Santaro: familiar heroes become friends

Read the campaign story

A mobile network has a recurring communication problem: plans and devices change faster than an audience can learn a completely new advertising world. au’s Santaro platform approached that problem through shared cultural memory. It brought three familiar Japanese folk heroes into the same friendship group. The strategic reading here is editorial: recognisable characters supplied a starting point from which the brand could make novelty feel approachable, rather than requiring every service announcement to establish its own cast.

KDDI and Okinawa Cellular announced that the commercials began on 1 January 2015. Shota Matsuda played Momotaro, Kenta Kiritani played Urashima Taro, and Gaku Hamada played Kintaro. Their improbable friendship departed from the characters’ separate traditional stories. Contemporary creative coverage attributed the concept to Dentsu creative director Makoto Shinohara and connected the reinterpretation to au’s existing idea of offering new freedom. This was deliberately invented entertainment, not a retelling presented as folklore scholarship.

The launch used television commercials, a dedicated website and au’s official YouTube channel. Contemporary coverage also described the intention to use the same series for service advertising. That distinction matters: distribution was not only a single film earning attention online. The characters provided a repeatable framework that could carry subsequent messages while maintaining a recognisable relationship with the audience. This study treats that framework as one family rather than counting its individual episodes as separate campaigns.

The creative mechanism is a useful combination of familiarity and a broken rule. Viewers can identify the heroes quickly, then encounter a situation that would not belong in the traditional tales. Their everyday interactions make room for humour without needing a technical demonstration in every scene. A brand using this approach still has to make its offer intelligible; character recognition alone does not tell a customer which plan suits them or establish service quality.

For practitioners, the interesting lesson is to design a durable relationship between characters before designing dozens of messages. That is an interpretation of the execution, not proof that the campaign caused subscriber growth. The opened launch and creative sources establish dates, cast and distribution but do not isolate incremental sales. Cultural familiarity is also local and uneven. A borrowed story system needs thoughtful interpretation, clear rights checks for modern adaptations, and testing with people who do not already share the creators’ reference points.

Define the relationship first

Write the cast’s recurring tensions before adding changing offers.

Preserve the practical message

Check whether viewers can explain both the joke and the service being promoted.

Test cultural familiarity

Ask unfamiliar viewers what they understood without explaining the reference.

A small test for another brief

Test a recurring fictional pair for one routine service.

Compare accurate offer recall and character-to-brand attribution.

Stop if character recall rises while offer comprehension falls.

• Write three short situations using the same relationship and one factual offer.
• Produce inexpensive storyboards and a plain information version.
• Show both to a small consenting audience and ask unaided questions.