Touch Wood: forest xylophone

Read the campaign story

A material difference can be difficult to communicate through a conventional handset advertisement. NTT DOCOMO’s Touch Wood film made wood itself the experience. A small ball travelled down a long instrument built into a forest slope, producing a familiar Bach melody as it moved. The phone arrived as the explanation for the spectacle rather than competing with it throughout. The relationship between execution and product was therefore unusually direct: the advertisement performed with the material being promoted.

Contemporary Japanese coverage places the online film in March 2011 and describes a later television version. The One Club archive credits Drill with Dentsu and links the instrument’s forest-thinning timber to the handset’s material concept. This was a constructed musical installation, not a naturally occurring event. Its patient progression and audible individual notes made the physical process legible, giving viewers a reason to remain with the sequence until its final product connection.

The creative mechanism is material proof translated into entertainment. Wood is not merely mentioned as a specification; its grain, sound and relationship to the landscape supply the film’s form. That makes the advertisement coherent even before the brand appears. The risk of delayed branding is balanced by the closeness of the reveal to the demonstration. A different material would not support the same idea in the same way, which distinguishes the film from an attractive but interchangeable landscape advertisement.

The campaign also illustrates the difference between a documented material story and a comprehensive environmental claim. Using timber from forest thinning does not, by itself, establish the total environmental footprint of a handset or its manufacturing chain. The film’s calm atmosphere can encourage a broad impression of naturalness, but that impression is not a lifecycle assessment. Its educational value lies partly in recognising how sensory craft can strengthen a specific association while leaving other product questions unanswered.

The opened sources establish the installation, product relationship, credits and circulation period. They do not provide independently verified incremental sales or forest-conservation outcomes. Award documentation is useful for attribution, while contemporary reporting is the stronger basis for dating the release. Read within those limits, the case shows how a single distinctive product attribute can organise an entire film, with executional restraint allowing the audience to discover the connection rather than being repeatedly told what to think.

Make the attribute perform

Choose an execution whose form depends on the product difference.

Earn delayed branding

Ensure the reveal explains the spectacle.

Bound environmental language

Separate a material fact from a whole-product sustainability claim.

A small test for another brief

Prototype a safe tabletop demonstration of one material property.

Attribute recall and accurate interpretation.

Stop if the demonstration implies unsupported environmental superiority.

• Choose a verifiable property.
• Build and film a small controlled demonstration.
• Test whether viewers identify the product connection.