For cultural reasons, Japan’s insomnia market is surprisingly quiet. Insomnia is a touchy issue, and historically, over-the-counter insomnia remedies have been reluctant to approach consumers with one-way communications via the print or television media.Social networking offers a potential solution, because it allows us to tap into and engage with a more receptive market. In addition, although social networks are extremely popular in Japan, they remain surprisingly untapped as a vehicle to promote insomnia medications, despite the fact that it is a relatively easy to target a specific age group in the social networking environment. We leveraged these advantages to create a completely different type of promotion for Drewell: Sleeplessness News, an entertaining faux news broadcast integrated with 3 different social networks that also leverages Google Street View.

To drive potential users to Sleeplessness News, we created a banner that recreates the opening of a news programme, and invited viewers to create the rest of the broadcast. In addition, we created a press release announcing that there was a new website where users could create their own funny news. This was picked up by a large number of web-based news, entertainment, and social networking sites, leading to a surge of interest in casual internet surfers—because any potential internet user is a potential insomnia medication consumer.

The launch of Sleeplessness News was covered by more than 1,000+ websites, including Yahoo and MSN. Through our web and PR campaigns, we were able to drive 8,000 contributors and 120,000 unique visitors to the site. However, more importantly, we are proud that by transforming sleeplessness and its attendant anxieties into humour, we contributed to helping Japan get a decent night’s sleep.