Bandai America
As one of the offices of Bandai Co. Ltd. of Japan, Bandai America Incorporated is an established manufacturer and toy licensee of a wide range of quality toys, collectibles and interactive entertainment. Their licenses include popular anime series, video games and TV shows such as: Dragon Ball Z, Demon Slayer, Tamagotchi, Pac-Man, Evangelion, Digimon, 44Cats, Naruto, My Hero Academia, Gundam, Saint Seiya, among many others.
About the Project:
As the lead trade designer, I was in charge of developing digital and printed ads for the company’s different brand releases supporting the strategies of their marketing and public relations teams.
For each of Bandai’s seasonal product releases I was in charge of developing digital material for Youtube, Facebook and Display campaigns. I also supported the needs of the brand designing editorial ads for different publications, billboards and branded booths for fairs and tradeshows.
An important aspect of working with Bandai is to follow the guidelines from Japanese licensors for anime shows such as Naruto, Dragon Ball, One Piece, Demon Slayer, Evangelion, Gundam among many others. This content has garnered 294,448,669 media impressions across 318 stories in the Bandai social channels in the last quarter of 2020.
Some of these media impressions include FOX Tampa, NBC Dallas, Toy Insider, Figures.com, Toy Shiz, Play.Live.Repeat, Pop Insider amongst many others!
One of their latest print ads I worked on was a double page feature of Bandai’s latest releases in the February 2021 edition of the Toy Book magazine:
Bandai at the New York Toy Fair 2020
One of Bandai’s biggest public relations events of the year is their participation in the New York Toy Fair. This event is one of the busiest shows of the year in the toy industry with over 22,267 attendees from all over the world. The main objective during the event was to attract the media and influencers to a highly visual and exciting display. To make this happen I was in charge of designing 8 different large format prints inside the venue and wrappings for 3 New York City buses.
The Bandai branded booth consisted in six large prints with the artwork and photography of their latest and upcoming toy releases:
The main challenge was to brand the booth with each of the Bandai new releases of the season but give each one of the brands their own space in the booth’s artworks following the guidelines provided by licensors and going through a meticulous process of approval.
To promote the Bandai booth and give the brand a sense of clout and attract the attention of the attendees, I designed two printed banners of 40 per 30 ft. tall which were located at the main entrance of the Crystal Palace Hall which were displayed during the four days of the event:
Additionally, 4 NYC buses were wrapped for 5 days during the event featuring the release of the Dragon Ball Z Kakarot video game and the Dragon Stars collectible figurines.
These buses served NYC routes 1, 2 and 3 serving Times Square and Midtown West which are high traffic areas in the city exposing the brand to millions of people around the city.
Tamagotchi ON Official Announcement
Another yearly event in which Bandai has participated is the Clamour Summit conference which invites over 600 influencers and online video professional creators to a series of lectures with industry experts to expand their networking and connect with new promising brands in the industry.
For Bandai’s participation in the 2019 event, I was in charge of designing a branded booth for Tamagotchi ON’s official announcement to the public which enhanced their social reach and engagement on posts about the event by the attendees.
The main goal of this booth was to showcase the features of the new Tamagotchi, which offers new characters, a full-colour screen and an online platform with different gaming options.
Tamagotchi’s participation in this event, resulted in an approximate of 2,937 media mentions and over 2 billion impressions on social media. This allowed the brand to connect with popular influencers, some of whom became part of their Brand Ambassador Program which garnered almost 50 million impressions on social media generating massive awareness to the Tamagotchi ON brand.
