Shirato Family: a household becomes a brand asset

Read the campaign story

Family mobile offers can be difficult to distinguish when competitors all promise ways to stay connected. SoftBank’s Shirato Family advertising gave that category a fictional household viewers could recognise across many messages. Its most striking member was a white dog playing the father. The editorial interpretation is that this unusual casting made an otherwise ordinary family premise distinctive while leaving room for familiar conversations about everyday life, changing devices and relationships.

SoftBank’s own retrospective places the television series’ debut in 2007 alongside the White Plan era. A Dentsu publication’s account of the tenth anniversary identifies June 2007 as the family’s origin and links it to a family-discount proposition. By the 2017 event, the established cast included the canine father, Kanako Higuchi as the mother and Aya Ueto as the daughter. The company announced additional family members rather than replacing the existing household wholesale.

Television was the original recurring channel. The 2017 announcement also described a planned cinema compilation of ten years of commercials and discussed audience responses on social media. These are documented extensions of an established advertising property, not evidence that the original launch used every later channel. Keeping the chronology clear shows how an enduring cast can accumulate material over time without turning each distribution extension into an allegedly separate invention.

The family format offers a practical advantage for brand storytelling: every episode can begin with a relationship the audience already knows. The dog father supplies immediate visual identification, while the human performers allow ordinary emotional and comic beats. This interpretation does not require accepting the company’s own characterisation of audience affection as an independent measurement. A recognisable character can also become so entertaining that the product message disappears, particularly when the same cast promotes many different offers.

The case is therefore about continuity with controlled renewal. New performers and situations can refresh a platform without erasing the cues that made it legible. However, the opened sources do not isolate the family’s contribution to subscriptions or profitability. Neither a long lifespan nor a celebratory anniversary is a causal effectiveness study. A smaller organisation studying the idea should focus on consistent character rules, clear offer attribution and responsible production, rather than assuming that an unusual animal mascot is itself a growth strategy.

Keep a character bible

Record recurring relationships, tone and visual cues so new executions remain coherent.

Refresh without erasing

Change the situation before replacing the identity audiences recognise.

Separate affection from conversion

Measure correct offer attribution rather than relying on comments about the cast.

A small test for another brief

Prototype a recurring illustrated household for a service explainer.

Track correct brand and offer recall separately.

Stop if viewers confuse the fictional story with actual service terms.

• Define two characters and a single recurring problem.
• Create two episodes with different factual messages.
• Test delayed recognition and comprehension against unrelated one-off layouts.