Welcome to your new obsession: Trains

Season 8, Issue 1: Move over Snakes on a Plane, we've got Marketing on a Train

Jul 17, 2024

Exploring the Japanese train advertising ecosystem, innovative marketing they’re doing (including product marketing!), and dissecting…
WHY?!

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こんにちは Mehketeers!

If you didn’t already know, all trains in Japan are considered prime advertising space. Not just the billboards at the stations, it’s also the insides of the trains (the newer trains even have video screens in them), and the outsides of the trains.

While I was visiting in June, I noticed the train system has seriously levelled up in terms of their own marketing. I started noticing snippets of things that made my brain go:

Stick with me through this one, I promise you it’ll be worth it!

Quick context: The rail ecosystem in Japan

If you’ve been to Japan and used the trains, feel free to skip this section. If you’ve never been, here’s just some context that’ll make everything else make sense.

There are multiple networks, all run by different companies, and there can be multiple companies operating networks in the same city. For example, Tokyo has the Tokyo Metro and the Toei Subway - these are two separate companies. Meanwhile, Osaka has six private railways. JR is the company that runs the bullet trains - but even then each region of Japan has its own JR and their systems aren’t as interconnected as you’d think they’d be even though they all come under the same umbrella company…
Many train stations (in metropolitan areas) are underground and connected to shopping arcades or even have exits to the basement levels of large stores. This means some stations are destinations in themselves, or common meeting points.
Tokyo (the city) has a population of ~14 million people, and ~8 million people use the two combined rail networks each day. In Tokyo (the prefecture - they share the same name) with a population of ~33 million, 57% of all transport is via public transport, with 80% of that transport specifically via trains.
A Japanese person once explained to me that trains are the equivalent of cars in western countries in terms of little kids being obsessed with them. Instead of Hot Wheels, they’d have mini trains. As a result, there’s a lot of adults who continue the interest/hobby, just like how a “car enthusiast” is not unusual in the west.
The trains are very frequent and reasonably priced to get around.

The train advertising ecosystem

Here’s a breakdown of the advertising that happens physically on/in the train carriages and in the stations.

Exterior ads

It’s not as common but there are exterior decals. While in Japan I saw this one, which had decals only on the first and last ~three carriages, and the middle of the train had no decals:

(It’s a domestic travel campaign for Minoh City.)

Interior ads

Inside the carriages, there’s hanging posters, stickers of various dimensions on the windows, larger posters on the sides of the doors, and more modern trains have digital screens that can also display video.

Coming back to the Minoh campaign, the interior of the train above looked like this, where every ad was part of the campaign:

Station ads

And then of course, the interiors of the stations have lots of options:

You can explore the ad specs on the Tokyo Metro Ad Agency website.

Brand marketing

So that’s advertising using the trains and stations as ad space. Now we get to the bits that caught my eye. The train companies are advertising and marketing themselves. It really makes me think “if I’m already riding a train, why are they advertising the train I’m on, to me?” and I hope that by the end of dissecting all of this, I’ll have an answer to it.

Here’s what they’re doing for brand marketing.

The Gachas

Gacha machines are basically gambling. Pay 300-500 yen, twist the handle, and out pops a miniature train toy. Gacha machines are a $697 million AUD industry ($460 million USD) just in Japan. There are multi story buildings that only stock gacha machines. I could do a Mehdeeka just on this industry, but let’s stay laser focused on the trains.

Here’s three gacha machines (one of which I actually spotted in Sydney). From left to right we’ve got:

Miniature JR timetable books. Like, it’s actually printed, with the real timetable.
Keychains of minitature logos for the Tokyo Metro train lines.
A generic train collection that’s not specific to a company but is just a normal toy.

It’s interesting that there are specific branded ones. I also found Thomas the Tank Engine gachas and more “toy” brands, so it really makes me wonder what the competition and sales numbers are like between the train companies and the toy companies.

Physical (regular sized) timetables

Yep, you can also buy a normal timetable. It’s 1,009 pages long. These are released monthly and are more “collectible” than functional.

Mascot merch

Most of the train companies have mascots, and accompanying merch. There’s also collabs! Sanrio had a Hello Kitty bullet train in 2018, Tama station is permanently Sanrio themed, and you can buy plushies, keychains, and other merch of the characters in the staff uniforms at plenty of locations.

Event marketing

This one surprised me! Here’s two signs I saw while on the train that made me double take:

The one on the left is for an escape the room style game that takes place over a bullet train journey. As in, you actually ride the train, and play the game over the duration of the trip via an app.

On the right is a poster for a mystery solving game, where there’s three mysteries spread over the Osaka Metro network which ran from November 2023 to May 2024 (I visited in May.) From the event’s website:

Participants purchase a mystery-solving kit (which includes a one-day Osaka Metro pass) and solve the "mystery" written on the kit. By solving the "mystery," the next destination will be indicated, and participants will follow the instructions to travel around various places in Osaka

In contrast to this, there’s a different type of event marketing happening on the bullet train. 75 premium seats sold out in 30 minutes for a wrestling match held within a train carriage travelling from Tokyo to Nagoya (and yes, it was an official event.)

You can also book it as a wedding venue!

Digital marketing

YouTube accounts

Osaka Metro was advertising their YouTube channel on posters inside the trains, however there’s actually so many train enthusiasts churning out content on YouTube that it doesn’t even come up on the first page of results when you search the exact channel name…

The first video on the channel includes the term ‘MaaS’ in the title which I can only assume means Metro as a Service? The channel has a pretty wide range of topics on it, from the history of the company and trains, to “who’s that pokemon” style videos guessing which station it is, to big brand videos with lofty goals and innovative technology that doesn’t yet exist being highlighted.

Social media

The social media accounts seem to be aimed at tourists as they’re bilingual (and often include Korean and Thai!) The posts highlight different things around the city and pretty much always include which station you need to go to for that location.

Line

Line is basically the Japanese native version of WhatsApp (while we’re here, join the Mehdeeka WhatsApp group chat) and you can add “OsakaMania” as a friend. This account is managed by Osaka Metro, and once you add them you’ll get an instant message basically saying “we’ll introduce you to various things around the city” and two links. The first link is to this website which is actually very cool despite being incredibly slow…

The second link on Line, and actually what the pop up on the first site is directing you to, is their merch shop — and the merch isn’t bad!

Select a category (food, bars, or cultural sites) and it’ll take you to a review written by a contributor, interviews with the shop staff, and a very in depth FAQ. Taking the egg sandwich recommendation in the top left of the screenshot above, it highlights a specific shop, and then recommends an additional 12 egg sandwich shops (and which station to get off at for them.)

Product marketing

It’s crazy to me that a train network is doing product marketing, but they are! Here’s two things I spotted:

Dynamic pricing

The Kyushu bullet train is adopting dynamic pricing for tickets booked online from July 1, 2025. It’ll be based on demand and how far in advance you’re booking your ticket. It doesn’t specify if this will impact tickets bought at the station.

Driving usage

I spotted this video playing inside a Tokyo Metro train and I remember thinking “if I’m on the train… using the train… why are they showing me a video telling me to catch the train?”

And then I realised the video was promoting use cases! Use the train to meet up with a friend, use the train to get to a cool class or experience, use the train to see a part of the city you’ve never been to before. It’s only in Japanese, so it’s a local campaign and not one aimed at tourists.

That’s why I’m putting it in product marketing instead of the events section above, it’s not a special ticket or connected to downloading an app for a limited period, it’s every day usage.

What’s it all for?

Why do they need product marketing? What are they getting out of it when utilisation is already SO high? Is it just that they have heaps of budget and this is how they’re spending it?

So let’s try and figure out what the business goals are. Tokyo Metro is jointly owned by Tokyo Metropolitan Government and the Government of Japan. The Toei Line (2nd largest network in Tokyo) is also owned by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government as part of the Bureau of Transportation.

Based on this Reuters report (which was published in January 2024 before the Japanese yen tanked), there’s plans to take Tokyo Metro Co (aka, the “company” that runs the metro) public by April 2027.

A Tokyo Metro IPO could raise about 300 billion yen ($2 billion), the finance ministry said in 2022.
The central government plans to use the proceeds from its portion of the sale to fund recovery efforts from the massive earthquake that struck the Fukushima area and other parts of northeastern Japan in 2011.

So this gives us some room to make assumptions:

They want the IPO to be successful with a high valuation
They also need to evolve the public perception of a public service into “Tokyo Metro Co is a good investment for my personal wealth”
To achieve these outcomes, they need to be visible and innovating, and part of this is all the additional marketing efforts

So that’s Tokyo Metro, what about Osaka? It was actually privatised in 2018 — the opposite of Tokyo Metro. It’s really hard to find information in English, but we can still make some assumptions such as they’re likely to be focused on increasing revenue/profits so that it’s less funded by tax payers and more funded by customers. During the privatisation, they cut a significant amount of staff and committed to renovating 15 stations. From their YouTube channel, we know they’re pretty ambitious with implementing new technology (e.g. you can pay/pass through the gates with a face scan at certain stations), so raising funds would be a priority.

The bullet train is a bit easier to decipher. Usage dropped during covid, as both tourists, commercial, and business passengers basically went to zero, and it took until 2023 for them to report a profit again after three straight years of losses. The special events are quite expensive by Japanese standards, and while they’re infrequent I’m sure they’re being perceived as a success.

🧹Housekeeping

Hope you enjoyed this! It’s one of the less “normal” issues of Mehdeeka, so thank you for indulging me if you made it this far down.

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