Client:  TV TOKYO Corporation
Award: Graphite Pencil / Graphic Design / Posters (Graphic Design) / 2016     
Award: Yellow Pencil / Crafts for Design / Photography for Design / 2016    

Background

Japan’s TV TOKYO, mainly renowned for its anime output, needed larger audiences for their broadcast of the 2015 World Table Tennis Championships. Having hosted the event for over 10 years, the station wanted to reach a new, younger audience for a sport traditionally watched by elders.

TV TOKYO’s long-running creative agency is Japan’s advertising powerhouse Dentsu. Housed in a building allegedly containing 70 elevators, and nearly 7,000 employees, Dentsu is by far Japan’s biggest advertising agency. Once a year, new recruits come together to climb Japan’s highest mountain, Mt. Fuji. The result is a loyal workforce, and trusting clients. This culture is what leads to the creation of powerful, craft-led solutions.

For the second time art director Uenishi Yuri was assigned the World Table Tennis Championships brief. No stranger to success, Uenishi has won prizes including the Tokyo ADC, and Adfest as well as holding solo exhibitions in Tokyo and New York, all at under 30 years old.

Uenishi’s posters for the 2014 championships, held in Tokyo, were complex, vibrant and dynamic. They depicted Japanese iconography overlaid with dramatic photography of the sport. It was up to Uenishi and his team, led by Creative Director Mari Konishi to come up with a concept equally as impactful for the 2015 event.