Remember That Hypnotic Business-Card-Swapping Ad? We Talked to the Man Who Made It

Morihiro Harano's work brings grand spectacle to mind. What it actually attends to is the smallest detail.

Morihiro Harano is an advertising creative. At the Mindpark conference in Shenzhen he gave a talk called "Don't Make Shit For Shit." Ask him how he defines "shit" and he answers, half-joking, "shit is shit." Then he adds: "It's about being honest. If you're candid enough, and respectful enough of your client, you can tell them theirs is shit."

If the name means nothing to you, you have probably still seen something he led — "I Won't Let You Down," the signature music video by OK Go, "the band that makes the best music videos", or the business-card-swapping video for Eight, the Japanese app for sharing and filing business cards.

Turning an ad into a large-scale art project — or into something that earns the fashionable label "hypnotic" — takes more than a good idea. As plenty of ad people will complain, what usually decides it is the client's attitude and willingness to be open. But people forget the other half of that: the agency owes the client real insight, not just showy creativity, to earn that trust in the first place.

Harano's work happens to sit on both sides of the equation.

Eight's hypnotic business-card-swapping ad; supervised by Morihiro Harano, choreography by Air Studio

In 1994, Harano joined Dentsu, Japan's largest advertising and communications group, and was later moved to a digital subsidiary to work on digital innovation marketing. He left Dentsu, helped a media startup through a successful IPO, then went back to run Drill, an unconventional creative agency.

In 2011, he co-founded PARTY, a creative lab based in New York and Tokyo, with Naoki Ito, Kanta Shimizu, Hiroki Nakamura and Masashi Kawamura. The next year he left and started Mori Inc., which today is just him and two assistants — his reputation keeps a steady stream of clients coming.

That is roughly the shape of a 20-plus-year career. The work that first made his name abroad was 《森の木琴》 ("Forest Xylophone"), a 2011 video for the SH-08C, a phone a Japanese telecom company built out of leftover wood. Twelve hours after the video went out, a major earthquake struck Japan and every campaign in the country was pulled. "Forest Xylophone" spread on YouTube anyway, and was picked up by The New York Times, Fast Company and other mainstream outlets. His international reputation traveled back to Japan from there.

Forest Xylophone

"The insight behind this video is simple: wood is good," Harano told QDaily. "So I thought about how to show that wood is good. I remembered the xylophones from my childhood — kids bang on them at random and get this doo-doo-doo-doo-doo sound... Once we had the sound of wood, we needed a visual... If we used a ball to stand in for the SH-08C, and reshaped the wooden bars, we could use gravity to make music."

His team pitched the idea with a small prototype. "They said, 'Fine, go make one.' They were all busy, and nobody paid much attention to you. Our whole team got excited about the idea, and it just kept growing. When I showed them the result, they were stunned, and asked, 'How did you do this?' Of course, I wasn't going to say, 'Thank you for leaving us alone to do it, which is exactly why it turned out this good.'"

For Forest Xylophone, Harano worked with music designer Kenjiro Matsuo to choose Bach's Cantata No. 147, "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." The giant xylophone was built with wood-structure designer Mitsuo Tsuda, out of mixed timber taken from the forest and worked by local craftsmen. Harano admits he prefers the language of music, because it resonates with an audience more easily.

Ad Age picked the film for its "Best 10 TVCs of 2011," and it made TED's Ads Worth Spreading 2012, becoming one of the "must-watch Japanese commercials" on YouTube. QDaily has recommended it before, too. There is no detailed data on the conversion rate advertisers care about, but going by how widely it was shared on social media alone, Forest Xylophone worked.

"How did he pull all of this off?" That is the question his videos leave you with. Did that huge, intricate "xylophone" really use no dubbed sound? How were all those business-card-swapping poses choreographed? How did OK Go's "I Won't Let You Down" move that many people around and capture it in a single unbroken take?

The "I Won't Let You Down" video opens with the band's four members riding Honda's single-wheeled UNI-CUB electric mobility devices. The five-minute-twenty-second video called up 2,400 Japanese girl dancers, choreographed by the professional dance company Air Studio (Harano's long-standing choreography partner), and mobilized 1,500 volunteers. It was shot 50 or 60 times with drones, octocopters and other equipment, with every person's movement path laid out by computer software. The effect is the ordered force of "strength in numbers" under a collectivist ideology — on a par with a military parade in front of Tiananmen.

In the wide shot that closes the song, the 2,400 girls open and shut colored umbrellas to produce the pixel effect of an LED screen, flashing up the band members' faces, hearts and lettering. Something this big and this hard to execute is nearly impossible without a degree of central control.

"I'm responsible for everything, and I think the key factor is hiring the right people. The right choreographer, the right cinematographer, the right production crew... It's like putting a band together — what matters most is finding the right key people and working with them directly. Once you have the right team, nothing goes wrong," Harano told QDaily. "If I spot a mistake, I fire that person on the spot. Think about it: I'm responsible for a thousand-odd people. You can't let one person wreck everything."

Hard problems still came up during the shoot. The stretch from the central plaza to the parking lot couldn't keep up with the music, because the machines had a top speed. So Harano asked lead singer Damian Kulash, "Can you give me four more bars?" What you hear and see in the end is the version where the music gave way to the video. The silent empty shot at the end came from the Beatles, who always liked to tack something on after a song finished.

The video passed a million views within 10 hours, and 10 million within six days.

While he was still at Drill, Harano took on a job for a Japanese credit card company, EPOS Card. The company wanted people to use the card more often. Harano dropped the conventional advertising format and proposed designing 100 different card faces instead.

"They were shocked," Harano said. "A credit card is a functional product; there's no emotional, psychological connection between it and the customer. But that was exactly our opening. If we could get a customer to choose from more than 100 designs, the card becomes a special object to them. They spent time picking it, and that builds a psychological bond."

The design raised how often EPOS Card was used by a factor of 1.5, and the number of cards issued by a factor of two.

"Advertising can become anything. It doesn't just promote a creative product you already have — it can also hand you one. Creativity and problem-solving have to be thought about together," Harano said. "Technology is moving fast right now, and that requires us to use new technology to change the way we work."

From 1994 to now, Harano has lived through Japanese advertising's shift into the digital era. "To create something new, you have to create a new process" — that was the founding idea behind PARTY, which he started in 2011 with four internationally recognized Japanese creative figures: Naoki Ito, Kanta Shimizu, Hiroki Nakamura and Masashi Kawamura. PARTY used the newest technologies — big data, virtual reality, robotics, the Internet of Things — to build creative advertising experiences, for clients including Nike, Google, Sony and Louis Vuitton.

The next year, Harano left PARTY. He wouldn't say much about why, only that working alone gives him more freedom.

A story Harano told in his talk may explain what he meant by "Don't Make Shit For Shit."

At night, a man is looking for something under a streetlight. A police officer comes over and asks, "Did you lose something?" "I lost my room key, and I can't find it." "Are you sure you lost it here?" "No, I lost it over there. But it's bright here, so I'm looking here."

"When we get a brief from a client, the thing to think about isn't what they're asking me to do, but what I ought to do — what kind of story do I need? The client will want us to make a commercial, but the client wants to look where the light is good rather than search in the right place. We go and search in the right place. That's how we can offer a new way of telling the story, one that meets what they actually need," Harano said.

Q: QDaily

M: Morihiro Harano

Q: You've been working for more than 20 years, since 1994. What changes in Japanese advertising have you witnessed?

M: Over the past decade, Japanese advertising has been very polarized: either it looks outward, or it looks inward. In design, the industry is recognized, and it has won plenty of international awards like D&AD and the One Show. But at the same time, in film and print, our gaze has kept turning inward, toward the Japanese market alone, and our methods have drifted away from international standards. In the long run the Japanese market will only get smaller, so for young creatives, "becoming international" is the next challenge.

Q: Going from a traditional creative to a creative in the digital era, what changed for you? And what didn't?

M: Video is what dominates social media now, so more and more of my projects end up presented as video. Take the work I did for Honda — Honda. Great Journey. It was a design project, but the final output used video and film alongside print and web media. Projects like this need a different kind of storytelling than TV commercials: non-fiction and non-verbal.

Q: How do you work?

M: I have an idea while I'm working through the brief, and by the time I'm in the taxi back I've lined up the people I need. Doing creative work is like being an athlete — you have to train constantly to perform when it counts.

Q: So how do you train?

M: I'm working on a different creative project every day, and that counts as daily training. On top of that, I go to Cannes Lions, or accept invitations to judge international advertising competitions, which lets me concentrate on studying the good work that comes out each year.

Q: Your social media has a lot of travel and food photos. Is that a form of "training" too?

M: Every city has something strange about it to me. Why strange? Because it's different — China has its way, Japan has its way. That's interesting. Every time I arrive in a city, I ask myself why it strikes me as strange. Where does the difference come from? Why is it different? The food is purely a hobby.

Q: Is there anything you want to do but haven't done?

M: A hotel.

Q: Why?

M: The main reason is simple: I like hotels. A hotel is a complicated creative composite, with a lot of room for creativity — interior design, service design, graphic design and so on. So as a creative director, I think a hotel is a very worthwhile project.

Cover image and in-article images: Mori