What’s helping turn Japanese youngsters into stars on Vine, the Twitter-owned social network devoted to looping, six-second video clips, is the stodginess of this nation’s business world.
Japan Inc. companies, both big and small, are generally so clueless about appealing to youngsters - especially young women and especially on social networks - they need all the help they can get from teenage Viners for marketing.
Reika Oozeki, 19, became a sensation overnight on Vine when she was just 17, offering snarky sketches of life.
“I was studying for tests, and I was bored,” says Oozeki, who started out using her cellphone to shoot videos of herself in pajamas or at school. “I was so surprised it caught on.”
Now she has more than 730,000 followers and her videos have looped over viewers’ screens nearly 850 million times. Most of her clips are close-ups of her face. She might coo pretending to be with a date, and then suddenly switch to a growl when she is supposedly with girlfriends.
She has appeared on TV shows, got cast in a movie and is signed with a production company. She is also training to become a swimming coach for children, who adore her because she is famous on Vine.
When companies approach her to make Vine clips, Oozeki is often given free rein. She is sometimes not even required to say the company name. In the clip she made for Intel Japan, she merely snarls, “Interru haitteru,” the Japanese for “Intel Inside.”
Vine is unique as a social network in that people post entirely video, much of it taken on cellphones. Each clip is a six-second loop.
There are 200 million people who watch Vine videos every month, and, although Vine does not break down viewers by country, Japan is one of Vine’s largest markets outside the U.S.
This story is from the July 24,2016 edition of Techlife News.
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This story is from the July 24,2016 edition of Techlife News.
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