In Japan, a competition is held annually to decide the funniest comedian of the year. Attracting over 30million live viewers, this is considered the Super Bowl of comedy, in other words, it’s one of the priciest TV programs to sponsor.

SEIYU is a major supermarket that has helped Japan to stay healthy with their slogan, “everyday low price.” With high prices of food due to inflation becoming a social issue, SEIYU continues to help the people, including the upcoming comedians who’ve yet to enjoy fortune nor fame.

The challenge was how to communicate the brand value, “SEIYU, a supermarket of low price and great deals,” that supports the local communities without the power of mass media that requires a massive budget.

This was a brand-new comedy competition where comedians compete with their acts featuring the low-price and great-deals of SEIYU. Many, from the new hopefuls to the seasoned professionals of comedy, competed with their original acts for the big prize.

Videos of their performance were posted on the official SEIYU Twitter account where the public voted with Like and Retweet which decided their place in the competition. The final round was broadcast on YouTube live with a panel of judges of established comics where their votes and the general public on SNS decided the first champion. The winner received a year’s worth of food and a chance to be featured in a SEIYU TV ad.

The attempt by a brand to organize a comedy award successfully established the awareness that “SEIYU, a supermarket of low price and great deals.”

The challenge in this project was creating a new branded content in a form of a comedy award and not a sponsorship of a popular TV show which usually requires a significant budget. Unlike a typical program sponsor, because the theme of the competition was about communicating the “low price of SEIYU,” the program was designed around this brand message which was powerfully delivered as the content.

In addition, because the incentive for the champion was to appear in SEIYU’s TV ad, the message was structured in a way to communicate the “value beyond the low price” by featuring the private brands and great shopping experience to drive store traffic.

This was designed in three phases which laddered up to powerfully establish the brand message, “SEIYU, a supermarket of low price and great deals.”

Phase 1: The public vote where viewers Liked/Retweeted the video of the acts on the official SEIYU Twitter account. The act of voting was a way to spread the word on SNS which helped to drive the topical value of the content.

Phase 2: 90-minute YouTube Live streaming of the final round which naturally helped to drive the attention of the live audience as more increasingly talked about who was going to win. The news of the champion was also featured in many news outlets that significantly drove the views of the archive video of the program.

Phase 3: Broadcast the TV ad which featured the winning comic to further drive the brand message and store traffic.

A brand-new comedy award by the supermarket, SEIYU, became an instant sensation on the news being featured in over 200 media, generating a value of 137,147,500 in earned media.

The video of the comedy acts earned over 2.5million views on Twitter along with over 15,000 votes, resulting in over 100,000 tweets and 92,135,516 PR impressions. If we include announcements running up to the final round on YouTube Live, more than 7.4million viewed the content which continued to earn news coverage across the media after the show.

The online film featuring the winning act reached over 18million where over 68.5% said, they are more “favorable towards SEIYU” and those who said, “A low-price great-deal supermarket is SEIYU” reached 52.5%, indicating a dramatic change brought to the mindsets of the consumers.